Hello, my name is Laura Scheepmaker. I present the paper
"Leaving the Field: Designing a Socio-Material Toolkit for Teachers to Continue to Design Technology with Children"
This research was conducted within the social play technologies project in Vienna, Austria
Together with my colleagues Kay Kender, Christopher Frauenberger and Geraldine Fitzpatrick
Leaving the field when conducting research in situated contexts
and finding ways to sustain project outcomes beyond academia,
can be challenging.
We co-designed social play technologies with neurodiverse children
in classroom contexts for three years
but when talking to the teachers what they would need to continue doing design workshops with their classes,
they felt unable to do so.
Our project outcomes did not sufficiently support them,
or other teachers who did not partici- pate in this research
to continue doing similar work after we would have left the field.
They were worried that they wouldn't have the resources to continue our work,
for instance because they are no technology experts and don't have the money to buy technical components.
To react upon their concerns and enable them to facillitate similar activities with the children,
we decided to build a toolkit, comprised of various socio-material tools.
We argue that we need a combination of material tools
for instance methodological guidelines to facilitate design processes
and social tools, i.e. a social support network, consisting of tech experts, or peers, that supports teachers in using the toolkit.
The majority of existing toolkits are mainly sets of methods or tools, physical parts or methodological guidelines.
We learned from our collaboration with the teachers, that their situated context requires not only stand-alone materials,
but also a social infrastructure in which the digital or physical materials are embedded.
As a conceptual lens we build upon the notion of infrastructuring.
We use this term as defined in Science and Technology Studies and used by Karasti et al. as
“a multifaced concept referring to interrelated technical, social and organizational arrangements involving hardware and software technologies,
standards, procedures, practices and policies together with digital configurations in support of human communication and capabilities”
The toolkit was co-designed based on an interview and a co-design workshop with special education teachers,
and initial feedback on the final prototype was gathered afterwards from additional teachers with an online survey.
During the interview it became apparent, that the teachers feel that they lack resources (time, money or skills)
to facillitate PD workshops at their schools without the support of researchers.
Then we developed an initial prototype of a toolkit based on the requirements of the teachers.
In the co-design workshop we designed and refined the initial toolkit prototype,
and discussed opportunities for support networks. In the online survey, we gathered initial feedback on the toolkit.
The material toolkit consists digital resources:
a handbook for teachers with methodological guidelines how to facilliate PD inspired technology design workshops with children,
a diary for the children, card decks (technology cards, design trigger cards and cards for fantasy workshop)
and videos which explain technologies.
Interestingly, the teachers preferred digital resources they could print, appropriate, and reproduce,
and not a travelling toolkit they could borrow, for instance, or already printed materials.
we discussed a couple of requirements for the toolkit and challenges the teachers experience in their practice.
For instance, that they need materials which are open for appropriation,
and that they want short explanations, rather than long texts.
With this work, we want to propose a pathway to sustain outcomes of participatory design projects in a school context.
We believe that a toolkit can support sustainability,
but it requires careful infrastructuring to embed it in the context.
Exploring the restraints of a particular context was in our case
the key to be able to develop a toolkit which meets the requirements of the teachers,
and the survey indicates that it might also support new audiences who were not previously engaged in PD projects.
This could be a first step towards scalability.
Reflecting on what we have learned, we suggest a pro-active attitude when aiming for sustainable project outcomes.
Especially with infrastructuring, we learned that it requires time
to find collaborators and build a network which outlives the initial research project.
Furthermore, we believe that infrastructuring could be a possibility for reintroducing politics and ethics,
two important notions in PD.
We saw that we were able to encapsulate values in our toolkit, for instance,
the empowerment of children in a design process.
By presenting the toolkit to policy makers, and teachers, we challenged the current school’s curriculum.