03/23/2025
By Zakkiyya Witherspoon
The School of Education invites you to attend a Doctoral Dissertation defense by Bernardo Abarcar Feliciano titled “Organizing Co-design with Collaborative One-on-Ones in a Computer Science Education Researcher-Practitioner Partnership."
Date: Wednesday, April 2, 2025
Time: 11 a.m.
Location: Coburn Hall, Room 140
Or by Zoom
Committee
Chair: Hsien-Yuan Hsu, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Research and Evaluation in Education, School of Education, UMass Lowell
Fred Martin, Ph.D., Professor, Computer Science, University of Texas San Antonio
Stacy Szczesiul, Ed.D., Associate Dean and Associate Professor, College of Fine Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, UMass Lowell
Abstract
In the United States, political, business, and educational leaders have recognized groupings of people who are under-represented in computing as an academic discipline and industry. Computer science educators have framed the problem as a need to broaden participation in computing. Educators, policymakers and funders have framed broadening participation in computing as an ill-structured problem or domain.
This kind of problem complexity can be thought of as a state of unavoidable dynamic heterogeneity. Research drawing on the work of H. A. Simon suggests that ill-structured problems require problem-solving approaches specifically structured to manage dynamic heterogeneity. Aimed at broadening participation in computing in the United States, a National Science Foundation grant supported the enactment of researcher-practitioner partnerships as effective approaches to addressing ill-structured problems.
In response to the grant, researchers representing two public universities and teachers and school leaders from three districts formed the Computer Science Pathways Researcher-Practitioner Partnership (CS Pathways). CS Pathways partners contributed to broadening participation in computing by collaborating to co-design and establish a mobile apps development curriculum in participating district schools. Researcher-practitioner partnerships use a collaborative research approach to address the dynamic heterogeneity of broadening participation in computing. However, enacting collaboration presents its own challenges involving dynamic heterogeneity or ill-structuredness. CS Pathways partners’ experiences in its second year illustrate those challenges, as well as how partners addressed them by using an adapted business management practice called collaborative one-on-one meetings.
This autoethnographic study investigates how teacher leaders and I as a CS Pathways researcher used collaborative one-on-ones. I analyze how we used them to: 1) pursue the co-design purposes of developing a curriculum and supporting the professional learning of teacher leaders to enact it; and 2) develop three principles of researcher-practitioner partnership functioning suggested by the literature: politicized trust, mutuality, and data agency. The study examines selected collaborative one-on-one meetings I had with six co-designing teachers. I use a synthesis of actor-network theory and sense-making perspectives to describe our collaborative work as jointly identifying and negotiating alignments and problematizations of our dynamically heterogeneous interests, influences, and interpretations of various human and non-human actors. I present CS Pathways co-design as a dynamic network of associations among human and non-human actors emerging from co-designers’ understandings of and interactions with other actors. The actors are also affected by the emerging network.
The chief findings of this study are that: 1) collaboration within contexts like CS Pathways co-design and researcher-practitioner partnerships present dynamic heterogeneity of interests, influences, and interpretations characteristic of ill-structured domains; 2) collaborative one-on-ones can be a tool for co-designers, researchers and practitioners to negotiate dynamic heterogeneity to develop affordances for teaching and support teacher professional learning; and 3) collaborative one-on-ones facilitated CS Pathways co-designers in enacting two of three researcher-practitioner partnership principles: developing politicized trust and mutuality. Although co-designers did not fully enact a third principle, data agency, my analysis suggests that collaborative one-on-ones can contribute to developing data agency. This study presents a tool and perspective, namely collaborative one-on-ones and ANT-Sense, for organizing collaborative approaches to ill-structured problems.