On Learning: Design Brigade Week 2
How can arts and cultural institutions provide accessible, engaging, and relevant educational opportunities for K-12 students in a COVID-19 world?
A project co-sponsored by the Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media and Atelier Cho Thompson. For more information, visit Design Brigade
Feedback from Outreach:
Following a great interview with our clients last week, we began this week by reconnecting with them. We wanted to clarify with them some of the primary takeaways from our interview as well as collect some more detailed information through a survey. The main takeaways from our interview helped form a Venn diagram (Figure. 1) that analyzes our clients’ similarities and differences. Creating the Venn diagram allowed us to clearly see where our clients’ missions overlap and where each institution is unique. For example, the Yale University Art Gallery and NXTHVN have more flexibility to display contemporary pieces of art, whereas the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the Yale Center for British Art have more focused collections of older artwork and documents. We mapped out common factors key to our clients’ brief and mission, as an exercise we associated the words in groupings (Figure. 2) to generate ideas moving into the pre-design phase.
In addition to touching base with our clients, we began to connect with various educational institutions around New Haven. We reached out to the New Haven Free Public Library to get a better sense of their phenomenal educational programming and their community outreach during the pandemic. We spoke to Xia Feng, the Library’s Public Services Administrator, and Margaret Girgis, the Young Minds and Family Learning Manager. Xia Feng and Margaret were a delight to talk to and offered us amazing insight into the successes and challenges of promoting learning, care, and community in New Haven (Figure. 3). Particularly interesting for our team’s project was their advice on self-guided learning: “Providing self-guided educational content is about cutting out as much of the middle-work as possible.” As this applies to our design problem, we will aim to design educational opportunities that are easy to find and with minimal barriers. Surprisingly, NHFPL has been pretty successful in their implementation of virtual programming, even though the shift was sudden and unprecedented. They have begun to host virtual storytelling for kids and are in the beginning stages of a project to distribute leftover craft supplies. But both Xia Feng and Margaret emphasized that they are “building the airplane while we’re flying” and still working out many of the kinks associated with the new virtual world. The NHFPL plans to continue to offer digital programs even once the pandemic subsides.
“Providing self-guided educational content is about cutting out as much of the middle-work as possible.”
Upon the advice of our clients, we also sent out a survey to the Community Management Teams this week. The Community Management Teams are small councils for each neighborhood in New Haven, so they have a lot of insight into on-the-ground developments. We have only just begun to receive some responses from our CMT survey, but will be regularly reviewing the responses as they come in and will continue to promote the survey. The leaders of the WEB and Downtown/Wooster Square CMTs have responded back to us so far, putting the survey on their upcoming meeting agendas and sharing it with their constituents, which we greatly appreciate.
Some of our group members attended a New Haven Public Schools Board of Education meeting this week. Our team found it helpful to hear some of the challenges that NHPS is facing in the pandemic, namely the debate around opening schools up for summer camps. The BOE seems to be working tirelessly to get facilities ready and safe and to figure out ways to keep kids occupied. This discussion relates exactly to our own design problem, and further decisions by the BOE will affect how we understand the educational needs of K-12 students. Although NHPS directly interacts with K-12 students, we decided to hold off on further outreach to NHPS so as not to overburden them during this difficult time.
Roadblocks:
Our major concern during this week was identifying the main content of each client. Since we were working with four different institutions, we were interested in discovering a shared thread of content among the clients. We also wanted to find out how the COVID-19 and the current social dynamics have changed the content that each institution deems crucial. Nico Wheadon, the Executive Director of NXTHVN, mentioned in the client interview on June 4th that the pandemic and Black Lives Matter movement have inspired NXTHVN to “understand how their mission plays out in real time”. In the past few months, museums have been challenged to serve their communities in innovative ways, and our goal was to identify the content that the clients considered to be the best execution of their missions in this specific moment in time. Therefore, we sent out a client interview follow-up survey (Figure. 4) with questions such as this:
Melissa Barton, Curator at the Beinecke, answered this question by saying that “in terms of the present moment, we have a lot of material related to Black history and to examples of organizing for social change”. Molleen Theodore, Associate Curator of Programs at YUAG, mentioned various remote educational programs that YUAG was organizing, and said that they have been thinking about not only how to best design them but also how to best share them with people. Through the survey, we were able to paint a clearer picture of the kinds of content that our clients considered valuable in this moment in time, and their concerns regarding the delivery of the content.
