It Takes a Network to Raise a Child: Improving the Communication Infrastructure of Public Education to Enable Community Cooperation in Young People's Success

Abstract

Background/Context

In this essay, I propose a design research agenda that braids equity research and technology research in education. More specifically, I propose that researchers join educators, youth, families, and community partners in tackling a central challenge for education research today: figuring out how and when low-cost and commonplace technologies, in combination with face-to-face talk and paper, can support necessary communications between the range of supporters who share students, schools, a district and a diverse community. I call such work improving the communication infrastructure of public education. This Essay discusses this research agenda as forged in the OneVille Project, a participatory design research effort engaging people of all ages in exploring the potential of low cost and commonplace technologies (cell phones, computers, free software) for connecting people in youth support efforts in the diverse community of Somerville, MA. In the OneVille Project, educators, parents, young people, and research partners together designed and tested new communication infrastructure, including new data displays for communicating ready/reliable information about young people to educators, students and families, online portfolios for sparking robust communication about the whole student, student-teacher text messaging for affording rapid/routine communication about students’ well-being, and multilingual phone and face-to-face parent networks for enabling far-reaching communications across language and technology barriers.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study

In education, much research suggests that to support young people's talent development, students and the diverse people who share education communities need to communicate information regularly with student support in mind, and to build relationships supporting this communication. But often a support network goes underutilized – like a city at night, with half of the bulbs gone dark. Who in a diverse community needs to communicate what to whom in order to support young people? What barriers prevent such communication? Which channels and habits of communication might enable these necessary communications? Encouraging others to ask such questions in their local school systems is the purpose of this essay.

Research Design

In the OneVille Project, we attempted a key design task in education: testing how, if at all, low-cost and commonplace technologies might enable necessary communications to support young people's success. We found people motivated to improve a specific necessary communication - teachers wanting to view student data more easily or reach absent students; administrators, teachers and students wanting to communicate more about students’ learning interests and lives; parents wanting to communicate across languages - and then shaped specific design projects around these desires.

Conclusions/Recommendations

In the OneVille Project, I came to understand how when educators, youth, and families help design and embed tools and strategies for enabling necessary communications in their own diverse schools and communities, they can make it more normal for ready and reliable, robust, routine and rapid, and far-reaching communications to happen. Technology can't be treated as if it will automatically enable such necessary communications; instead, researchers and school community members need to test which channels, which detailed designs of channels, and which habits and ground rules for using channels enable specific communications necessary for student support.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Atlantic Philanthropies (2012). Race andgender disparities in discipline: A research-to-practice collaborative. Juvenile Justice and Education Stakeholder meetings, Oakland, CA., May 23-24.

Aarons

D. I.

(2009). Leading the charge for real-time data. Education Week, June 3. (online edition).

Boudett

K. P.

, City

, & Murnane

(Eds). (2005). Data wise: A step-by-step guide to using assessment results to improve teaching and learning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

Cochran-Smith

, & Lytle

S. L.

(2009). Inquiry as Stance: Practitioner Research in the Next Generation. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Cohen

G. L.

(2008). Providing Supportive Feedback. In Pollock

(Ed.) Everyday Antiracism: Getting Real about Race in School (pp. 82–84). New York, NY: The New Press.

Darling-Hammond

, Pecheone

, Jacquith

, Schultz

, Walker

, and Wei

R. C.

(2010). Developing an Internationally Comparable Balanced Assessment System That Supports High-Quality Learning. Washington, DC: Educational Testing Service.

Daly

A. J.

(Ed.). (2010). Social Network Theory and Educational Change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

Daly

A. J.

, Moolenaar

N. M.

, Bolivar

J. M.

, & Burke

(2010). Relationships in reform: the role of teachers’ social networks. Journal of Educational Administration, 48(3), 359–391.

Dede

(2005). Why Design-Based Research is Both Important and Difficult. Educational Technology, 45(1), 5–8.

10.

Delpit

(2008). Lessons from Teachers. In Ayers

, Ladson-Billings

, Miche

, & Noguera

P. A.

(Eds.), City Kids, City Schools: More Reports from the Front Row. New York, NY: The New Press, pp. 113–135.

11.

Dewey

(1897). My Pedagogic Creed. School Journal 54, 77–80.

12.

Diamond

J. B.

, & Gomez

(2004). African American Parents’ Orientations toward Schools: The Implications of Social Class and Parents’ Perceptions of Schools. Education and Urban Society 36(4), 383–427.

13.

DuBois

D. L.

, & Rhodes

J. E.

(2006). Youth Mentoring: Bridging science with practice. Journal of Community Psychology, 34, 547–565.

14.

Ferguson

R. F.

(2008). Helping Students of Color Meet High Standards. In Pollock

(Ed.), Everyday Antiracism: Getting Real about Race in School, 78–81. New York: The New Press.

15.

González

, Moll

, & Amanti

(Eds.) (2005). Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities, and Classrooms. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

16.

Grossman

J. B.

, & Bulle

M. J.

(2006). Review of What Youth Programs Do to Increase the Connectedness of Youth with Adults. Journal of Adolescent Health 39, 788–799.

17.

Hattie

(2008). Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement. London: Routledge.

18.

