Participatory School Design for Participatory Democracy Half-Day Workshop Sean M.Z. Anderson
Michael McCabe
Community|Learning|Design Edgerton, Wisconsin
[email protected]
ABSTRACT This paper describes a hands-on workshop in the democratic design of a school, including decisions about curriculum, instruction, assessment, learning spaces, and practices. Participants are guided through a series of Phases of Action, and make all design decisions by Formal Consensus, to collaboratively draft a school plan.
KEYWORDS school design, democratic design, formal consensus ACM Reference Format: Sean M.Z. Anderson and Michael McCabe. 2018. Participatory School Design for Participatory Democracy: Half-Day Workshop. In PDC ’18: Proceedings of the 15th Participatory Design Conference - Volume 2, August 20–24, 2018, Hasselt and Genk, Belgium. ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 4, 3 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3210604.3210654
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SUMMARY: PARTICIPATORY SCHOOL DESIGN, DEMOCRACY, AND POLITICS
This workshop proposes an application of Participatory Design praxis for use in re-imagining public secondary schools. This methodology, called Participatory School Design for Participatory Democracy, is presented-in-action, as participants in the workshop constitute a “temporarily determinate community,” and co-create a school plan to serve their unique lived experiences and needs, alongside the facilitators of the workshop. Participatory School Design brings together elements of democratic school innovations and fundamental practices of Participatory Design toward two aims. The first is to create the most engaging, empowering, and effective learning environments for youth. The second, and equally important aim, is to create authentic sites for the exploration and reproduction of a more deliberative and participatory politics, in which democracy means sincerely collaborating to control the shared institutions that mediate our lives. We know from the sociology of “reproductions” [2] and from the political theory of “hegemony,” [9] that schools are a key site for the continual re-creation of our social forms and structures. It follows, then, that all of us who value a more democratic politics must make the democratization of schools a primary strategy in Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from
[email protected]. PDC ’18, August 20–24, 2018, Hasselt and Genk, Belgium © 2018 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5574-2/18/08. . . $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3210604.3210654
Community|Learning|Design Edgerton, Wisconsin
[email protected] bringing these values to life. This workshop proposes that Participatory School Design is a critical methodology to do the work of democratization of schools, which ultimately will contribute to the work of democratizing our politics.
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RELEVANCE TO PD
Participatory Design as a praxis has experienced an astonishingly wide variety of applications in its short history. Robertson and Simonsen defined PD as, “a process of investigating, understanding, reflecting upon, establishing, developing, and supporting mutual learning between multiple participants in collective ‘reflection-inaction”’.[12] Kensing and Greenbaum traced the roots of PD to automation entering Scandinavia in the 1970s and workers wanting to have a voice in their work-place environment.[10] Since then, it has found a home in fields as disparate as human-computer interactions and architectural design. Although participatory design provides the theoretical underpinnings for student-led school design, Hoadley noted the persistent and consistent lack of including this theoretical model in the learning sciences.[8] This is a substantial gap in the application of such a critical field, especially given the opportunities and needs presented by the world of public schools. Schools offer a unique site for the praxis of Participatory Design, as they allow for the maximum application of fundamental PD concepts. At the same time, PD offers a unique set of tools which can assist schools to best fulfill their public purpose. As the mismatch between the industrial design of school and the needs of 21st century learners has become increasingly clear, a wide variety of thoughtful educators have made efforts to redesign their instruction, their classrooms, and even schools as fundamental systems and structures. Among the most effective strategies for adapting education to our contemporary context are student voice and choice, culturally-relevant pedagogies, and democratic learning. Presumably unbeknownst to these educators, all of these concepts are actually reflections of the core tenets of the field of Participatory Design. By acknowledging the overlap between these two worlds, and bringing PD into the world of school innovation, we aim to amplify the effect of these educational practices, while also implementing some of the strengths of the explicit PD infrastructure that have not yet been exploited for the sake of school improvement. The educational strategies listed above reflect the following fundamental PD concepts, which we will maximize in participatory school design: (1) “Having a say”: Kensing and Greenbaum emphasize a pragmatic element of PD, by which “the process of involving people who will be affected as active participants. . . can result in better designs”.[10] In schools, teachers may emphasize
PDC ’18, August 20–24, 2018, Hasselt and Genk, Belgium giving students “voice and choice” to create better learning, as Newell highlights in an overview of Project-Based Learning.[11] Participatory School Design ensures that students as “users” of their school will have maximum “say” in how their school works, giving them more “voice and choice” than in any other context. (2) A collaborative ethic: Robertson and Wagner claim that “Participatory Design. . . has at its core an ethical motivation to support and enhance how people can engage with others.”[13] This challenging ethic, which asserts a “right to participate,” is best reflected in the teaching practice of “Culturally Relevant Pedagogies,” in which, according to Darder, “there must exist a democratic environment where the lived cultures of bicultural students are critically integrated into the pedagogical process” to allow this participation.