Day 2 - Topics, Activities, and Materials

As part of my own outreach into the broader world, I decided to post something about our course experiment and experience. I took a picture of the class in action on Day 1, and posted it to LinkedIn. I admit to being surprised by the attention it received.

The extent of the reaction seemed like a lot to me! I think that it shows how people are looking for opportunities to engage in exciting and meaningful work, and the idea of participatory design as an element of it captures people’s imaginations.

I shared this reaction. One students remarked, “Wow, we went viral on LinkedIn.” Indeed. I’m not sure what constitutes ‘viral on LinkedIn,” but there seemed to be a lot of interest in what we were doing. The students appeared excited about this reaction, like they were now doing something important and of note. It was interesting how quickly we went from students taking an elective, to students involved in a larger mission.

The goals for the second day of the course was to get students to provide the following information to help co-design the course:

-What topics do you want to cover in the course?

-What assignments/activities best facilitate your learning?

-From what types of materials do you best learn?

The same method what we used on Day 1 was going to be used on Day 2 as well:

1. Break the students up into groups of 5 or 6

2. Give the group large sheets of presentation paper to write on

3. Have them as a group come up with answers to those questions (10 minutes or so)

4. Put the sheets on the walls

5. Give the students adhesive dots for voting

6. Have the student walk around and vote on what answers most resonate with them.

7. Discuss as a group

Topics

A wide-range of topics were generated, which in some ways was and was not surprising. There is a lot of terrain that you can cover in a course like ‘criminal and social justice.’ It is meant to be a survey course of sorts, examining a broad swath of area. That said, the topics that far and away had the greatest enthusiasm were as follows:

• Celebrity Criminals (OJ, Epstein, Aaron Hernandez, etc)- 18 votes

• Serial Killers - 18 votes

• Discrimination - 9 votes

• Prison system - 7 votes

• Social systems in prisons - 7 votes

• Media portrayals (tv, movies) - 6 votes

• Undercover operations - 6 votes

Again, this is not a complete list. A total of 32 different general topics were proposed. I did some collapsing and reframing to pull together common topics. It did show that students did have some general understanding of various topics that I would have covered anyway. However, those that provided the most excitement were those that were the most sensational.

But even within the sensational, there are elements that can be pulled out to highlight more ‘traditional’ criminal justice themes. Can we walk about social class and race in talking about OJ and Jeremy Epstein? Can we talk about white privilege while talking about Ted Bundy? Can we talk about LGBTQ safety issues while talking about Jeffrey Dahmer? Cults and the Manson family? Use television and movies to present topics?

Activities

I was very interested what students said regarding what are the best activities to facilitate their learning. Again, there were some interesting responses:

• