Hi my name is Awais Hameed Khan, and today I will be presenting the paper speculative design for education, using participatory methods to map out design challenges and opportunities for education in Pakistan.
I am presenting this research on behalf of my colleagues, Neelam Ejaz from the World Bank and Sarah Matthews, Dr Stephen Snow and Dr Ben Matthews from the University of Queensland.
This paper offers directions for the design of education technologies in Pakistan through a plural culturally rooted discussion with 21 key stakeholders using speculative proposals.
We highlight opportunities and considerations for localising design for education and reframing the value of education in Pakistan.
This paper as part of a broader research program that explores how can we leverage materiality of designerly practices tools and methods to make design easier to understand and use by non designers.
According to UNICEF, Pakistan is the second highest out of school child population in the world, with almost 19 million children between the ages of five and 16 not attending school.
On average, a child starting school at age four completes a little under five years of actual learning instead of the benchmark nine years.
Additionally, 75% of children aged 10 are unable to read and understand a short age appropriate text, this means not only are their children out of school, but even those in school or not learning.
As the fifth most populous country in the world, with a population growing at 2% per annum, the challenges within the education system are most likely to continue increasing in scale.
With long term effects on the country's human capital, development and economic prosperity.
The complexity of the challenges that persists within the Pakistani education context are unique to the local landscape, inherently complex and multi dimensional.
We categorize these challenges into two broad areas, access to education and quality of learning.
disruptions to the education delivery services do you did the coven 19 pandemic have created unique opportunities and an appetite within the local landscape to explore alternative education service delivery mechanisms.
Immediately after school closures, the government of Pakistan led a multimodal broadcast initiative called TeleSschool.
which uses terrestrial broadcast media for delivering educational content with the potential to reach 95% of the population.
This model serves as an example of how radically innovative uses of even existing technology infrastructure can act as a catalyst, not just to mitigate the impact of disruptions due the pandemic, but also potentially reach out of school children.
While cognizant of the fact that a host of good minds have attempted to address the challenges of the education sector in Pakistan before.
We approached the topography of education service delivery landscape, with a different framing.
A designerly lens that adopts a pluralistic collaborative and decolonial approach towards speculative design, that we clearly differentiate from existing HCI4D work within the paper.
As a form of inquiry speculative design allows us to envision alternative futures by suspending.
constraints of our current reality, enabling us to uncover novel perspectives to approach wicked problems, such as those prevalent within this context.
This allows us to explore both future and near future possibilities to address systemic challenges as opposed to being constrained by immediately practical solutions.
It is, however, important to factor in the contextual particularities, that is, how can we leverage design opportunities by harnessing characteristics unique to the local context and culture.
Examples such as Balagamwala's games - Arranged! which facilitates conversations about the complex social issue of arranged marriages situated within Pakistan.
As well as Paltering Politicians - a game which explores contemporary challenges and realities extant within the local political landscape.
drawn on contextual particular structure critical discourse reflection and dialogue.
Similarly, local culture can also be leveraged, for instance, UNESCO Islamabad's project which uses Pakistani truck art known globally for its unique colorful murals.
intricate patterns and use of poetry as a non traditional medium to advocate for girls education. These examples highlight how we might ground materials in conversations with the particulars of the context.
We conducted semi structured interviews and a design activity with 21 participants across 15 sessions, the sessions lasted between one to two hours conducted remotely via Zoom and the interactive whiteboarding to a Miro.
participants were selected using a purpose of sampling strategy.
The selection criteria included practitioners, who worked on ground within the education sector: educationists policymakers development specialists researchers.
and practitioners, who worked within the local non education industry or technology sectors, as well as students who have been part of the education sector.
All participants were residents of Pakistan, identified as Pakistanis and had been educated in Pakistan.
We developed 17 speculative proposals framed as futuristic fictional concepts addressing some of the contemporary challenges within education delivery.
building upon documented challenges from various industry reports high impact critical areas of interest to the World Bank from ongoing projects about educational reform in Pakistan.
And the lived experiences of the first and second authors of education in Pakistan.
For example, the concept of 'language karaoke' was designed in response to the diversity of languages within Pakistan. Qith over 73 unique languages spread across the country.
Historically languages, been an inhibitor for the assimilation of regional residents in urban centers.
Similarly concepts such as 'class-in-a-box' and 'drone projections' were designed for remote delivery to regions where infrastructure development might not be viable or children must travel long distances to the nearest school.
These concepts were used with open-ended scenes, inspired by unfinished comics as a means to facilitate participant generated world building.
Participants fleshed out the open ended contexts used pre learn convention, such as using speech bubbles to annotate and flesh out the scenes.
developed their own speculative proposals and concepts, mapped proposals to scenes and leverage the convenience of the technology to share materials locally available to them to support the discussion.
Through our analysis of the data we generated themes that orient to understanding the context, pragmatic considerations and challenges associated with implementing technological interventions.
The findings are organized under two meta categories: (1) Opportunities and considerations for localising design for education; and (2) Reframing the value of education in Pakistan. I will unpack some of the findings here.
leveraging situated knowledge, highlighting the importance of creating localized content.
10 participants stated "a child in Jaranwala, a rural location, which is an agriculture Community or a child in Thar desert, a rural, remote area.
is being evaluated on their ability to identify components of the computer.
Which they've never seen and is not relevant to their lives. But a child in Karachi and Lahore which are metropolitan cities.
is not being tested on their ability to identify different types of seeds. so the funds of knowledge that the Jaranwala kid has, is complex knowledge, useful knowledge and.
knowledge that is used to create food for the population - really important! that knowledge in the standardized, urbanized, capitalist knowledge systems.
becomes less important than the funds of knowledge of a child in the urban economy."
This quote highlights that while the basic learning outcomes across various subjects should remain consistent across the country the examples and settings used in teaching activities could be tailored to the indigenous location of the child environment.
This also extends the reframing of value education, a participant shares an anecdote visiting a rural community they say:
"This is very funny, I went to a Chacha ji! an older gentleman, and I said, 'you have four kids who are out of school, you should send them to school' he asked 'why?'
And I said, 'they will be happy', he then asked, 'did you go to school? are you happy?' to which I responded 'No chacha ji, you keep your kids with you!'
This exchange presents a very succinct but ultimately vivid picture of the reality of the disconnect between the value of the potential benefits ascribes to completing a formal education.
from an outsider's perspective when compared to that which is actually valued by the locals.
receiving a basic education within Pakistan does not directly correlate to upward socio-economic mobility therefore value must be reconsidered.
The pandemic has fundamentally changed how education content is distributed and open up the opportunity to reimagine the future of education.
delivery systems. A participants states "let's not go back to the old excuses! it was practically unthinkable to put together a program like TeleSchool.
within the time frame that it was developed in! the old and tested model is no longer an option.
If somebody says the design fiction approaches futuristic, just tell them the did the federal government ever believe that they can launch a TV channel within a matter of weeks?
Did the Punjab government ever believe that they could have a TV channel running across 500 cable operators in a matter of weeks?
Where did all this content come from? how did all that happen? it happened!
Did people know in February that most meetings would take place online and everybody would find a way to connect to everybody else? so you know it all happened and it seemed futuristic in February 2020!
The people who provide that support financial or otherwise need to put their foot down - I think there's an opportunity to bring about real change in the mindset!
You know from the poorest of the poor and the richest of the rich if the last six months have taught us one thing that is immediate quick U turn and turn around is absolutely possible.
When there's no other option it's just that we think there are other options.
This work presents a starting point for the use of speculative and design early approaches to explore education and box on.
And it's multi dimensional complexities. Not just as a means of inquiring into the problem space and mapping existing conditions, but as an approach with.
the potential to change the nature of the conversations that can take place, when novel technological proposals intersect with policy issues, local cultural conditions infrastructural capacities and limitations.
and informative ideas about the nature of education itself. We thank you for listening and hope to continue the conversation offline!