[3] Our insistence that student-designers’ different cultures be recognized and celebrated within Participatory School Design brings the collaborative ethic to the forefront of the praxis. (3) Democratization: Finally, Kensing and Greenbaum connect the PD work of “finding ways to give voice to those who may be invisible or weaker in organisational power structures” directly to “help people with less money, power or influence to find ways of asserting their needs to those in power.”[10] Emery is even more direct in Future of Schools: “[Participative Design Workshops] use structures. . . so that from the very beginning of these processes, democratic community is created, experienced, and learned through the activity of planning.”[6] In the namesake work of our own curriculum and workshop, Emery calls out clearly in Participative Design for Participative Democracy: “Participation can apply in any area. . . There is a general need to raise the basic and common human ideals through processes in which the people intimately involved in those decisions which affect them affirm their ideals and design their own futures.”[5] In schools, Dewey’s insistence that “the school becomes itself a form of social life, a miniature community and one in close interaction with other modes of associated experience beyond school walls”[4] draws a straight line between the practice of learning within schools and habits of life outside of them. Participatory School Design, as an act of intentional and radical school democratization, therefore aims to create broader and interconnected practice of radical democratization, including in politics.
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WORKSHOP GOALS
The workshop has three goals: what we aim to produce together in the session, what we aim for participants to learn, and what we ourselves aim to learn through facilitating the workshop. (1) Production goal: To apply the new PD methodology, Participatory School Design for Participatory Democracy, to create a “design essentials” document for a new school, published on www.communitylearningdesign.org and posted for critical feedback, evaluation, and extension on our blog. Design essentials include, at minimum: • Design team commitment statement • Possibilities statement 2
Sean M.Z. Anderson and Michael McCabe • Stakeholder-driven design criteria These elements are created through facilitated deliberation, and authorized by Formal Consensus of the participants and organizers. The completed document has, as addenda, curated documentation of the design process itself, including artifacts, photos, videos, handwritten notes, and evaluative feedback. The full collection of work is made freely and publicly available. (2) Learning goal for participants: Participants learn the discrete needs and processes of school design, how PD engages and amplifies the best practices of democratic school design, how Formal Consensus allows for deliberative democracy within school design, and how this new methodology can be applied to any context in which a community wishes to redesign learning in the service of democracy. (3) Learning goal for organizers: Facilitators learn how this vision for democratic school design resonates with other practitioners of PD, which facilitation strategies are most effective, and how we might refine and revise our methodology in preparation for full-school design with youth.
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PARTICIPANTS
Participants in the workshop are asked to enter into a “temporarily determinate community” for the sake of conducting a democratic school design together. In actual community school designs, “all who come” must be welcomed and accommodated into the design team – accordingly, participants in this workshop must be welcomed regardless of any preferences or vision for who we would prefer to design with. This is our democratic commitment. We have conducted workshops in this style with as few as seven participants, and the methodology can effectively be utilized with a group as large as thirty. The activities embedded in the Participatory School Design methodology are specifically created to be approachable by any community, and accordingly do not have any particular prerequisite knowledge or skill: any and all participants are empowered to enter the design process immediately.
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METHODS, TECHNIQUES, AND STRUCTURE
The “Participatory School Design” methodology is built on a procession of phases of action, in a cycle adapted and synthesized from several prominent processes.1 Each phase calls for a variety of facilitation strategies to be employed toward a singular production goal, which answers an “Essential Question.” For example, Phase 1 begins with the Essential Question, “How can each of us commit honestly and deeply to each other and to our consensus design work together?” Facilitation strategies include storytelling, SWOT analysis, “norming,” and anti-bias training. The production goal is to generate, by Formal Consensus, a “Team Commitment Statement.” The entire curriculum, which lays out the process in its entirety and includes detailed considerations for each Phase, is available at http://communitylearningdesign.org/. For a half-day workshop, we aim to do abbreviated actions to complete Phases 1 through 3 of this curriculum. 1 See
our synthesis notes at https://communitylearningdesign.wordpress.com/
Participatory School Design for Participatory Democracy
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PARTICIPANT CONTRIBUTIONS
Participants at the workshop constitute a temporarily determinate community. That is, we as organizers and facilitators establish the culture in the workshop to replicate as closely as possible the conditions and context of an authentic community engaged in practical design for a new school. Each participant in the workshop, just as each each member of a community, contributes their own unique lived experience, their voice, their values, and their hopes for “our school.” By training in Formal Consensus and utilizing this democratic process as the “gateway” out of each design Phase into the next, each individual participant is empowered to withhold their consent and pause the progress of the design team to ensure that we are meeting our shared values with our work. In our experience, this level of empowerment encourages much greater engagement and contribution from participants than in a standard “majority vote” democracy. Our full hope and expectation is that each and every participant contributes to the deliberation to produce our school plan document. The design that is produced in this session will truly be “of, by, and for” the participants themselves.
