Critical literacy finds a 'place': Writing and social action in a low-income Australian grad 2/3 classroom

In a study of socioeconomically disadvantaged children's acquisition of school literacies, a university research team investigated how a group of teachers negotiated critical literacies and explored notions of social power with elementary children in a suburban school located in an area of high poverty. Here we focus on a grade 2/3 classroom where the teacher and children became involved in a local urban renewal project and on how in the process the children wrote about place and power. Using the students' concerns about their neighborhood, the teacher engaged her class in a critical literacy project that not only involved a complex set of literate practices but also taught the children about power and the possibilities for local civic action. In particular, we discuss examples of children's drawing and writing about their neighborhoods and their lives. We explore how children's writing and drawing might be key elements in developing "critical literacies" in elementary school settings. We consider how such classroom writing can be a mediator of emotions, intellectual and academic learning, social practice, and political activism.

Working on the edge : Exploring the creative tensions experienced by practitioners facilitating participatory media projects with refugees and asylum seekers in Australia

This paper aims to provide a contextualised and embedded exploration of how the notions of "practice" and "participation", key concepts in the study of culture and media, are manifest in an example of a complex creative project. This project aimed to engage with refugees and asylum seekers through the co-creation of cultural material and is an outcome of an? ethnographic action research (Tacchi et al. 2003) partnership involving a community development worker in a settlement support agency and a storytelling/community media researcher (the author), along with other project collaborators. The discussion of this project focuses on the role of the facilitator and illustrates the processes of orchestrating a complex project involving a series of linked stages with cumulative effect. As practitioners at this site we are working in the space where personal narratives, participatory arts and media, and the staging of intercultural, civic dialogue events, intersect. Co-creative media facilitation in these contexts involves both managing hybrid communicative spaces and (re)combining the "integrative practices" (Schatzki 1996) of a range of professional approaches and creative roles. This is liminal work, located on the boundaries of several disciplines and practices. Drawing on reflections gathered from collaborative ethnographic descriptions (Bhattacharya 2008), this paper traces moments of practitioner uncertainty that can be linked to the way "practice" and “participation” is problematised within the community cultural development field in a way that is at times an uneasy fit with conventional ways of operating in social service roles. These moments of tension also indicate where this project pushed practitioners into spaces of improvisation and new learning. Keywords: Youth, refugees, community cultural development, co-creative media facilitation, ethnographic action research, intercultural dialogue.

Vote as you go : Blending interfaces for community engagement into the urban space

This paper presents a series of studies on situated interfaces for community engagement. Firstly, we identify five recurring design challenges as well as four common strategies used to overcome them. We then assess the effectiveness of these strategies through field studies with public polling interfaces. We developed two very different polling interfaces in the form of (1) a web application running on an iPad mounted on a stand, allowing one vote at a time, and (2) a playful full-body interaction application for a large urban screen allowing concurrent participation. We deployed both interfaces in an urban precinct with high pedestrian traffic and equipped with a large urban screen. Analysing discoverability and learnability of each scenario, we derive insights regarding effective ways of blending community engagement interfaces into the built environment, while attracting the attention of passers-by and communicating the results of civic participation.

Learning experiences for the transition to professional work

A better educated workforce contributes to a more informed and tolerant society with higher economic output, and this is also associated with higher levels of personal health, interpersonal trust and civic and social engagement. Against this backdrop, the role of universities has expanded, as university learning has moved beyond providing an education to preparing students for leadership positions within society. This article examines the effectiveness of final-year learning experiences from the perception of recent graduates. The aim is to improve undergraduate curriculum to facilitate the transition to professional employment. An online quantitative and qualitative survey instrument was developed to investigate graduates’ perceptions of their different learning experiences and assessment types in their senior year. Four hundred and twelve alumni from five universities completed the survey. Our results indicate that graduates value case studies, group work and oral presentations, and that graduates rate lectures and guest lectures from practitioners as the least important in their transition to work. The results validate the use of graduate capability frameworks and mapping the development of the skills over the curriculum. These results are useful for curriculum designers to assist with designing programmes on the transition to professional work.

