Asking questions, exploring, and starting to think about solutions

This week we were able to interview a number of parents, former students, administrators, and a few Black teachers. It’s been a great challenge to explore this problem space and we were especially excited to do some more in-person research this week.

Field Research

Tour of partner schools

We were able to get out of our offices by organizing a small tour of the partner schools FAME has connections with in the Pittsburgh area. We wanted to get a sense of what sort of neighborhood each school was located in, what the scale of the schools were, and how their campuses may change the culture at those schools.

We visited five of FAME’s pPartner schools on our trip: Winchester Thurston, St. Edmund’s Academy, the Ellis School, the Neighborhood Academy, and Shady Side Academy.

It was a surprise to see how much each school varied in size — St. Edmund’s, for example, was in the heart of Squirrel Hill and was pretty close to a hub of activity at Murray Avenue. The school itself was only one story tall and relatively small. The high school division of Shady Side Academy, on the other hand, was enormous and sprawled across a campus that was sequestered in a forest.

“since we weren’t allowed to take photos, it pushed us to visually try to encapsulate important descriptions of the schools. For example, I tried to focus on the number of cars in the drive way, the spaciousness of the location, if there was anyone walking around, what kinds of signs/posters were up. I think these details can reveal cultural truth to the schools.” — Leanne Liu

Virtual Lunch

Later in the week, we also partook in a virtual lunch with the majority of FAME’s Staff. This was a fun event since it was the first time we were able to meet the whole team. We discussed insights from our research with them and were able to hear their thoughts about what we were doing.

It was exciting to have the entirety of FAME’s staff in one place and although the lunch was virtual, it still set a good rapport so that by the end, we felt confident in beginning another trajectory of our research — scheduling interviews with each of FAME’s staff members.

Meeting FAME for a Fireside Chat

Moving on, last Thursday night, we were excited to be invited by FAME to attend the event “Building the Black Teacher Pipeline in Western PA: A Fireside Chat” at Pittsburgh’s Energy Innovation Center. This was an event by FAME and the Propel Schools’ Teacher Residency program. It was an absolutely amazing night!

Pictures from the “Building the Black Teacher Pipeline in Western PA: A Fireside Chat” event. Panelists included Dr. Crystal Rose-Smith, Dr. Angela Anglin-Taylor, Donnell Wilkins, Darryl T. Wiley of FAME, and Dr. Rhonda Threet

Not only did we learn so much, we also got to meet our contacts from FAME, Lisa and Marion in the flesh!

Our team poses with Marion Key and Lisa Owens from FAME(center).

We were all so excited about the discussion and the people we met afterwards. To debrief on the knowledge we heard from the mouths of Black educators and administrators concerned with diversity in Pittsburgh private schools, the team did a small synthesis activity to pull out important lessons that we heard from the panel and used it in our interpretation session later on in the week.

“One thing I learned about myself from our past week of field research is that I am really excited to get into the world and talk to people with lived experiences within our domain. So many of our team conversations have related to a need for collaboration and communication, and it is energizing to see these patterns emerge across different contexts and quotes from community members.” — Martina Tan

Welcoming FAME to CMU

Finally, we were excited welcome Lisa Owens and Marion Key, two directors from FAME who have been acting as our point of contact, to our lab space at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human Computer Interaction Institute. It was nice to catch up again after seeing them the night before at the fireside chat.

We had Lisa Owens and Marion Key from FAME visit our space and do a problem reframing activity with our team.

During this time, we were able to share some of our research and go through a prioritization activity to make sure both FAME and us had a shared understanding of the problem and goals our project is tackling.

Pretotyping

A pretotype is a design technique that helps designers explore specific solutions or ideas without investing too much time or energy.

Our Pretotype

This week, we’ve been trying to identify what type of pretotype would be the most helpful for us at this stage of our research. We are hoping to create a pretotype that can give us insight into how people in ‘othered’ situations can navigate it with either a foundation of helpful knowledge or through making connections with similar people.

