Blog Task 2
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.
What approach do you want to take to your research?
I know I want to look at how we might use design research methodology to help children and young people (C&YP) articulate their preferred educational futures. There are a few key questions I am currently working through. Namely:
- Do I concentrate on one method (for example using design fiction) or use a range?
Do I concentrate on thinking about educational futures generally or take a specific practical element of educational policy currently being worked on? Here in Scotland, we’re currently thinking how we might design and implement new forms of national assessment – specifically an e-portfolio for all learners aged 3-18. Using this approach my first question would again come into play do I use one method, or a range?
More generally I have been struck by this article¹ on involving children in the design process. The authors argue for an understanding of children as protagonist and;
encourage children to be the main agents in driving the design process and thereby to develop skills to design and reflect on technology and its role in their life. (Iversen et al, 2017)
In this was I think I can begin to make connections between design research and my ultimate goal of helping C&YP articulate their preferred futures.
What methods interest you?
The two main strands are speculative and participatory methods. I think the Scottish Approach to Service Design is helpful here as it gives a formal, ethically appropriate approach to this work. Looking specifically at methods; design fiction and diegetic porotypes as well as storytelling around utopias seem promising as do more participatory methods like some of the activities from the Liberating Structures work as well as Lego Serious Play. I found Nesta’s Playbook For People Power a helpful overview on the practicalities of using some of these types of methods
What training or development are you pursuing to support your project and why?
I’m very much coming at this as a teacher who is new to design research. To this end I am grateful to have had the opportunity for some informal coaching from a colleague in the Scottish Government’s service design team who has experience of using exactly these methods in the educational futures space. I have also reached out to academics here at EFI who have been generous with time and advice.
¹Ole Sejer Iversen, Rachel Charlotte Smith, and Christian Dindler. 2017. Child as Protagonist: Expanding the Role of Children in Participatory Design. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Interaction Design and Children (IDC ’17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 27–37.
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?
Decision-making: children and young people's participation
In the spirit of using this blog as a place to think aloud I'm trying to connect three fascinating things I've read recently.
Decision-making: children and young people's participation (from the Scottish Government)
Game Design as Policy Making (Matteo Menapace)
People Powered Results (from NESTA)
As I consider my masters project the overarching question I keep coming back to is how do we involve children and young people in futures thinking and then respond to what they are telling us with policy that is meaningfully co-created?
In Matteo's article he writes:
Playing games: When we play a video game, its rules are often opaque and enforced by a machine. When we play a board game instead, we have to learn and constantly negotiate its rules. This trains us to think critically about policy.
Making policy: And when we make games, we make policy. Through rules and incentives, game designers decide what players can and cannot do, what they should focus on, and what they should care about.
The Scottish Government paper references a variety of consultations and co-designs that have involved children and young people. These consultations used a range of more tradition tools to gather input. I do wonder however if there are more creative engaging ways to involve children and young people. This is especially true if we are looking to co-design policy for an uncertain future. In other words if we want to help children and young people to imagine what could (or should) be and take this as the starting point for our policy design.
Page 23 of NESTA's playbook references methods for engaging people with think about the future. Perhaps game design is a way to do this?
Lego Serious Play & Speculative Design with CYP
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Children and Young People As Sources Of Weak Signals
Putting this placeholder here as I begin to think through what this might mean in practice. This article helpfully defines a weak signal (apologies it's behind a paywall). As I think about my project I am beginning to explore how children and young people (CYP) might (a) be both sources of weak signals and interpreters of them and (b) how we might engage with CYP to use weak signals in order to reflect on the future and use that to critically co-create their present.
Two quotes from this wonderful PhD thesis by Stuart Candy (2010).
This first one is from a talk by Bruce Sterling (who is paraphrasing Warren Ellis):
There's a middle distance between the complete collapse of infrastructure and some weird geek dream of electronically knowing where all your stuff is. Between apocalyptic politics and Nerd-vana, is the human dimension. How this stuff is taken on board, by smart people, at street level. ... That's where the story lies... in this spread of possible futures, and the people, on the ground, facing them. The story has to be about people trying to steer, or condemn other people, toward one future or another, using everything in their power. That's a big story.
The second is from Candy himself:
Humanity appears to be caught between two competing visions for society, two kinds of future: one appears to be unthinkably bad, the other unimaginably good. The paradox is that, vague though they are, the diametrically opposed potentials both have an aura of plausibility. Strangely enough, the balance between these competing images of the future seems to shift depending on what evidence you happen to attend to at the moment, and even on your mood as you consider them. It is as if the slider of the probable future moves depending on how you tilt your mind.
We would do well to keep both these ideas in mind we consider the future of education.
Learning Intentions and Success Criteria from the Near Future
The artefact below, a set of learning intentions and success criteria, below is an example of how design fiction/speculative design (see post below) might work in the context of education.
Introduction
The idea that, in the not-too-distant future, pupils could use ChatGPT or similar to write assignments has been making waves in education circles. Without getting bogged down in the wider debates, the artefact is an attempt to think through what a writing lesson might attempt to do in this possible future reality.
For the uninitiated, learning intentions (LI) set out what students should be able to understand, do or value by the end of a lesson; they provide focus for teachers’ planning decisions and guide student learning. Success criteria (SC) indicate the different levels of achievement in a task and support students in understanding those expectations.
The Artefact
The artefact above as a set of LI and SC are not perfect by any means, but I hope it highlights how a piece of design fiction might stimulate conversation around what a writing lesson in the near future might be, and, crucially therefore, what do we think is important about a writing lesson now.
What is Design Fiction?
Design fiction is the practice of creating speculative stories, products or services that explore how we might live and interact in future. As my interest is futures thinking about education, I use it as a way of imagining and speculating how things could be if certain technologies, pedagogies, and curricula were to be used within education in new ways. It helps us to consider social norms, ethics, economics, and other aspects of our contemporary education systems. Design fictions often use mediums such as films, books, audio dramas and interactive experiences to bring stories to life.
By using these methods, we can identify opportunities and challenges in order to have meaningful discussions about what we want educational futures to look like. In short, design fictions allow us to craft thought-provoking stories about what could be and consider collaboratively whether the scenarios are desirable and what we might do about them.
In my MSc work I am beginning to look at how we might use design fiction pedagogically – as a tool to help pupils reflect on the futures they want. This could be quite specific; for example, questions of the purposes and methodologies of education, or more generally to reflect on the societies(s) they inhabit.
Hi
This simple blog is a place for me to think aloud as I engage with my MSc studies and my professional work across e-Sgoil and the Northern Alliance RIC. You can find more me on Twitter & Mastodon.Scot.