Projecting the new world city: The city as spectacle in an urban light festival

As a precursor to the 2014 G20 Leaders’ Summit held in Brisbane, Australia, the Queensland Government sponsored a program of G20 Cultural Celebrations, designed to showcase the Summit’s host city. The cultural program’s signature event was the Colour Me Brisbane festival, a two-week ‘citywide interactive light and projection installations’ festival that was originally slated to run from 24 October to 9 November, but which was extended due to popular demand to conclude with the G20 Summit itself on 16 November. The Colour Me Brisbane festival comprised a series projection displays that promoted visions of the city’s past, present, and future at landmark sites and iconic buildings throughout the city’s central business district and thus transformed key buildings into forms of media architecture. In some instances the media architecture installations were interactive, allowing the public to control aspects of the projections through a computer interface situated in front of the building; however, the majority of the installations were not interactive in this sense. The festival was supported by a website that included information regarding the different visual and interactive displays and links to social media to support public discussion regarding the festival (Queensland Government 2014). Festival-goers were also encouraged to follow a walking-tour map of the projection sites that would take them on a 2.5 kilometre walk from Brisbane’s cultural precinct, through the city centre, concluding at parliament house. In this paper, we investigate the Colour Me Brisbane festival and the broader G20 Cultural Celebrations as a form of strategic placemaking—designed, on the one hand, to promote Brisbane as a safe, open, and accessible city in line with the City Council’s plan to position Brisbane as a ‘New World City’ (Brisbane City Council 2014). On the other hand, it was deployed to counteract growing local concerns and tensions over the disruptive and politicised nature of the G20 Summit by engaging the public with the city prior to the heightened security and mobility restrictions of the Summit weekend. Harnessing perspectives from media architecture (Brynskov et al. 2013), urban imaginaries (Cinar & Bender 2007), and social media analysis, we take a critical approach to analysing the government-sponsored projections, which literally projected the city onto itself, and public responses to them via the official, and heavily promoted, social media hashtags (#colourmebrisbane and #g20cultural). Our critical framework extends the concepts of urban phantasmagoria and urban imaginaries into the emerging field of media architecture to scrutinise its potential for increased political and civic engagement. Walter Benjamin’s concept of phantasmagoria (Cohen 1989; Duarte, Firmino, & Crestani 2014) provides an understanding of urban space as spectacular projection, implicated in commodity and techno-culture. The concept of urban imaginaries (Cinar & Bender 2007; Kelley 2013)—that is, the ways in which citizens’ experiences of urban environments are transformed into symbolic representations through the use of imagination—similarly provides a useful framing device in thinking about the Colour Me Brisbane projections and their relation to the construction of place. Employing these critical frames enables us to examine the ways in which the installations open up the potential for multiple urban imaginaries—in the sense that they encourage civic engagement via a tangible and imaginative experience of urban space—while, at the same time, supporting a particular vision and way of experiencing the city, promoting a commodified, sanctioned form of urban imaginary. This paper aims to dissect the urban imaginaries intrinsic to the Colour Me Brisbane projections and to examine how those imaginaries were strategically deployed as place-making schemes that choreograph reflections about and engagement with the city.

Local Commons: A visual approach to collective city making through situated community engagement

Due to the numerous possibilities of voicing concerns and the flood of data we are exposed to, local issues are sometimes at risk of being overlooked. This study explores Local Commons, a design intervention in public space that combines situated digital and tangible media in order to engage communities in contributing and debating different perspectives on a given local issue. The intervention invited the community to submit images of their perspectives on the issue, which were displayed on a public screen. Via tangible buttons in front of the screen, community members then agree or disagree on the displayed perspectives, creating a space for deliberation. In a user study, we were specifically interested in testing three aspects of our intervention, which are discussed in this paper: The difference that situatedness, visual content, and tangible interaction can make to urban community engagement.

Exploring the Potential to Educate “Good Citizens” through the Australian Civics and Citizenship Curriculum.