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PLANNED FORMAT AND TENTATIVE SCHEDULE • 0 - 20 minutes: Introductions and Connections, Overview of Participatory School Design, Relevance to PD • 20 minutes - 45 minutes: Phase 1 of design - construct “temporarily determinate community,” draft and authorize by Formal Consensus a “Commitment Statement” from the assembled design team (participants plus facilitators) • 45 minutes - 1:15 hours: Phase 2 of design - generate a “Possibilities Statement”[1, 7] via “individual to collective visioning” [14] and affinity mapping activity, authorize by Formal Consensus • 1:15 - 1:25 hours: Regenerative break for regrouping, networking, reflecting • 1:25 - 2:10 hours: Phase 3 of design - “Community Stakeholder Listening Sessions” action to generate ideation for Design Criteria, utilizing role-playing with “open design | closed design” concept and room arrangement, ideation list culled to final Criteria list by deliberation within Formal Consensus • 2:10 - 2:35 hours: Final collaborative drafting of School Plan document, curation of artifacts of design addenda • 2:35 - 3:00 hours: Design Session evaluation, reflection in action, feedback and dialogue on methodology, vision for next actions
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PDC ’18, August 20–24, 2018, Hasselt and Genk, Belgium has been applied through four successive pilot sessions of studentled Participatory School Design within the constraints of Sean’s traditional public middle school classroom, and has also been workshopped at regional (EdCamp, Madison 2018) and national (Free Minds Free People, Baltimore 2017; EduCon, Philadelphia 2018; Innovations in Participatory Democracy, Phoenix 2018) conferences. In addition to having facilitated design for learning alongside youth and adults in these workshop settings, Michael and Sean both have extensive prior experience leading professional development and collaborative learning with both youth and adults. They are passionate about learning, democracy, and Participatory Design, and have the skill-sets necessary to translate that passion into effective learning experiences.
REFERENCES [1] Peter Block. 2009. Community: the structure of belonging. Berrett-Koehler. [2] Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron. 1990. Reproduction in education, society and culture. Sage. [3] Antonia Darder. 1991. Culture and power in the classroom. Bergin and Garvey. [4] John Dewey. 1944. Democracy and Education. Free Press. [5] Merrelyn Emery (Ed.). 1993. Participative design for participative democracy. Centre for Continuing Education Australian National University. [6] Merrelyn Emery. 2006. The future of schools. R and L Education. [7] Shawn Ginwright. 2016. Hope and healing in urban education. Routledge. [8] Christopher Hoadley. 2017. Participatory design for learning. Routledge, Chapter How participatory design has influenced the learning sciences, 22–27. [9] Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (Eds.). 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. International Publishers. [10] Finn Kensing and Joan Greenbaum. 2013. Routledge international handbook of participatory design. Routledge, Chapter Heritage: having a say, 21–36. [11] Ronald J. Newell. 2003. Passion for learning. R and L Education. [12] Toni Robertson and Jesper Simonsen. 2013. Routledge international handbook of participatory design. Routledge, Chapter Participatory design: an introduction, 1–18. [13] Toni Robertson and Ina Wagner. 2013. Routledge international handbook of participatory design. Routledge, Chapter Ethics: engagement, representation and politics-in-action, 64–85. [14] Linda Stout. 2011. Collective visioning: how groups can work together for a just and sustainable future. Berrett-Koehler.
ORGANIZER EXPERTISE
Michael McCabe and Sean Anderson are educators who have always thought of themselves as designers of learning. We have only recently begun to consider ourselves practitioners of Participatory Design, but have discovered in that field a praxis which aligns marvelously with our own values. As we have dug deeper into how Participatory Design reinforces and challenges our own notions of student empowerment and democratic learning, we have authored a PD curriculum to guide our own learning-design practice (and hopefully help inform the practice of others). This curriculum 3
