Tools for reflexivity in meaningful collaborations: Timeline Mapping and Reflections Mapping techniques for retrospective analysis
By Hayley Ho and Kateryna Pereverza
This story is the second in the series “Meaningful collaborations for systems transformations”. In this story we share two approaches we developed for retrospective analysis of a university course — timeline mapping and reflections mapping. We also discuss potential benefits of implementing retrospective analysis in a participatory way with involvement of students and societal partners.
While retrospective analysis is considered a common practice in the areas of product and service design or software development, it is rarely carried out in a systematic way for university courses. In our collaboration around the course “Transdisciplinary Approaches for Systems Innovations” we got the rare opportunity to conduct a full scale retrospective analysis of its design. This took us about two months after the course ended in the middle of March 2020. After exploring approaches for retrospective analysis, we developed two techniques for analysing the course design: timeline mapping and reflections mapping.
Timeline mapping
We conducted a retrospective analysis for the entire time of our collaboration around the course between January and May 2020. Timeline mapping emerged as one of our central approaches. When building a timeline, we created two layers in the retrospective analysis — one focused on the evolution of our internal collaboration and the second centred around the design and implementation of the seminars. The timeline visualises different events and the interconnections between them. We included our process documentation in the form of notes from the design meetings, scripts of the seminars, and pictures of outcomes produced by the students. When experimenting with remote collaborative tools to support the development of this mapping, we found Miro to be the most suitable.
We started building the skeleton of the timeline by placing the different types of events we had within the course on a timeline in Miro in chronological order. We created specific icons for each type of event.
We identified several types of events that we had during the course. Events within the course were seminars and other learning activities (such as critique session or study visit to Järfälla). Design events included several types of design meetings: whole day meetings, mini-design meetings, finalisation design meetings and final preparations for the seminars. Later in the processes of our collaboration, we added remote reflections as a type of event where we used Zoom to carry out retrospective analysis meetings and a Process analysis workshop — an event we organised to get students’ input and perspectives on the course design.
On the first layer of the timeline focusing on our internal collaboration, we populated the timeline with documentation we collected during the course. This included for example, pictures of the notes we took during our design meetings and sketches of the design of facilitation techniques and seminars.
On the second layer related to the course design, we added information related to the activities of the seminars and outcomes. We listed various facilitation techniques used in the seminars and analysed them in relation to their potential contribution to students learning of transformative skills (read more about this in Story 3 of this series).
For both layers, we added arrows to different parts of the timeline to show links that we observed. Our discussions revealed that so many different parts of the timeline were interconnected in some way, so for the sake of clarity, we limited ourselves to only mapping the strongest connections.
Reflections mapping
Timeline mapping was followed by reflections mapping which encompassed the analysis of the two layers, associated documentation and interconnections between the events. We started noting our reflections from the very beginning of timeline mapping and kept on adding them during the entire process. After the timeline was finalised we went for another iteration of reflections and worked to cluster them. This resulted in identification of several key themes and building a map of their relations to specific observations. Many of these themes became central for the development of this publications series.
Reflections on the retrospective analysis for university courses
Both timeline mapping and reflections mapping are flexible approaches and can be easily adjusted, for example by choosing what aspects to highlight in relation to each event, how many layers to include, or what kind of additional information about interconnections and specifics of the events to visualise. Miro served as a tool to realise both techniques and allowed, among other features, for the integration of external documents such as Google Documents and drawing.
Timeline mapping helped us, for example, to explore consistency of the course design by analysing connections between various activities. Already in this edition of the course we often designed seminars by starting a new one with a wrap up of the last exercise from the previous study event. This is particularly important for helping students to quickly return to the topic and spirit of the course after a time between study events.
It is worth noting here, that the course was designed following a responsive approach based on feedback loops from students and course partners. This means that a smaller retrospective analysis was embedded into every design meeting. We are going to share more about our approach to responsive design in Story 5 of this series. Yet, the full-scale retrospective analysis at the end of the course revealed new possibilities for improving consistency of its design.
Another aspect that the retrospective analysis highlighted to us is that it is impossible to create a comprehensive picture of a transdisciplinary course like ours without integrating perspectives of all its participants and partners. A fully participatory way of implementing such an analysis to include the perspective of the participants would be extremely beneficial but would require even more time and resources. We were lucky enough to get input from a group of students who volunteered to take part in a Process analysis workshop in the middle of April, three weeks after end of the course. Together, we identified the crucial role of alignments and diverse group dynamics for the learning environment in the course. The workshop also resulted in the initiation of regular online meet-ups for discussing challenges of meaningful collaborations in the context of systems transformations.
In one of these sessions we shared our timeline mapping and reflection mapping process with students. If not due to time and other limitations, inviting them to map their processes to integrate with ours could be a step towards adding more layers into the analysis. In turn, such a collaborative analysis of a course could open up for the possibility to further improve its design and align it with students' needs. Perhaps embedding collaborative retrospective analysis in university courses could be a way to trigger transformative changes of educational systems.
This story is the second in the publication series “Meaningful collaborations for systems transformations”. Check the introductory story in which we launch the series and introduce upcoming stories. Read our next story Meaningful collaborations for transformative systems change: Design for learning of transformative skills.
