Participatory design research

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Design research has researchers participating in trying to actually solve a problem or improve upon a situation, while studying the effort and its snags and redirecting accordingly (Dede xx and other sources xxxx).

We call what we’re doing participatory design research because we’ve put community members of all ages in the driver’s seat of testing and considering communication solutions. In fact, we feel this is the only way to learn about which tools and strategies will actually work and “stick.” We’ve ended up in pairing ethnographic researchers, technologists, and people with community organizing experience with educators, families, and young people, all innovating communication solutions while studying the work!

Design based research is usually about proceeding in very clear “stages” to test something. Our work has proceeded in stages but in a more rolling manner: we’ve made ongoing course corrections in reaction to students’, educators’, and families’ ideas, interests and efforts. (We created a multilingual coffee hour and in it, parents suggested we make a hotline. We made a hotline and parents clarified how to get information on to it more effectively!) When something didn’t work, we tried what participants thought would work better.

The OneVille Project has been a fully cooperative exploration of how commonplace technology might help diverse people work together toward youths’ success by helping them share information, efforts, and resources. What has been particularly exciting to us about working in Somerville is that we've had the chance to engage young people, families and teachers in design efforts to bring tech into the everyday core of life and communication in “traditional” public schools. Of course, this innovation means that the schools aren’t “traditional” at all!

Researchers and companies typically design tech tools for education and then head to schools to try them. Many avoid the bottlenecks of public schools altogether. Policymakers typically just tell youth and educators regulations constraining such tools’ use in public schools.

Put together, this leaves young people, families, and educators in “traditional” public schools with little power to direct the use of technology in 21st century public education. So, how might diverse youth, educators, families, and researchers instead come together to co-design uses of basic tech that effectively support people’s partnerships (and young people’s learning) in diverse, mixed-income, and traditional public schools? How might such efforts transform public schools from the inside out?

We've put several research methods together in our participatory design research. Ethnography, a method from anthropology and sociology, involves participating in the everyday life of a community and documenting people's everyday actions in detail. As stated earlier, design research has researchers participating in trying to actually solve a problem or improve upon a situation, while studying and redirecting the effort toward success. Participatory action research engages members of a community in analyzing and thoughtfully improving community life. We put all of these together: in our texting project, for example, we engaged as researchers, teachers and students in trying out texting as a way to improve student support, we analyzed the texting experience and actual texts together, and we took notes throughout on our conversations and interactions so that we had data to draw conclusions from. And to even get to the point of innovating improvements to everyday communications, we had to form real friendships that made us all want to try things together. With just a few exceptions, we all lived in Somerville and working to improve the lives of young people there meant improving our shared community.

Many of us had done community research before but not any community organizing; others had done organizing but not research. Some of us started our projects knowing tons of people in Somerville; others of us knew few people and had to make friends quickly. Those of us who do research for a living haven’t combined these methods before and, we certainly haven’t published our first thoughts online. So this project has taken a lot of adventurous spirit, from all involved!

We began our work in Somerville with a year of fieldwork, interviews, friendship-building, and trial and error exploration, to understand current communication issues in Somerville and to test ways of linking people in efforts to support young people. We piloted multilingual coffee hours to get diverse parents talking to one another for the first time across boundaries of program, income, and language about shared issues in their schools. In that work, we learned the massive resource of the bilingual parent. We piloted academic “Reading Night” events to partner families who shared a K-3 hallway, but had had never talked before about their children’s education. In this work, we learned the crucial nature of face to face gatherings for building community spirit, but also the time-suck of face to face event invitations and planning and the need for better infrastructure for sharing out information to all parents. We also held some public dialogues to support a school struggling with the decision of “unifying” several programs, and learned how some parents had far more access to information and input than others. That work led to our schoolwide information toolkit and Parent Connector Network effort: as we had discussions across the school about improving translation, tech access/training, and public information, we found our first Parent Connectors. With permission, we participated in the typical data drudgery of schooling, by entering student data by hand into a school spreadsheet to help the principal analyze it. In that work, we learned which information was and wasn’t kept in the district database and which was kept in folders in drawers, to the frustration of educators who needed to access it; that work funneled into our dashboard project. We started an afterschool club and began to test a private social network allowing students to communicate about school and life outside of class with peers and potentially teachers. In that work, we learned that students were motivated by media but needed to be engaged by richer (and already-social!) conversations about their actual learning experiences; the eportfolio project would pick up on several of these threads, finding prompts that would really get students to “flow” in sharing their learning experiences and interests in multiple media. In summer school, with a SHS teacher and two classes of summer school students, we explored the concept of convening a support team around every student, using technology to communicate about the student's progress. Students made clear that texting was the most natural tool for everyday support conversations, leading to our pilot of texting.

We also took a big hint from community organizing: listen, then work with those excited to try a particular approach. We worked for a year with Somerville High’s principal, to build on bubbling interest in his school and school site council in transitioning paper portfolios kept in a filing cabinet, to ePortfolios that could display work in vocational as well as typical academic subjects. At Somerville’s alternative school, we found teachers immediately interested in experimenting with texting, to facilitate their role as “teacher-counselors” trying to reach students often hard to get to school. We designed a “dashboard” with a teacher tired of creating and printing out spreadsheets in Excel and, with a principal tired of getting people around a table with paper folders; we built on the Excel spreadsheet the school was already using, designed by a parent at the school (with a career in data management). For a parent view, we combined some existing successful paper models from elsewhere (Taveras et al xxx) with Somerville’s existing report card, which parents often wanted to talk to teachers about. We linked a Somerville High graduate wanting to test software to a computer center hoping to staff computer programs. And in all this, we learned to see a city as an ecosystem of communication about young people, in which infrastructure did or did not exist to support various participants to share information and ideas they wanted to share to support student success.

Each effort we participated in itself indicated the need for more communication infrastructure. Reading Night required a mix of paper-based, emailed, and personal communication for advertising the very event. Busy working parents then couldn’t organize (or debrief) Reading Night together without email and a schoolwide listserv. Those who attended couldn’t easily share out the tips with those who didn’t. Core communication issues percolated throughout any attempt to partner people in student support.

In fall 2010, we broke up the project more explicitly into 6 working groups each tackling a different aspect of communication to help people partner in youth success.

Those of us who are researchers have come to believe that joining educators, youth, and families in efforts to improve schools, while rigorously studying those efforts in detail, may be one of the most important ways available to us of actually improving education in general.