Henderson

A. T.

, Johnson

, Mapp

K. L.

, & Davies

, (2007). Beyond the Bake Sale: The Essential Guide to Family/School Partnerships. New York: The New Press.

19.

Horton

, & Freire

(1990). We Make The Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

20.

Hymes

D. H.

(1972). Models of the Interaction of Language and Social Life. In Gumperz

J. J.

& Hymes

(Eds.), Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication (pp. 35–71). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

21.

Ito

Mizuko

(Ed.). (2009). Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

22.

Jones

, & Yonezawa

(2002). Student Voice, Cultural Change: Using Inquiry in School Reform. Equity and Excellence in Education, 35(3), 245–254.

23.

Jones

, & Yonezawa

(2008). Inviting Students to Analyze their Learning Experience. In Pollock

(Ed.), Everyday Antiracism: Getting Real about Race in School (pp. 212–216). New York, NY: The New Press.

24.

Joseph

(2004). The Practice of Design-Based Research: Uncovering the Interplay Between Design, Research, and the Real-World Context. Educational Psychologist, 39(4), 235–242.

25.

Klimczak

, Li

, Glynn

, & Beckmann

(forthcoming). ePossibilities: The Power of a Grassroots Approach to Student-Curated ePortfolios in an Urban High School. Forthcoming in Barrett

(Ed.), Student-Centered Interactive E-Portfolios in the Cloud.

26.

Lawrence-Lightfoot

(2003). The Essential Conversation: What Parents and Teachers can Learn From Each Other. New York: Random House.

27.

Lin

(2001). Social Capital: A Theory of Social Structure and Action. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

28.

Lin

E. S.

, & Zaff

(2010). Community Collaborations for Change: Lessons Learned and Directions Forward. Unpublished manuscript, America's Promise Alliance, Washington, DC.

29.

Mediratta

, Shah

, & McAlister

(2009). Building Partnerships to Reinvent School Culture: Austin Interfaith. Providence, RI: Annenberg Institute for School Reform.

30.

Mehan

(1996). Beneath the Skin and between the Ears: A Case Study in the Politics of Representation. In Lave

& Chailin

(Eds.), Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context (pp. 241–268). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

31.

Mickelson

R. A.

& Cousins

L. L.

(2008). Informing Parents about Available Opportunities. In Pollock

(Ed), Everyday Antiracism: Getting Real about Race in School (pp. 318–324). New York: The New Press.

32.

Moolenaar

N. M.

, Daly

A. J.

, & Sleegers

P. J. C.

2010. Occupying the Principal Position: Examining Relationships Between Transformational Leadership, Social Network Position, and Schools’ Innovative Climate. Educational Administration Quarterly 46(5), 623–670.

33.

Nieto

(2000). Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural Education. New York: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc.

34.

Noveck

B. S.

(2009). Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

35.

Oakes

, & Rogers

(2006). Learning Power: Organizing for Education and Justice. New York: TC Press.

36.

Penuel

W. R.

, Fishman

B. J.

, Cheng

B. H.

, & Sabelli

(2011). Organizing Research and Development at the Intersection of Learning, Implementation, and Design. Educational Researcher 40(7), 331–337.

37.

Pleasants

(2008). Showing students who you are. In Pollack

(Ed.), Everyday anti-racism: Getting real about race in school (pp. 70–74). New York: New Press.

38.

Pollock

(2004). Colormute: Race Talk Dilemmas in an American School. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

39.

Pollock

(2008). Because of Race: How Americans Debate Harm and Opportunity in Our Schools. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

40.

Pollock

, & Amaechi

(2013). Texting as a Channel for Personalized Youth Support: Participatory Design Research by City Youth and Teachers. In review for publication in the Journal of Learning, Media, and Technology.

41.

Putnam

R. D.

(2001). Community-Based Social Capital and Educational Performance. In Ravitch

& Viteritti

(Eds.), Making Good Citizens: Education and Civil Society. New Haven: Yale University Press.

42.

Reich

B. J.

, Murnane

, & Willett

(2012). The State of Wiki Usage in U.S. K–12 Schools: Leveraging Web 2.0 Data Warehouses to Assess Quality and Equity in Online Learning Environments. Education Researcher, 41(1), 7–15.

43.

Shirky

(2008). Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. New York: Penguin.

44.

Tatum

A. W.

(2008). Toward a more anatomically complete model of literacy instruction: A focus on African American male adolescents and texts. Harvard Educational Review, 78(1), 155–182.

45.

Taveras

, Douwes

, Johnson

, Lee

, & Caspe

(2010, May). New Visions for Public Schools: Using Data to Engage Families. Harvard Family Research Project, FINE Newsletter.

46.

Turkle

(2011). Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books.

47.

Valenzuela

(1999). Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring. Albany: State University of New York Press.

48.

Watkins

(2009). The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

49.

Wilson

(2011, November). Diversity in a Digital Age. Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University.

50.

Yonezawa

, McClure

& Jones

(2012). Personalization and Student-Centered Learning. Students at the Center: Teaching and Learning in the Era of the Common Core. Boston, MA: Jobs for the Future.

51.

Zehr

M. A.

(2011, March). Civil Rights Deal Signals Federal Push for Translation Services. Education Week, 30(3), 8–9.