Making Space for Youth Perspectives
A collective emotional impact map based on maps individually generated by high school students.
Timeline February - May 2019
My Contributions
Project co-lead
Observation
Design research strategy
Workshop co-design
Workshop co-facilitation
Curriculum design
Location Dearborn and Ann Arbor, Michigan
Team
Jenn W. Low (project co-lead)
Colleen Clark (project co-lead)
Darin Stockdill (Center for Education Design, School of Education, University of Michigan)
Angela Altomonte and her students (Fordson High School, Dearborn, MI)
Project Context
During the winter 2019 semester of our MDes in Integrative Design program at the Stamps School of Art and Design, our cohort worked with the University of Michigan School of Education’s Center for Education Design, Evaluation, and Research (CEDER) to address equity and access in public education as part of their Design Studio 2 prototyping course.
Working both collectively and in teams, we worked with Darin Stockdill, design coordinator for the University of Michigan School of Education’s Center for Education Design, Evaluation, and Research (CEDER), to identify areas of opportunity and potential partners through Equitable Futures, a curricular initiative co-organized by Oakland Schools that aims to help teachers discuss social issues in U.S. history classes with greater depth and relevance.
I collaborated with the genius Jenn W. Low, who prior to graduate school spent 12 years as a landscape architect and urban designer. Darin introduced us to Angela Altomonte, a high school social studies teacher familiar with the Equitable Futures curriculum. We worked with Angela to explore concepts of belonging and equity with her students. To create deep, actionable meaning around the civil rights curriculum, Angela felt it was important to lay a foundation of trust, community, and inclusion in her classroom.
Inspired by the community based participatory research method, Photovoice, our original lesson plan objective was to use participatory photography to elicit youth perspectives and opinions on their physical environment and discuss how spaces within their school do or do not foster feelings of belonging, equity, equality, and being yourself. Angela kindly allowed us into her classroom for three sessions over one week. Through post-mortem reflections immediately after each session, we produced new iterations of the lesson plans based on individual and group dynamics, time constraints, and that variety was key to keeping the students engaged. New insights gained from breakdowns along the way.
A model of where we situated our project within the framework of the Equitable Futures curriculum. Designed by Jenn W. Low and myself.
Insights
After three sessions with the high school students over the course of one week, Jenn and I identified the following three insights:
The value of the student-led tour of spaces
We quickly discovered that school policies did not allow students to have their phones out during school hours and that they couldn’t be in the hallways without an adult. We iterated and ended up dividing the class into groups, for student-led tours of school spaces. This breakdown provided insight on how students perceived their physical environment that wouldn’t have been gained if we sent them to do this task by themselves.
Importance of creating opportunities for open conversation
We designed an interview guide and curated conversation among students first in pairs, small groups, and the entire class. Students told us later they appreciated the space to express themselves, discuss their experiences, and share their opinions.
Engagement through a cognitive mapping exercise
We decided to change up our activity for the third session and have students do cognitive mapping of how they experience spaces between their homes and school to further talk through what types of spaces and places support and do not support feelings of belonging, being themselves, equity and equality. Again, variety was important to maintaining engagement and reinforcing terminology and concepts introduced over the three-day workshop. One student commented, “You let us guide the conversation....you wanted to know our point of view...all the activities were really different and I noticed my classmates were engaged
Our original plan inspired by the participatory Photovoice process
Outcomes
As an outcome of our engagement with the high school students, we’ve developed the next iteration of the workshop called Making Space for Youth Perspectives. Our concept consists of three activities to build students’ spatial awareness and vocabulary and to think critically and communicate how they experience the built environment. Through these activities we have students explore concepts of belonging and equity through activities that provide the opportunity for students to reflect on how their physical and perceived school spaces impact their daily lives.
UnderstandSPACE: A warm-up activity to build spatial awareness and vocabulary through physically moving bodies and furniture in the classroom space. Through mini design interventions within the classroom, students will change the configurations of desks and do an evaluation of how they experience the space differently as a result. They will have word banks with key spatial terms to learn and use in their evaluations of the configurations.
SketchSPACE: Generate insights through drawing and conversation about specific places that students associate with equity and belonging (and their converses). By using built environment vocabulary (see “UnderstandSpace”), students will reflect on specific spaces within their school that foster feelings of belonging and equity and to contrast, identify spaces that do not support these concepts and the opposites of these concepts. Students will visually represent these spaces through sketching or taking polaroids. The visual juxtaposition of spaces that promote belonging/not belonging and equity/inequitable will serve as prompts for discussion and critical analysis for students reflecting on their daily experiences.
MapSPACE: Visually map onto the floor plan both the individual and collective experiences of the school’s physical environment. Students will visually map out their individual experiences of their daily school environments into a collective emotional impact map.
Illustrations created by Jenn W. Low.
