Participatory Design Research and Educational Justice: Studying Learning and Relations Within Social Change Making

Reciprocal design: inclusive design approaches for people with late stage dementia

“…This becomes particularly important in relation to marginalized and vulnerable group, such as those living with dementia. We see this issue addressed in participatory approaches and in particular Participatory Design Research (PDR), which developed in the field of pedagogy and education as a method and approach that focusses on the desire to effect social change and to re-address power dynamics (Bang & Vossoughi 2016).…”

“…Co-design approaches also need to be able to accommodate participants who are not able to verbally articulate wants, needs, or desires; have cognitive and physical limitations; whose level of input, while important, may not be extensive; and those who may have difficulty with comprehending the role of probes and prototypes. Projects may be restrictive because, for example, they require the user to understand the design process and 'future think' the end product, or be able to explore concepts and possibilities, think about alternatives, or empathize with the designer (Bang and Vossoughi 2016).…”

“…The level of participant input needs to be given careful consideration to ensure that it is appropriate to the overall aims and outcomes of the project. After all, the type and extent of the engagement required may differ considerably depending on whether the desired outcome is the production of an object, a service, a tool, an experience in itself, social change, or research (Bang and Vossoughi 2016;Jonas 2014;Brandt 2004).…”

“…These participatory approaches attend to the ways in which normatively powered dynamics are re-inscribed in the roles and relations between researchers and 'the researched', and disrupt or create new roles and relations and to achieve, in Bang and Vossoughi (2016, 173) terms, transformative ends. In using such approaches, design for dementia can engage in design projects that advance fundamental knowledge of learning and development in relation to dementia, and become 'social change making projects' (Bang and Vossoughi 2016).…”

Cognition and Instruction in Transition

“…There have been many excellent articles published that move in these directions; examples include Manz (2015), who studied young learners' development of scientific ways of seeing and talking as they moved between their classroom and a "wild" area of their school yard, and Rubel, Lim, Hall-Wieckert, and Sullivan (2016), who studied mathematics learning as students in low-income urban neighborhoods moved between classrooms and local businesses that sold lottery tickets to residents in those neighborhoods. These new topics and approaches to conceptual learning in familiar conceptual domains have put positive pressure on theories of learning, research design (see also a special issue of the journal on participatory design research; Bang & Vossoughi, 2016), and the scope and kinds of research questions that can be approached through careful empirical study. The research communities served by this journal, the fields within which we do our research, and the worlds this research seeks to understand and to affect are all changing.…”