Week 2 —Kicking Off Presentation 1
Documentation for IXD Studio II
As we headed closer to the first presentation of the semester, we began brainstorming our areas of interests or more specifically the domains we wanted to hone in on and choose a discipline of focus within the topic of Schools as Community Hubs.
The Territory Map
A clue that led us in the direction of understanding the concept of community hubs was the territory map. The previous week saw us, Team Ahaa put all our ideas of stakeholders on the territory map and this week, we began cleaning it up, bunching and bucketing categories together to craft a map that gave us a sneak peek into what the idea of a community-oriented school looks like.
The map focuses on the topic at hand in the centre, i.e Schools as Community Hubs. Each ring of the Territory Map adds a dimension of the various stakeholders and systems in interaction with the community. People form the most direct stakeholders and owing to the organisational structure in the society, occupy pride of a place as members of the community in direct or indirect association with the schools. Services availed forms the next dimension of the map followed by environments branched as-built or manmade and natural. Policy and Pedagogy oriented systems populate the final dimension of the map, helping us establish the current context of the theme.
How will the stakeholders in Portland’s Vision of the Future play a role in shaping Community Hubs?
Once we had the territory map in place, we tried to draw connections between the vision statements of the graduate portrait, educator portrait and education system portrait to understand the role of the stakeholders.
The big question at hand, however, was to understand the context of the topic in the current scenario and gain insights from the present happening in community schools to take a step towards the future.
Preliminary Research and Case Study Review
An initial look at literature review did the magic of setting the scene of a holistically integrated school. We analyzed various case studies revolving around schools that adopted this model in places like Pittsburgh, Vancouver and the DC area along with a research paper that put forward the idea of schools as hubs of social justice.
Here are some of the insights that we gained from this exercise —
- Community plays a strong role in providing intensive intervention when it comes to holistically developing a student and establishing social equity
- These experimental hubs exist, but they currently struggle with demonstrating the impact of these programs. We predict that this will continue to be a challenge in the near future, in 2020, 2030 and beyond
The Introductory Presentation and Feedback
The feedback we received was to concentrate on one specific area of focus with clarity on whether we as a team were interested in pursuing the role of the community in individualised learning or the role of community as a service integration.
Next Steps
Our next steps would include conducting stakeholder interviews, talking to educators, students and community groups at the Portland Public School along with literature review of specific aspects of the graduate portrait and the educator portrait. Specific insights on the metric parameters to measure inequality in the school would help us understand the current evaluation methods.
