Makingspace for youth perspectives

Dearborn, MI | January to April 2019

THE CHALLENGE + THE OPPORTUNITY

Our partners in this project were educators and the designers of a social justice curriculum called Equitable Futures. Equitable Futures is a six-week high school program that seeks to connect issues of present day social inequity in the Detroit-metro region to the nation’s broader civil rights history. To accomplish this goal and facilitate student empowerment, the lessons are rooted in project based learning and student led inquiry. Students explore topics such as red lining to understand the profound segregation they experience and observe daily in their communities.

Through post-evaluation surveys completed by students who have participated in the program, the majority of students responded positively to the curriculum. However, many students posed the question “so what now?”. They felt unsure how to follow through with meaningful action to promote change in the context of their local communities. Motivated by this insight, we embarked on the following research question...

How can we get students to see themselves as change agents?

This inquiry was led by the following research question and hypothesis: How can we get students to see themselves as change agents? And, how can we begin to make students aware and able to articulate the changes they want to see in the world? Our hypothesis was that an important first step was through the lens of their everyday environments; their own school campus and community.

THE OUTCOME

We co-designed a workshop series for high school students called MakingSPACE for Youth Perspectives. MakingSPACE aims to build students’ spatial awareness and to think critically about how they experience different spaces and places in school. The goal for students to use these exercises to analyze these experiences to inform and articulate change in their daily learning environments. The workshop modules can work as a series or independently. They include UnderstandSPACE, SketchSPACE, and MapSPACE.

UnderstandSPACE is a warm-up activity to build spatial awareness and vocabulary through physically moving bodies and furniture in the classroom space.

Through simple drawing exercises, SketchSPACE aims to identify and articulate the characteristics of spaces that do and do not foster equity and belonging in their school.

Building off the data collected in SketchSPACE, MapSPACE aims to visualize the individual and collective experiences of these identified spaces onto a floor plan of their school.

THE PROCESS: RESEARCH THROUGH DESIGN

Through a research through design approach, I co-designed a workshop series with my MDes colleague, Colleen Clark, to gather insights through the engagement with a high school social justice class in Dearborn, Michigan. The goals of the 3-day workshop series was to provide exposure to design-thinking processes and methods and through the methods of engagement, gain insights on the interests and motivations of these students and how that information can help us better integrate activities into the Equitable Futures program that begin to get students thinking about actionable steps toward change in their own local environments. Workshop activities included the collective ideation/brainstorm exercises, photo-voice method, one-on-one peer interviews, small group focus group interviews and conversations, a series of cognitive mapping exercises, and a short design charrette.

LESSONS LEARNED + NEXT STEPS

Designing for value beyond the semester timeline (or more broadly, any given project timeline).

By the end of the semester, we were unable to test the proposed MakingSPACE modules ourselves. However, in subsequent conversations at the end of the semester with our project partners, they voiced interest in using this as a tool for teachers to consider how space can be designed to support the learner experience. So the teachers in the Oakland School District ended up adapting these exercises to frame a conversation about facility improvements for the school district.

Using the MAKINGSpace activity as a guide, teachers participated in a “space walk” around the district’s school buildings. They were asked to observe how space was being used and how it made them feel. They had 20 minutes to walk, sketch, and write in their journals. Followed by whole group reflection about the trends that they noticed.

The teachers then moved into thinking about their own contexts. For this part teachers could focus on their classroom or on their school building. Using the SketchSPACE activity, teachers drew spaces that created feelings of belonging, not belonging, equity, and not equitable. Teachers were asked to do this two different ways, first from their own perspective (so how the space made them feel as a grown up in the building) and then from a student’s perspective. We ended with a small group reflection where again they shared and looked for patterns followed by individual journaling about what this means for students and how it impacts how we think about design.

The feedback from teachers was overwhelmingly positive. Most said they had not ever really considered space in this way.

Co-assess what co-learning looks like in your respective engagement partnerships.

Teachers are very busy, students are very busy and learning environments are a highly dynamic ecosystem and also highly political and bureaucratic environments -- including the relationships amongst students, students and teachers, and students and the administration.

Given these considerations, they demonstrate in a way a microcosm of society. While this project provided very specific findings on how to facilitate collaborations and co-design processes with teachers and students, these also provided us with broader takeaways on building partnerships across different project collaborations.

Set up expectations and co-create objectives for the engagement. What are the respective partners contributing and getting out of the experience?

Make space to identify the opportunities and risks to be aware of in the early phases of developing a partnership. How are you following up to make connections of what you participated in together? How are you coming back to synthesize or demonstrate what was built or what was integrated from that collaboration into a project or outcome?