The team walks through a “Crazy 8’s” activity to figure out what pretotype we can make to help us achieve our learning goals.

To do this, our initial proposal is to play an icebreaker Bingo game among a set of about 10 participants where MHCI students are over-represented. A small part of this group (perhaps about 3) will be from other backgrounds. The Bingo board will be filled with things that are easier for people to fill out by meeting MHCI students. This will inevitably make it harder for people from other backgrounds to complete the boards since they may not have the context to know how to successfully fill their Bingo sheet.

What do we want to learn?

During this activity, we will be keeping track of which participants are talking with each other and see how ‘othered’ participants react. Do they try to engage with the MHCI students or with the other outsiders? How successful are they in completing the Bingo game? Our main goal for this activity is to gain insight into our hypothesis that ‘othered’ individuals need more information or connections to thrive in alienating situations.

“[learning about pretotyping] has helped me understand the difference between testing an idea, versus testing to see if this is the right idea, and I am excited to see how we utilize this method throughout our project.” — Marlon Mejia

Feedback on our pretotype

We have since gotten a lot of feedback from our classmates and faculty advisors about the direction of our pretotype. Geoff Kaufman, an associate professor of Human-Computer Interaction here at CMU, also gave us his expertise as a designer who works for social good, often through surprising mediums like games, on the direction of our ‘gamified’ pretotype.

We are still processing the critiques of our pretotype, but here are some ideas we have for adjusting the game so far:

1. We are hoping to get an ‘othered’ group of participants who are not students to further remove them from the context of the majority.
2. We want to look closer at the cheat sheet we will provide participants to see if even providing that is not an ‘othering’ experience.

We are hoping to conduct this activity in the next two weeks.

Synthesis

At the end of this two-week sprint we were finally able to come back together as a team to discuss what we’d learned through another ‘Walk the Wall’ activity.

T o ‘Walk the Wall’ we put up a lot of our concept maps from interviews and other design artifacts and each member took some time to write down thoughts on post it notes. Afterwards, we synthesized all the ideas on to post-its into our insights.

Through this, we pulled out several key insights:

1. “The education system is not designed for people of color” — Black teachers are pressured to assimilate into white-dominated cultures at schools, to avoid losing their jobs or being alienated by non-Black teachers. This was a quote we have heard throughout this month, during conversations and events with our stakeholders.
2. Experience with diversity and diversity training vary among the education community in Pittsburgh — Hearteningly, we found that many partner schools FAME are slightly ahead on this front.
3. Much of teachers’ morale depends on students’ success — Teachers gain a lot of happiness and motivation from students. Along with this, they feel pressure to not ‘fail’ at raising their students into privileged opportunities like higher education
4. There is little transparency between institutions and families — The lack of knowledge and transparency within the education system hinders potential educators from better preparing themselves prior to entering the field. Along with this, people outside of the Black community do not understand the full picture of what FAME is or does, resulting in the organization not having the impact they deserve.

“…conducting so many interviews, it was difficult to keep up with synthesis last week... I found that planning for an in person synthesis session at the end of the week together made it easier for me to look at all our findings in relation to one another.” — Alana Mittleman

Next steps & reflections

Previously we had been casting a wide net to target parents, students, etc. in the Pittsburgh area. Our focus has now become more narrowed as we head into interviews with Black teachers.

At the same time, we are expanding our scope of what defines a Black Teacher. For example, during FAME and Propel school’s fireside chat, we met Dr. Crystal Rose-Smith, who was a Black educator who taught early-career Black educators at Carlow University. This is a promising analogous audience for us to explore how early-career teachers felt about professional development courses and what further support they felt they needed.

For now, we are pushing on with research and also beginning to ideate what possible solutions we can offer with what we know so far.

“This week was a whirlwind! We talked to so many people and my mind is still racing with all that we learned. The new walk the wall activity helped us synthesize our research so far and I want to see how this plays into what we still have to do. Moving forward, I think we are at a good place to really hone in on the people we talk to. It’s exciting!” — Swetha Kannan