Participatory Design Methods in Education
- Dates: In-Person: July 7-9, 2023 | Virtual: July 3-21, 2023
- Instructor: Dr. Halimat Alabi
- Location: Virtual (synchronous and asynchronous) and in-person on the UBC Vancouver campus
As educational scholars and practitioners, we design an interactive experience for every learner who enters our workplaces and learning spaces. It is through this interaction, the exchange of ideas, that meaning is co-created with learners. Through a series of design challenges, you will learn about and through design in this course. This course is not about making – instead we focus on the thought processes that making supports. We make to reflect perspectives, to manipulate information, and to reveal patterns. We create these cognitive artifacts to illustrate relationships, to share ideas, and to grapple with concepts that are challenging to otherwise describe. Through group-based systematic exploration and experimentation, we will implement design methods in the ideation, implementation, and assessment phases of our praxis.
This course is focused on the strategic implementation of design methods, toward the goal of creating user-centered, inclusive educational experiences for the communities we serve. The design challenges reflect the current complexities of the educational ecosystem and the situations we often find ourselves in as educational scholars and practitioners. To help you address these complexities, we will delve deeply into design methods such as participatory action research, participatory design, research through design, and less utilized methods such as cognitive mapping, data physicalization, and design fiction. Historically, participatory action research has focused on the liberation of equity-deserving groups through research as praxis. We will explore the intersections of Black, Indigenous, and feminist research methods in this course, in service to anti-racist praxis and decolonization. Dialogue and collaboration are critical to these methods. As such, this course will be conducted in a hybrid format. The course spans three weeks, with a three-day residency to cap off the first week. Synchronous weekly activities will be conducted online throughout the institute.