“in terms of the present moment, we have a lot of material related to Black history and to examples of organizing for social change”
We included a section in the survey in which we outlined some of the important points that were brought up during the interview, asking the clients to clarify or add anything they deemed necessary. We were able to gain more detailed information from each client, and clearly identify their goals and challenges. Melissa Barton, Curator at the Beinecke, agreed that Beinecke finds it challenging to create a consistent and sustainable community engagement program to serve K-12 students. Jennifer Reynolds-Kaye, Educator from the Academic Outreach department at YCBA, also brought up in the client interview that YCBA’s goal is to create “authentic and reciprocal relationship” with the New Haven community.
Another roadblock that we encountered this week was reaching out to students, parents and caregivers, and educators in New Haven. Two big challenges were to put together contacts of this specific population, and to figure out the legal details of interviewing minors. Jennifer from YCBA and Ming, thankfully, were able to provide us with contacts of students, parents and caregivers, and educators, with which we can conduct focus groups in the coming weeks. In addition, Ming and Dana have put together an Interview Release Form, which we can use when interviewing these individuals, including minors.
During this week, we also started discussing how we will approach the K-12 population, which is a broad and diverse age group. Daniel Fitzmaurice, the Executive Director of Arts Council of Greater New Haven, suggested that we try to bridge the generational gap by designing a program in which we compensate high school students for mentoring younger students and helping with the program. Considering that a lot of high school students will be out of work this summer, Daniel thought that this would be a good incentive and work experience for high school students interested in visual art. Another option that we have been discussing is to focus on a smaller age group. “One size does not fit all,” said Molleen from YUAG, regarding the K-12 population. With this in mind, our team is still in the process of assessing how we can best handle the diversity of the K-12 age group.
Breakthroughs:
One of our team’s biggest breakthroughs came during our team meeting on Thursday. We pulled thirty keywords from our initial interview with our clients to try to get a broad sense of how they described their ambitions for themselves and this project. Our mentor Brittany Bland suggested we group these words in threes to see what unusual pairings might emerge. The exercise, which yielded phrases such as ‘mobile social picnic’ and ‘community art march,’ helped us to broaden our thinking about what the end product might be.
For this same team meeting, we each agreed to bring a couple of sketches to begin brainstorming in a more concrete manner (Figure. 5). Among the concepts presented were: an ice cream truck delivering not desserts but art, an exquisite corpse exercise split amongst different neighborhoods in New Haven, educational installations at bus stops, a design for a pavilion with a flexible interior, and an online art repository for generating physical posters around town.
These two exercises in tandem helped us to think about potential directions for design concepts, which we will continue to develop next week. Daniel, himself a parent of school-aged children, encouraged us to think about how we can engage different groups in the community at all stages of the project, as well as the fact that students have lost much of the social aspects of making art during the pandemic — meaning that it’s more difficult for students to share and discuss the artwork they have made with one another while learning from home. Listening to Daniel’s perspective and those of our other collaborators has helped to grease the wheels, and we will continue to consult with them as we move forward.
Next Steps:
Going into our third week of Design Brigade, our team will mainly be working towards a midterm check-in meeting with our clients. In this meeting, we will be sharing with them the results of our community outreach to date, including important takeaways and recurring themes gathered from our surveys and interviews. We will also be presenting our initial designs for how our clients might offer their resources and educational programming to K-12 students in New Haven. These designs are in no way final, but will be an initial opportunity to share our team’s ideas and receive feedback.
To this same principle of design as a dynamic process of constant communication and collaboration between designers and various stakeholders, next week our team will continue to promote our surveys and set up interviews with key members of the New Haven community. More specifically, we will be following up with neighborhood residents who have indicated on our CMT survey that they would like to be in further dialogue. Furthermore, members of our team will be attending upcoming online CMT meetings, in order to learn more about what’s going on around New Haven in general. Transparency around our evolving designs and process is essential to our success.
One group of stakeholders that our team has yet to engage with are actual K-12 students. The past couple of weeks we have been strategizing how best to approach this critical group, and have settled on a quick and easy survey that students, their parents/caregivers, and/or educators can fill out. We will be utilizing our personal channels to send out the survey this coming week, and hope to get a wide breadth of results. Finally, we will also be working this next week to set up a small focus group of elementary-school students and their parents in order to gain more specific feedback on our designs.
Team:
Cat Wentworth — ’22 — Grad Student — MFA, Graphic Design — School of Art
Matthew Liu — ’20 — Grad Student — MArch — School of Architecture
Soomin Kim — ’21 — Grad Student — School of Music
Robert Skoronski — ’21 — Undergrad Student — Architecture Major
Kayley Estoesta — ’21 — Undergrad Student — Urban Studies Major
