Curriculum, learning environments, critical futures and speculative/critical/participatory design with C&YP (as well as music & other interesting bits and bobs)
Two beautiful piano albums I've been enjoying recently. Amaro Freitas' album (Y'Y) came out about a year ago, and the Phil Cook album (Appalachi Borealis) is out next month. Both have such a strong sense of place running through them (as well as the obvious connection of the use of field recordings—particularly birdsong).
Very similar to Scottish Approach to Service Design (SAtSD) but some helpful ideas.
The metacrisis says there is a spiritual crisis within the political failure to attend to myriad crises (e.g. the destruction of our only liveable planet is clearly delusional but also sacrilegious); it also says that there is an epistemic crisis in the apparent inability to see between different features of problems (e.g. the emotional needs driving consumerism, the denial of death at the root of climate inertia, the scapegoat mechanism as a threat to democracy).
via Perspecteeva
Trying to be better at posting here 😊
Here are some interesting things I've found online:
“…art collective – Kairos Futura – has been trying to take what might seem like some of the city's more dystopian elements and create a vision of a utopia, or at least how that might be achieved.”
Given my role with e-Sgoil, this is an emphatic YES from me!
This is an enormously helpful way to think about approaching work.
Standout quote: For most people, social media gives you this sense that unless you care about everything, you care about nothing. You must try to swallow the world while it's on fire.
We work in a complex space, with many complex as well as complicated issues, but making use of systems thinking doesn't have to be complicated.
Music
Some brilliant, beautiful albums I've been enjoying;
Cryptophasia – Kinbrae Chimet – Mining Fearless Movement – Kamasi Washington (pre-release) Laugh Ash – Ches Smith
This is a cross post from my MSc Student blog which we use to chart our progress through our final projects.
In what ways might participatory provotyping help young people articulate preferred educational futures with particular reference to the future of qualifications in Scotland?
While it's a clunky question, it is a first step on the way to my research question. Looking back over my blog posts it's starting to get at the issues I want to explore namely:
What remains in terms of fleshing out my project is the specific area of focus. Is this a project about critically examining participatory provotyping as a methodology or am I more interested in exploring the outputs as they relate to the future of Scottish qualifications?
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. This post responds to a prompt asking us to imagine our dream project.
I would like to work with several diverse groups of similarly aged children or young people. We would have two or three school days together to work use a variety of design research methods to consider their preferred educational futures, We would do three things:
Collaboratively create a speculative scenario focussed on an educational future. I would like to ground the stages of the work that follow in this co-created scenario (rather than simply presenting the children or young people with a scenario I have created).
Respond to this scenario in a way that creatively articulates how they want education to be. The question remains to focus on one design research method or try and create a set of shorter activities utilising a variety of methods. The children/young people would work in smaller groups and have the opportunity to explore each others work.
Create a public group display, statement or manifesto synthesising the children/young peoples work. Thereby giving them an authentic audience/outlet.
A final fourth step might be to connect the different groups work to the current policy landscape. This could be done by utilising some type of trend map or final report.
An important part of this work is the diverse nature of the groups I would work with. Scotland – like any nation is diverse in all sorts of ways (geographic, cultural, socio-economic) there is an obligation to present the type of future forecasting I'm considering here in a way that reflects that diversity, rather than gloss over it.
This approach is inspired by a variety of sources discovered during my EFI courses and wider reading. These include:
Making it concrete As I get my project off the ground, one of the aspects I'm struggling with is context. I know generally what I want to work on, but I'm a little at a loss for how to ground it. More specifically I am trying to decide if it is best to ground using design research methods with children and young people to help them think about preferred educational futures in the general sense, or to tie it to a specific context. On the one hand having a very specific focus (for example influencing policy around a new pupil portfolio system) perhaps makes the work (for the children and young people involved) seem less abstract. On the other hand there is something appealing about keeping it general – it allows the methods to really be stress tested as it were...