Marianne Kinnula, Netta Iivari, Leena Kuure, Tonja Molin-Juustila
9 min
This paper explores the application of Educational Participatory Design (EPD) as a transdisciplinary approach to transform work practices in education. The authors investigate how EPD can be used to prepare future professionals—specifically student teachers—to navigate the digital transformation of their field. By positioning student teachers as designers and their pupils as users, the study aims to move beyond traditional, print-oriented pedagogical models toward a more active, technology-mediated future.
The researchers conducted a master’s level course for English language student teachers in Finland. The course required students to design an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) project for 11–13-year-old schoolchildren. The authors utilized a transdisciplinary framework, combining Participatory Design (PD) with language teacher education, and employed nexus analysis to understand the complex, multi-layered contextual factors shaping the project. The goal was to foster 'design agency,' allowing students to critically reflect on and shape the future of their profession.
The study demonstrates that while EPD provides a powerful framework for encouraging students to envision new work practices, its successful implementation is deeply affected by institutional and historical factors. The authors identify a 'clash of agendas' where university credit requirements, school timetables, and the deeply ingrained habits of traditional classroom teaching created significant barriers to genuine, long-term participation. Despite these challenges, the authors argue that EPD belongs to the core expertise of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) research. They suggest that CSCW researchers should take a more active role in orchestrating these transdisciplinary processes to better equip future professionals for the digital age.
Some level of digital technology design skills and competencies is important in any profession but in their education and work life this is often ignored. We explore the potential of Educational Participatory Design (EPD) in transforming work practices within diverse disciplines. This is done through a transdisciplinary case where EPD was used as an approach for transforming language teacher education seen to respond too slowly to technological advancements in society and work life. Based on our findings, we propose EPD as a useful approach for building the design agency of future professionals with various disciplinary and professional backgrounds. In the context of real-life work practice with students as future workers, EPD invites them to act as 'designers' envisioning novel practices and technologies for their own work, engaging their 'users' in the PD processes. EPD as a novel methodological approach integrates design with work practice learning and education and therefore, we suggest, belongs to the core expertise of CSCW research and design interested in the digital transformation of work practices.
Sam: Were the children supposed to help teach the students what worked, or actually help design future learning?
Alex: Both, but the second ambition was crucial. The student teachers were meant to learn from working with children and support them in imagining future language use. Afterwards, those experiences and ideas were supposed to inform concepts for future language learning.
Sam: That makes the return from school important. The children’s contribution has to survive into the final design, not disappear after the workshop.
Alex: And that is where the process broke down. The student teachers generally created activities that encouraged children to use English. But they focused less on helping children become partners in envisioning future practices, and did not use the children’s ideas to refine their final concepts.
Sam: Before we judge that failure, how much opportunity did the student teachers have to build those partnerships?
Alex: Not much. A researcher surveyed the children before the university course began, when student teachers could not yet participate. During the course, conflicting schedules, travel difficulties, and workload limits restricted contact. Continued collaboration was encouraged, but it was not built firmly into the course structure.
Sam: So participation was an aspiration layered onto a schedule that did not reliably make room for it.
Alex: That is supported by the authors’ account. They also acknowledge that their own support should have been stronger. Technology researchers introduced participatory design, but their teaching role was unclear, and other duties limited involvement. Schoolteachers remained mostly observers rather than active planning partners.
Sam: What did work? Otherwise, it could sound as though the course achieved nothing.
Alex: Students readily adopted project-based working methods and built activities around children’s interests. They adjusted their teaching when they saw how children responded. The researchers judged mutual learning reasonably successful overall, although limited contact prevented deeper collaboration.
Sam: Those are useful teaching gains. But did students become better able to imagine their profession’s digital future?
Alex: The authors describe progress in that understanding as marginal, based on students’ talk and reflective writing. Students were fluent technology and social-media users, yet struggled to connect that experience with pedagogical goals. Their own histories as language learners kept pulling their designs toward traditional exercises.
Sam: That suggests the obstacle was not simply unfamiliarity with devices. How did the researchers study those deeper influences?
Alex: They used nexus analysis, an approach examining how histories, relationships, and settings shape action. They repeatedly analysed course documentation, student materials, and their own observations and experiences. Their broader transdisciplinary lens—combining fields and affected people around a shared problem—was applied retrospectively.
Sam: Give me an example where looking beyond the immediate activity changes the explanation.
Alex: The school had open, flexible spaces intended to support modern pedagogy. Yet a brainstorming activity suffered because children lacked privacy to reveal their thoughts. Mixing ages and grade levels also created tensions. A space designed for flexibility could therefore make genuine participation harder.
Sam: The setting could offer more freedom physically while making children less comfortable socially. That complicates any simple story about technology-rich schools.
Alex: The infrastructure created other limits too. Applications available through city funding could not be used in the project because of account-management issues. The authors’ point is that design opportunities depend on institutional arrangements, not just a teacher’s ideas or technical confidence.
Sam: How far should we trust this account? Are we hearing a tested educational method, or researchers making sense of their own difficult course?
Alex: Primarily the latter, alongside a methodological proposal. The excerpt supplies no participant counts and reports no controlled comparison. The study focuses on working processes, not the quality of design outcomes. It cannot establish that this approach improves professional practice more than another course would.
Sam: The researchers also helped run the course. Does the paper explain how it supports their interpretations?
Alex: They describe repeated analysis, both individually and together, over several years. They explicitly acknowledge that not every interpretation can be supported by a data extract. They ground credibility in detailed, critical descriptions and reasoning. I’d read it as evidence about implementation difficulties, not demonstrated effectiveness.
Sam: And extending it to other professions remains a proposal, rather than something this case tested.
Alex: Yes. The authors argue that future professionals across disciplines need a participatory designer stance. But their example is language teacher education. They recommend longer-term education, clearer responsibilities, and more thorough preparation in the philosophy of participation—not just instructions for running activities.
Sam: That philosophy seems to include what happens after meeting users. Their ideas need a route into decisions.
Alex: The conclusion makes that explicit. Designers need guidance to appreciate users’ expertise and carry it into future visions. Users need support too, because their own experiences can limit what they imagine. The authors say one course is insufficient to build this professional stance.
Sam: Who should read the full document, and where should they start?
Alex: Researchers in collaborative work, teacher education, and professional design education. Start with the findings on histories and practices: they explain how schedules, professional habits, and school settings shaped participation. Then read the conclusion for the recommendations on sustained training and using learners’ input.
Sam: And what should everyone else take away?
Alex: Being active in someone else’s activity is not the same as having a voice in its design.
Sam: That distinction is worth carrying into your own projects.