This chapter examines the ways in which notions of ‘a good citizen’ and ‘civic virtue’ have been conceptualized in the new Civics and Citizenship Curriculum for students in Years 3 – 10 in Australia. It argues that whilst Civics and Citizenship Education (CCE) has, over time and in various ways, been recognized as a significant aspect of Australian education, only recently has attention been given to the relational and multidimensional conceptions of citizenship. Considerations of ‘morality’, ‘a good citizen’ and ‘civic virtue’ offer possibilities to engage with multidimensional notions of citizenship, which acknowledge that citizenship perspectives can be affected by personal, social, spatial and temporary situations (Cogan & Derricott, 2000). In the current statement on national goals for schooling in Australia, which informed the development of CCE, the Melbourne Declaration (MCEETYA, 2008) called for young Australians to be educated to “act with moral and ethical integrity” and be “committed to national values of democracy, equity and justice, and participate in Australia’s civic life” (MCEETYA, 2008, pp. 8–9). The chapter claims that this maximal emphasis (McLaughlin, 1992), based on active, values based and interpretive approaches to democratic citizenship which encourage debate and participation in civil society, was evident in the new Civics and Citizenship Curriculum. However, it contends that the recommendations of the recent Review of the Australian Curriculum: Final report (Australian Government, 2014a & b), will now limit CCE’s potential to deliver the sort of active and informed citizenship heralded by the Melbourne Declaration. This is because the Review advocates for a content-focused minimal (McLaughlin, 1992) emphasis on civic knowledge, with diminished attention to citizenship participation and processes. In doing so, the Review foregrounds conceptions of the ‘good citizen’ in more limited terms of responsibility, obligations and compliance with the status quo.

Gamifying collective intelligence for the common good

The rise of the mobile internet enables the creation of applications that provide new and easier ways for people to organise themselves, raise issues, take action and interact with their city. At the same time, society faces new problems that can only be solved when citizens work together. Nevertheless, a lack of motivation or knowledge often prevents many citizens from regularly contributing to the common good. In this position paper, we present DoGood – a mobile app – as a socio-technological system that aims at supporting the collective intelligence of citizens in their pursuit of civic engagement and civic collaboratories. Our study asks to what extent gamification can motivate users to “do good” deeds. The DoGood app uses gamified elements to encourage citizens to submit and promote their civic activities as well as to join the activities of others. Gamification is sometimes criticised for simply adding a limited number of game elements, such as leaderboards, on top of an existing experience with the hope of increasing motivation. However, in the case of the DoGood app, the process of game design was an integral part of the development, and the gamified elements target the user’s intrinsic motivations instead of providing them with an external reward. In this paper, we present design elements of the app and discuss their potential to support collective intelligence for the common good.

Smart Cities, Social Capital, and Citizens at Play: A Critique and a Way Forward

Digital transformations are not contained within the digital domain but are increasingly spilling over into the physical world. In this chapter, we analyse some of the transformations undergoing in cities today towards becoming smart cities. We offer a critique of smart cities and a way forward, divided into three parts: First, we explore the concept of Smart Citizens in terms of both localities, the move towards a hyperlocal network and also the citizen’s role in the creation and use of data. We use the ‘Smart London’ plan drawn up by the Mayor of London, as a way to illustrate our discussion. Second, we turn to the civic innovations enabled by digital transformations and their potential impact on citizens and citizenship. Specifically, we are interested in the notion of social capital as an alternative form of in-kind currency and its function as an indicator of value, in order to ask, can digital transformations give rise to ‘civic capital,’ and how can such a concept help, for instance, a local government invite more representative residents and community champions to participate in community engagement for better urban planning. Third, we introduce a hybrid, location-based game under development by design agency Preliminal Games in London, UK. This illustrative case critiques and highlights the current challenges to establishing a new economic model that bridges the digital / physical divide. The game provides a vehicle for us to explore how established principles and strategies in game design such as immersive storytelling and goal setting, can be employed to encourage players to think of the interconnections of their hybrid digital / physical environments in new ways.

