Honoring Community Voices: Reclaiming Engagement and Responsibility
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Title
Honoring Community Voices: Reclaiming Engagement and Responsibility
Abstract/Description
From one dark office lightened with a flickering lamp, to an air-conditioned spacious workspace with illuminating light – this metaphor can be used to describe five years of working on a community-based research project in an Urban Indian community. As the first full time staff member on the project, my position has evolved over time and in the beginning years I wasn’t completely aware of where we would end up. Due to the long history of unethical and “damage centered” research in Native communities, research projects often evoke uncertainty and position many participants to feel powerless (Tuck, 2009). In our own community, community-based research was unheard of, despite this I didn’t feel intimidated to work among community who were brought together with the goal of reclaiming science and science education; engaging community in design and implementation of a Native Science Program for urban Indian youth was exciting. In this paper I take up a desire-centered framework and focus on the “complexity, contradiction, and the self-determination” (Tuck, 2009, p. 416) of Design Researchers lived experiences.
I use a mixed methods approach including participatory ethnography and portraiture to explore my role and lessons learned through the design process, as well as the ways in which community input and participation was structured, taken up and evolved over the course of the larger research project (Barab et al 2004; Brayboy & Deyhle, 2000; Yazzie-Mintz, 2009). I pay particular attention to the role that Design Researchers played in the curriculum development process and their conceptions of science. Designer Researchers were contributors in all aspects of the creation of the project curricula and program structure. As a Designer, they made decisions about the content, structure, and materials of the project. Some of the Designers’ roles evolved to other positions with day-to-day operation of programming while many floated between multiples responsibilities dependent on goals, and the growth of the project.
The data presented in this paper comes from two sources, clinical interviews and design meetings. I examine 7 community designer meetings and 12 clinical interviews conducted with community participants over the course of 5 years. The clinical interviews were conducted with community members involved in the project in a design role. The interview was organized around the following themes: conceptions of science; communities’ scientific knowledge; project impact on larger community, and national level; understanding of community-based design; curricular design. These interviews were recorded and transcribed. Using grounded methods I code these interviews for thematic responses and conceptions of community engagement.
The second source of data, designer meetings, is analyzed using both quantitative and qualitative methods. I examine designers multi-layered forms of participation and look at how designers reflected on their own roles in community learning, what this means for community based design research, and changes over time in reclaiming responsibility for project goals and larger community goals of self-determination in education.
Preliminary results from demonstrate that when community based research is deeply driven by community the learning that occurs is far beyond the original scope.
I use a mixed methods approach including participatory ethnography and portraiture to explore my role and lessons learned through the design process, as well as the ways in which community input and participation was structured, taken up and evolved over the course of the larger research project (Barab et al 2004; Brayboy & Deyhle, 2000; Yazzie-Mintz, 2009). I pay particular attention to the role that Design Researchers played in the curriculum development process and their conceptions of science. Designer Researchers were contributors in all aspects of the creation of the project curricula and program structure. As a Designer, they made decisions about the content, structure, and materials of the project. Some of the Designers’ roles evolved to other positions with day-to-day operation of programming while many floated between multiples responsibilities dependent on goals, and the growth of the project.
The data presented in this paper comes from two sources, clinical interviews and design meetings. I examine 7 community designer meetings and 12 clinical interviews conducted with community participants over the course of 5 years. The clinical interviews were conducted with community members involved in the project in a design role. The interview was organized around the following themes: conceptions of science; communities’ scientific knowledge; project impact on larger community, and national level; understanding of community-based design; curricular design. These interviews were recorded and transcribed. Using grounded methods I code these interviews for thematic responses and conceptions of community engagement.
The second source of data, designer meetings, is analyzed using both quantitative and qualitative methods. I examine designers multi-layered forms of participation and look at how designers reflected on their own roles in community learning, what this means for community based design research, and changes over time in reclaiming responsibility for project goals and larger community goals of self-determination in education.
Preliminary results from demonstrate that when community based research is deeply driven by community the learning that occurs is far beyond the original scope.
Author/creator
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AERA Annual Meeting
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Research/Scholarly Media
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Presentation/Poster
Scholarship genre
Empirical
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Featured case/project
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Citation
Soto, C. (2011). Honoring Community Voices: Reclaiming Engagement and Responsibility. AERA Annual Meeting 2011, New Orleans.
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| Title | Alternate label | Class |
|---|---|---|
 Decolonizing Methodologies in an Urban Community: Ripple Effects of Community-Based Design Research [Session 49.068] |
Session |
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