Hello, I am Marisol Wong-Villacres, researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Thank you so much for clicking on this video.
It is exciting to be able to share our work with the CHI community.
I’d like to start this presentation by walking you through the motivation for this research
And that has been our four-year ethnographic exploration on how technologies can support
the educational system in catering to the needs of Hispanic immigrant parents specifically
in the city of Atlanta, United States.
Historically, across the United States, it has been extremely difficult for Hispanic
immigrant parents to work together with schools.
Parents’ many differences from the norm, like language, cultural practices, and even
jobs, often prevent them from keeping up with school-related information.
Also, the educational system tends to misread parents’ limitations as a lack of care from
their part.
In our work across 16 locations with over 300 parents, teachers, and decision
makers, we’ve seen first hand how the introduction of new technologies into the educational system
only widens the gap.
These interventions never consider these parents’ realities, and thus end up imposing practices
that parents often reject, like keeping up with different messages and installing different apps.
From its beginning, the goal of our work has been precisely to change all of this
For that, we made the commitment of embracing an assets-based design process
Inspired by work in community development, HCI scholars have increasingly proposed assets-based
as a desirable approach when designing for vulnerable groups.
In essence, assets-based recognizes how vulnerable groups are rich in knowledge, skills, social
capital, and other assets, and proposes to work with these groups in designing
technologies that use such assets to produce sustained change.
After three years relying on this assets-based perspective to guide our fieldwork we decided
we were ready to take the next step and engage in designing with parents.
Over a month, we conducted several participatory workshops with 35 parents in three of our
previous locations.
We first worked with parents in a series of activities that elicited their reflection
on the assets they use to face everyday challenges.
Then we moved to working with parents in imagining technologies that would leverage their assets
for changing the school system.
Now, we needed to empower and compel parents to do this and so for that, we presented them
with a parenting-related narrative that asked parents to propose design solutions for helping characters
from El Chavo del Ocho, a beloved Mexican TV show that is also extremely popular across
Latin America.
Parents’ design work entailed assigning magical attributes to everyday objects like
a map, head antennas, and a magnifying glass.
13 design concepts emerged from this activity.
I won’t touch much on this methodology but I’d like to invite you to read more about
it in our paper The data we collected were indeed very rich
and promising However, when we tried to analyze them for
devising realistic interventions, we realized this was not going to be a seamless process.
Basically, we faced a problem that previous HCI work in assets-based design has already
hinted.
Assets are not static traits, they are actually attributes that become assets given a particular
situation and thus, what is an asset in one context can be a constraint in another.
For example, our participants saw their perseverance as an asset motivating them to pursue
goals.
However, their perseverance often led them to over focus, blinding them from
other opportunities.
Another problem we faced was that, parents’ assets-based designs were not seamlessly related to educational
goals.
the had more to do with ensuring family togetherness, and teaching value-based lessons to children.
This suggested an important question for anyone doing assets-based design
And that is, what would be an appropriate methodology for unpacking how participants’
situated use of assets can effectively inform technology-based interventions?
To devise this methodology we first looked for an analytical lens that could hep us unpack
people’s actions as well their limitations to act
We looked at approaches within and outside HCI, like for instance Activity Theory and
Bourdieu's theory of capital, amongst others.
None were appreciative of assets and limitations as a whole package. Activity Theory,
for example, tends to downplay structural limitations, the theory of capital dismisses
non-traditional forms of capital Then we decided to turn to sociology and explore
Ann Swidler’s Theory of Culture in Action which is not a lens that HCI has used much
before.
We were initially drawn to it because it proposes that people are resourceful problem solvers
while also recognizing that the ways in which people solve problems are often shaped by
structural limitations.
In essence, this theory describes the way people act as highly shaped
by the many capacities that they’ve acquired as they interact with culture at large.
Essentially, it proposes that each one of us has a cultural toolkit we can draw from
for assembling strategies of action that help us face everyday problems without having to think
about them too much.
As these heuristics become more prevalent in our lives, they actually start defining
the goals that we pursue when we face a problem.
For example, if we face the problem of choosing teammates,
and we are really really good at reading signs of loyalty,
we'll most likely choose teammates who seem very loyal to us.
We found this theory’s focus on capacities much promising for our goal.
First, it can provide rich insights into why different people use different cultural resources
to solve problems.
And the, it can also offer a richer understanding of what assets are: they no longer need to
be these productive traits that society values, they can actually be all the capacities
that people use for solving problems.
Now, once we decided to use culture in action as a lens, the problem still remained
how can we actually use this theory to inform a methodology for analyzing assets-based data,
This theory is telling us that strategies of action is the start point for understanding how and
why action takes place.
It basically tells us that strategies can tell us the real goal behind people’s actions.
This is important for our analysis, because if can identify people’s goals, we will be able to
envision goals for design.
But how do we identify people’s goals if all we initially have is the strategy?
To address this issue, we identified parents’ different strategies from our data
Then, per strategy, we identified the problem that the strategy is trying to solve.
Having the problem and the strategy, we were now then able to identify participants’ capacities
and limitations to act
Only then, with all that information, we were able to conclude the underlying goal.
So for example, in our data, we saw parents pursuing self-learning as a very common strategy
of action but the underlying goal of choosing this strategy over other ones was not clear.
So, what we did is that we identified all the times parents engaged in self-learning and we found that one of the
problems they were trying to solve with this strategy was to address their social discomfort
of being in a foreign country.