Democratic and participatory citizenship: Youth action for sustainability in Australia

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical analysis of recent examples of action competence among young people engaged in democratic participatory action in sustainability programs in Australia. It explores examples of priorities identified for citizen action, the forms this action takes and the ways that democratic participation can achieve positive outcomes for future sustainability. It suggests multiple ways for developing action competence that provides further opportunities for authentic and engaging citizen action for youth connected to school- and community-based learning, in new and powerful ways. Design/methodology/approach – This conceptual paper examines international literature on the theory of “action competence,” its significance for education for sustainability (EfS) and the ways it can inform education for young people’s democratic participatory citizenship and civic engagement. It analyses examples of the development of action competency among young people in Australia, including the problems and priorities identified for citizen action, the forms this action takes and how it can achieve positive outcomes for sustainability. Following this analysis, the paper suggests multiple ways for developing action competence in EfS in schools and communities in new and powerful ways. Findings – Developing EfS to increase democratic and participatory action among young citizens is now widely regarded as an urgent education priority. There are growing exemplars of school and community organizations’ involvement in developing EfS learning and teaching to increase participatory citizenship. Young people are being empowered to develop a greater sense of agency through involvement in programs that develop action competence with a focus on sustainability in and out of school. New forms of participation include student action teams and peer collaboration among youth who are marshaling social media and direction action to achieve change. Originality/value – It contributes to the literature on multiple ways for developing action competence in EfS.

Community Service Charities

Using the first Annual Information Statements (AIS) filed with the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC), this factsheet describes community service charities that are based in QLD. They have been selected from charities that have a main activity of either aged care activities; civic and advocacy activities; economic, social and community development; emergency and relief; employment and training; housing activities; income support and maintenance; law and legal activities; mental health and crisis intervention; or social services.

Envisaging change: Supporting grassroots efforts in Colombia with agonistic design processes

Design has become increasingly engaged with bringing about social change. Shifting domains and perspectives to conflict stricken contexts yield opportunities to explore emerging forms of design that enable the expression and articulation of difference in productive ways, which can contribute positively to efforts related to civic issues and struggles in urban settings from developing countries. We explore the recently developed notion of Adversarial Design to support the integration of diverging perspectives and grassroots voices in the design process. This paper presents the findings and design insights from our study with two grassroots organisations in Bogota, Colombia. We present three themes that expose ways in which conflict motivates bringing about change, the importance of the social and physical features of the urban landscape, and the way in which social change acts as catalyst for acquiring new knowledge. To finalise, we discuss two design areas and how design could be used to integrate dissimilar worldviews.

Young people and urban public space in Australia-creating pathways to community, belonging and inclusion

Cities and urban spaces around the world are changing rapidly from their origins in the industrialising world to a post-industrial, hard wired surveillance landscape. This kind of monitoring and surveillance connects with attempts by civic authorities to rebrand urban public spaces into governable and predictable arenas of consumption. In this context of control, a number of groups are excluded from public space, such as some children and young people. This article discusses the surveillance, governance and control of public space environments used by children and young people in particular, and the capacity for their ongoing displacement and marginality, as well as possible greater inclusion.

From users to citizens: Some thoughts on designing for polity and civics

This paper presents an essay aimed at prompting broad discussion crucial in keeping the interaction design discourse fresh, critical, and in motion. We trace the changing role of people who have advanced from consumers to producers, from stationary office workers to mobile urban nomads, from passive members of the plebs to active instigators of change. Yet, interaction designers often still refer to them only as ‘users.’ We follow some of the historic developments from the information superhighway to the smart city in order to provide the backdrop in front of which we critically analyse three core areas. First, the issue of echo chambers and filter bubbles in social media results in a political polarisation that jeopardises the formation of a functioning public sphere. Second, pretty lights and colourful façades in media architecture are increasingly making way for situated installations and interventions fostering community engagement. And third, civic activism is often reduced to forms of slacktivism. We synthesise our discussion to propose ‘citizen-ability’ as an alternative goal for interaction designers to aspire to in order to create new polities and civics for a better quality of life.

Situated interfaces for engaging citizens on the go

Insights Live screening and playfulness of the interactive space can be effective strategies for attracting the attention of passers-by and turn them into active participants. While urban screen interfaces increase participation by encouraging group interaction, privately-oriented tangible user interfaces give people a longer time to reflect upon their answers.