Our Designs and the Social Agendas They Carry

Sasha Barab, Tyler Dodge, Micheal K. Thomas, Craig Jackson, Hakan Tuzun

Journal of the Learning Sciences, 16:2, 263 - 305.

This paper argues that learning scientists and instructional designers should do more to communicate the critical social agendas in their work. After an overview of critical pedagogy (Freire, et al), the authors spend most of the paper discussing experiences testing an educational mmo they’ve developed.

“Instead of simply building an artifact to help individuals accomplish a particular task, or to meet a specific standard, the focus of critical design work is to develop sociotechnical structures that facilitate individuals in critiquing and improving themselves and the societies in which they function, and then we use our understanding of participation with these structures to advance theory.”

After Paulo Freire, the authors define a critical agenda as: “one that, if adopted, calls into question and potentially disrupts existing practices and structures; it communicates a commitment that the work reflects a critique of the status quo, even exposing inequitable power structures, resource allotment, divisions of labor, or disempowerment (Friere, 1970/2000).” Discussions of critical pedagogy sometimes seem to ignore the fact that students might enjoy false consciousness. Their idea that they are acquiring social capital through education and that this is going to alter the circumstances of their lives may be so attractive to them that calling parts of it into question can be far more threatening than liberating. I don’t think that students are completely ignorant of the circumstances of their disempowerment; I think they are complicit in it through their participation in the narrative of their empowerment. The dreams of going somewhere are better than statistics of going nowhere.

Barab, et al, claim that their article discusses two critical agendas:

1. Critical design work that acknowledges and actualizes its social agendas
2. A specific design (their game) and the process used in creating it.

• Brief discussion of the implications of the application of critical pedagogy at different levels (student, teacher, admin).
• Brief discussion of similar projects: Purple Moon (Laurel), Fifth Dimension (Cole).

the authors’ claims re: the Quest Atlantis project as critical design work:

• “a designed intervention that explicitly adopts a critical agenda”
• inquiry-based pedagogy (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1993; National Research Council, 1996) and experiential learning framework (Dewey; Kolb, 1984).
• content is part of “rich narratives” (Brunner, 2002)
• activities are part of “Web-supported, globally distributed community.” (Wenger, 1998).
• “Building on strategies from online role-playing games (Gee, 2004; Koster, 2000; Squire, 2006), Quest Atlantis combines elements of free play, role play, adventure, and learning, allowing members to virtually travel to three-dimensional worlds where they select developmentally appropriate curricular tasks, talk with other students and mentors, and build virtual personae.”

A description of the game follows. It includes:

• notes regarding context / setting and activities and rewards.
• registration and access to the game world
• interface design
• structure of the game world and quest system and rewards

The authors discuss integrating a social agenda “in a way that was not prescriptive and that would undermine neither the entertaining nor academic aspects of the program.” They claim that “seven social commitments emerged to constitute the agenda foundation of this work: personal agency, diversity affirmation, healthy communities, social responsibility, environmental awareness, creative expression, compassionate wisdom.”

The authors provide a more detailed description of the game. Then describe an “ethnographic methodological process and elaborate on the development of Quest Atlantis,” focusing of critical anthropology and participatory action. However, neither “necessarily ‘packages’” their critique “in a manner that can be used by others who were not privy to the goings-on at the site where the critique was developed, thereby limiting its potential impact.” The next few pages provide definitions of critical design work, participatory action research, critical anthropology and participatory design. They may be helpful later.

Next, the authors, outline five steps of design ethnography and discuss Quest Atlantis in terms of each of these steps:

1. Building a rich understanding
2. Developing Critical Commitments
3. Reifying Commitments into Design
4. Expanding the Impact
5. Making Theoretical Contributions

In some ways this just seems to be the enumeration of the obvious.

“Challenges of critical design work: All designs are political, avoiding hegemonic influence,” problems with tensions between “preexisting biases and local needs,” “empowering teachers and empowering children,” “local design work and more general products and theories.”