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Inclusive or Inflexible: a Critical Analysis of the School Context in Supporting Children's Genuine Participation

Published: 23 October 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Relatively little attention has been paid to discussing what it means when children's participation in technology design is genuine, even though the importance of their participation is emphasized in the literature. School as a context presents multiple challenges but also numerous benefits for working with children. We examine five projects carried out with children in the school context, and critically consider in which respects this context supports genuine participation of children, in which respects it poses challenges for it, and what this implies for technology design with children. We maintain that researchers need to critically examine the goals set for children's participation: whether they are learning- or material outcome-oriented. This significantly affects the choice of the context for projects.

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    NordiCHI '16: Proceedings of the 9th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction
    October 2016
    1045 pages
    ISBN:9781450347631
    DOI:10.1145/2971485
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 23 October 2016

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    Author Tags

    1. Children
    2. genuine participation
    3. school
    4. teacher

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    NordiCHI '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 58 of 231 submissions, 25%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 379 of 1,572 submissions, 24%

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    Cited By

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    • (2024)Our Water Stories: A four-part participatory film method to support children set the agenda for designProceedings of the Participatory Design Conference 2024: Full Papers - Volume 110.1145/3666094.3666100(63-74)Online publication date: 11-Aug-2024
    • (2024)Nurturing the Transformative Agency and Activism of Children Through Digital TechnologyThe Palgrave Handbook of Everyday Digital Life10.1007/978-3-031-30438-5_13(223-244)Online publication date: 13-Feb-2024
    • (2023)"Look at Our Smart Shoe" - a Scalable Online Concept for Introducing Design as Part of Computational Thinking in Grades 1-6Proceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference10.1145/3585088.3589377(222-232)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2023
    • (2021)Fostering Children's Stewardship of Local Nature Through Game Co-designProceedings of the 33rd Australian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3520495.3522702(38-50)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2021
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    • (2020)Zones of participation – a framework to analyse design roles in early childhood education and care (ECEC)CoDesign10.1080/15710882.2020.181266718:2(208-226)Online publication date: 19-Nov-2020
    • (2019)Interaction Order and Historical Body Shaping Children’s Making Projects—A Literature ReviewMultimodal Technologies and Interaction10.3390/mti30400713:4(71)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2019
    • (2019)Teachers' Expected and Perceived Gains of Participation in Classroom Based Design ActivitiesProceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3290605.3300387(1-9)Online publication date: 2-May-2019
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