“Before moving on to the next step in your futuring process, take a moment to lean back and consider what you’ve built up to this point.”
— How to Future, Ashby & Smith
This week, our team conducted the first round of interviews. We have not yet interviewed PPS educators, but instead collected general insights from a school administrator based in California. While this interview should be properly regarded as one outside of our research context, it is nevertheless relevant to our primary research objectives. Given the width of our exploration, we have many questions that can be answered from outside stakeholders.
Some questions we’re asking are indeed very broad in their scope. After speaking with Peter about the state of our project on Monday, he recommended that we frame some of our questions to account for the larger context of a not-too-distant future:
How is learning in the “new world” of the future different from the world we are living in now?
Where are we right now?
Where are we headed?
What connects the present and future are agents of change?
How might we design something that aligns with those forces?
What are the forces from the past?
What are the hindrances to change?
Another intervention into our process came through meeting with our counterparts (another team that is focusing on PPS). We exchanged resources and compared some of our initial concepts. While there wasn’t too much overlap between groups, it was still quite helpful to expand our questions to account for the larger system of public education in the United States.
While these abstract considerations were useful in formulating the questions our team was interested in asking participants, we also realized some very practical considerations. Namely, we decided to prioritize our interview questions under the assumption that any public school teacher is likely to be stretched thin for time, and thus would only be able to provide between 30 and 45 minutes of interview time. This constraint helped us to focus on questions that would be most likely to illuminate current unknowns regarding the present state of PPS, and the future needs of educators.
On Wednesday, Peter and Stef continued providing feedback as we refined our interview questions. Some things we still needed to resolve (a work in progress), but one particular pain point thus far has been: how are we defining our terms?
We returned to our Miro board (which has served us well as a virtual whiteboard for our team to reference).
Peter also recommended that we consider incorporating generative research processes; e.g., ask participants to invent a “magical device” that would solve current problems. Through this process of making (participants are not required to address technical functions), they can articulate their priorities, wants, and needs. In other words, it’s not about the device itself, but the story that the device helps the participants to tell. For interviews, we also consulted with Hajira and Sofia for feedback, and the ultimate outcome of this cross-critique was a prototype of our primary research protocols. Our hope is to incorporate this refinement method with future interviews, to strengthen the value of our research with each subsequent iteration.
Motivation has been a continuing struggle. Last week was confluence, and this week we had a day off (Tuesday), which in theory would have allowed for some rest, but instead just made the entire week feel a bit (?)… Off? It was jarring to start the week with a busy Monday, an absent Tuesday, and then continue with a “regular” week. To be honest, nothing has felt quite right since switching to online/remote learning. Beyond the workload of graduate school, there is a commutative impact from the prolonged isolation of quarantine and social distancing.
If pandemics were easy, then perhaps we would have them more often.
I’m curious about what these experiences might mean for our team’s exploration into the goal of resilience. When do routines become a rut? When do repetitions become rituals that have overstayed their welcome? How might we balance the need for variety with the desire for stability? What kinds of interview questions will illuminate these concerns?
I’m anxious to learn more from our participants. We have two additional interviews scheduled for our fifth week, with a few others still in the pipeline of confirmation.