Further analyzing this problem, we saw that the capacities they used to
engage in this strategy were control of their own space, a desire to self-improve,
and an ability to find sites for learning.
However, their use of these capacities was often limited by their fear to fail and be
judged From this, it was now easier to realize that
parents’ underlying goal is to attain self-empowerment in ways that are safe to them, that is, in
ways that minimize the risk for them to face failure or social embarrassment.
In terms of design, this already tells us plenty: for example, when designing to support
parents’ learning, we cannot force social components for that would probably scare them
off.
Now l’d like to show you how we used this methodology to envision possible interventions
in the educational system.
For this I’ll center the analysis on the strategy of parenting via consejos, which
translates directly into the word advice but in the context of parenting we saw it entails
much more than that.
So, for instance, we have the case of Clara, a mother of three. Her story illustrates really well how consejos work.
When some kids at school bullied Clara’s daughters, telling them that Clara was fat,
Clara used consejos to change her children's view on bullying:
She sat down with them and had a long conversation explaining how their family was in a better
socioeconomic and probably emotional position than the bullies’.
Thus, whatever the bullies said did not matter much after all.
As this example shows, consejos are a strategy that addresses the problem of changing children’s
behavior through value-based elements.
In Clara’s case she used the notion of family togetherness and even classism to emphasize
differences across her family and the bullies’.
Such mastery in using values when crafting consejos suggests that the usual goal of this
strategy is to motivate value-based growth, which for Clara meant to help her daughters
feel proud of who they are Our data showed us that parents use this strategy a lot when
they are trying to impact their children’s education as well.
However, in those cases using value-based discourse is not necessarily always enough.
Here we have the cases of Regina and Roberto to provide an example of this.
Both tackled the problem of changing their children’s academic behavior by fostering
a value-based development Regina used fear and guilt for motivating
her child to attend college, and Roberto used examples of effort to convince
his daughters of studying Math.
However, Roberto’s ability of mixing school-related examples with a value-based discourse might
give him a higher chance of attaining his goal.
Many of our participants, including Regina, believe that that type of school talk
is key to impact children’s education.
However, engaging in such talk is hard for most parents.
Regina, for example, did not have a good experience with school growing up, her parents frequently
scolded her for not being being smart enough and finally took her out of school to work
in the fields.
Regina felt that her life experiences had made her rather an expert on discourses around
perseverance and hard work, and that's what she used on an everyday basis to self-motivate
With this knowledge of what parents do and what really want to do, the next step in
our analysis was to understand The
role that technology can have in supporting parents as they learn more school talk
Further, we need to know if and how we could use parents’ capacity of Consejos to design
such technology We thus turned to analyze parents’ designs.
As I mentioned before, these were narratives of how certain objects could acquire magical
powers to solve the parenting problems of beloved TV characters.
In this case, the designs themselves represented strategies of action.
So, to analyze these designs, we first grouped them based on the problems they were trying to
solve, for example, we grouped together all designs that addressed the problem of changing
people’s behavior.
From there, per artifact, we performed a similar analysis to the one I mentioned before
And, finally we compared our new analysis with the ones we already had.
Any differences in capacites, limitations, or goals could then shed light on new design
directions.
Our analysis revealed the concept of Pluma aspiracional,or aspirational pen, as one that
addresses a similar problem than consejos, that is, changing someone’s behavior.
In the case of this design, however, it referred to changing other parents’ behavior.
The concept proposed a magical pen and notepad that a parent could use to track down their
everyday activities, like how many hours they work per week.
The notepad would then magically react showing the pros and cons of such activities for supporting
children’s academic attainment.
For instance, if a parent writes down that they work over 40 hours per week, the notepad
will tell them that working so many hours will deter their child’s chances to go to
college.
Just like parents did, this concept tries to deal with academic problems through values,
in this case using guilt, fear, and aspirations.
However, it uses other interesting capacities.
For example, it brings elements of school talk and mixes them with a value-based discourse
to help parents reflect on how to best support their children
Further, it harnesses the impersonal nature of a notepad as a feasible medium for giving
such blunt, school-related consejos to parents.
It becomes clear then that technologies that use consejos for teaching school talk to parents
would do better if they ensure that these consejos come from non-human actors.
For example, parents might be willing to learn school talk from smart technologies that use
a value-based speech.
Parents might also be willing to learn school talk from other parents as long as these learning
lessons come in the form of impersonal media such as videos or audios of other parents
outside their social network.
Having demonstrated how we used this culture-in-action lens to support design, I now would like to discuss
three ways in which we think this theoretical lens can further impact assets-based work
in HCI First, this len’s emphasis on strategies
of action and problem solving facilitates a holistic understanding of assets
Rather than assuming assets as positive traits only, this view forces us to ask way more
questions about why participants act in a certain ways, and why they use some capacities
vs others.
Second, by revealing capacities as imperfect elements, clashing with other capacities and
limitations, a culture in action view augments possible design directions
For example, if a capacity is not working, we would still need to unpack it to see why
it does not work, and derive other design lessons from it.
And finally, when using participatory design for collecting data on capacities we suggest
to consider three aspects First, it is important to ensure that participants
are exposed to a diversity of experiences for discussing their assets from different
perspectives.
It is also important to provide participants with time to reflect on what they are learning about
themselves.
And finally, it is important to lower technological ambitions and rather focus on facilitating culturally
familiar and compelling spaces for creation.
And with that, I end my presentation.
Thank you again for watching.
We’d love to learn your thoughts on this work, either over email or Twitter.