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Informal learning environments are an important part of the educational landscape for diverse learners, and do their best work when creating learning experiences that align with community interests, needs, and ways of knowing. While models exist for exploring design partnerships between schools and communities, fewer evidence-based models are available for these design collaborations between informal learning environments and communities. The overarching question of the proposed session is: How do informal learning environment designers, researchers, and practitioners work with communities to co-design and co-implement socially engaged and equitable educational programs in different sociocultural contexts across the world? As a part of this symposium we highlight projects from Asia, Africa, South and North America that vary both in partnership scale and duration.
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Visualizing the Unseen Design Work of Educators
Educators are often described as practitioners and can be subject to deficit-oriented characterizations that position their work as focused on the passive dissemination of knowledge. This pictorial argues that educators are designers, and their curation of learning environments and experiences constitutes an underappreciated and complex design practice. Further, the design work that educators engage in is significant and consequential as it can define or reimagine who participates and what is valued in educational spaces – playing an important role in creating more equitable educational outcomes. In this pictorial, we leverage photos captured and curated by educators of their learning environments in library makerspaces and youth- serving technology centers to make their unseen design work and impact visible. Beyond making educators’ expertise more visible, this pictorial also offers design considerations for designers of technologies, materials, and experiences that may be situated in educational environments.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2005764
- PAR ID:
- 10542560
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 9798400705830
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1956 to 1969
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- IT University of Copenhagen Denmark
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3660751
