Zones of participation – a framework to analyse design roles in early childhood education and care (ECEC)

Abstract

Current research has addressed children's involvement in codesign from several different perspectives such as empowerment, design thinking, participation, and learning. The literature presents many roles that children can have in participatory design (PD) e.g. as testers, informants, users, co-designers, and co-researchers. Both critical views and solutions to support children's genuine participation exist. The investigation was motivated by examining whether and how children's participation can be enhanced through PD practices. The study conducted a participatory design (PD) process in a kindergarten in Finland together with adults and children. The Grounded Theory analysis elicited different roles of the participants as prominent indicators of the interaction in and quality of participatory process. These roles were further elaborated as Zones of participation (ZoP) that constituted of the Zone of audience, Zone of whisperer, Zone of actor and Zone of director. The analysis shows that there are significant co-occurrences between participant groups accessing different zones. We suggest that the quality of participation in the design process can be investigated by identifying participants' access to different ZoP. Movement between the zones indicates that there is no onesided control over actions and dialogue between the participants is prominent.

CiteSpace-based bibliometric review of participatory design

“…Some like Konings [15] (2014), discussed the impact of participation on the key players in education (students, teachers, designers). Others like Brinck [16] (2020), looked into the impact of the level and stage of participation on the quality of design output in children's educational programs .…”

Open design pedagogy: Revealing openness in early childhood education with digital technology

“…Brinck, J., Leinonen, T., Lipponen, L., & Kallio-Tavin, M. (2020). In this journal article, my contributions included planning the design project, conducting fieldwork, collecting and processing data, and documenting participant activities.…”

“…Here, adults who are designing pedagogy benefit from recognising the social nature of learning (Biesta, 2022;Vygotsky, 1978;Wenger, 1999) and the multiple opportunities to design pedagogical activities and learn digital media skills together with the children. Designing pedagogical activities that employ digital technologies provides a solid starting point to develop one's own digital skills and pedagogical practices as an educator (Brinck et al, 2020(Brinck et al, , 2023Vartiainen & Enkenberg, 2013).…”

“…Involving children in research means not only abiding by rules such as not causing harm or avoiding risk, but actively seeking ways to enhance children's wellbeing (Nutbrown, 2018b). In this thesis, my aim was to enhance children's participation in their everyday lives and thus eventually to ensure their basic rights (UNICEF, 1989) 9 by supporting their agency in the matters important to them (Brinck et al, 2020(Brinck et al, , 2023Leinonen et al, 2021).…”

Pensamiento de diseño como agente de transformación en los procesos formativos

“…La última recomendación se orienta hacia la implementación de prácticas de diseño en el aula que impulsen la RCP, en donde los estudiantes asuman roles y responsabilidades específicas (Brinck et al, 2020) en procesos de co-creación del aprendizaje (Kaminskienė et al, 2020), acciones pensadas en función de los RAE, mediante estrategias pedagógicas relevantes y creativas. En este sentido, se formula la pregunta: ¿cómo se integran procesos de codiseño en el aula?…”