Blog Task 1
This is a cross post from my MSc Student blog which we use to chart our progress through our final projects. This year marks the beginning of my project work and these Blog Task Posts form part of our initial scoping and project planning.
During the last academic year, I was involved in creating and delivering the pupil engagement sessions for the Scottish Government’s National Discussion on Education. While we had huge numbers of learners (26,000) take part and many pieces of evidence (20,000) submitted, sifting through the evidence, it was clear that children and young people struggled to articulate their preferable futures when it came to education. They had definite ideas about the liked and didn’t like about the present, but they didn’t have the tools or language to express what the future might look like.
Taking EFI courses last year showed me how design research methodologies might be one set of tools to help young people articulate educational futures. I want my project, therefore, to do exactly that. As I wrote in my last post:
Broadly speaking my interest is in using design research methods (particularly speculative design) to involve children and young in the creation of education futures. Following on from that I’m keen to explore how both how these methodologies might be usefully “packaged” so that teachers and other educators might use them, and how the outputs from might be used to inform policy making.
As I flesh this out further, I have more questions than answers:
There is clearly too much in my initial ideas for one project – how best to narrow the scope? I want to explore a range of participatory design methods, how best to do that? There is part of me that is unconvinced in tying the use of these methods exclusively to “plan” the future. In other words, is a better approach to use these methods not to simply to help adults create a future policy direction, but instead to help children and young people make meaning of their present situations?