Co-designing Community-Engaged UX Pedagogy: Acknowledge, Assemble, Amplify, Advocate
a workshop by Heather Noel Turner, Soyeon Lee, Emma Rose
On June 22, 2022, we were excited to host a workshop that brought together over 50 scholars, teachers, and designers to discuss how to community-engaged UX Pedagogy.
Workshop description
In this 90 minute workshop, facilitators and participants worked to co-design teaching materials to support community-engaged user experience (UX) courses. Specifically, we worked together to address the following:
-
- How do we meaningfully, ethically, and respectfully engage community partners?
- How can we design UX courses and assignments that highlight community assets?
We invited participants interested in UX and community-engaged contexts to attend including graduate students, instructors, community partners, program directors, instructional designers, makerspace staff, librarians, and all others interested in joining this coalition. We welcome individuals working in various institutions including two-year, teaching-intensive, HBCUs, Latinx serving institutions, and others with expertise in connecting pedagogy and communities.
Reflection on the workshop
Given the high attendance in the workshop, we sense that there is much interest in the topic of how to do community-engaged projects in UX classes. Based on a pre-workshop survey, we learned that most attendees were instructors and most considered their experience as emerging (51%) when it came to teaching UX Others considered their expertise as proficient (38%) or expert (10%). We also asked participants if they currently teach or plan to teach UX classes that feature community-engaged projects, 59% said yes, 14% aid no, and 24% said maybe.
The workshop was comprised of two activities. The first asked participants to role-play the different stakeholder roles in a potential community-engaged project to understand the opportunities and tensions that arise. The second asked participants to co-design materials to conceive of a new CEUX course both in terms of a model for the course, the instructor role, and learning goals. Attendess were asked to consider the asset based framework of Acknowledge, Assemble, Amplify, and Advocate when designing their classes.
We thank the engaged participants for attending and look forward to doing more work in this space!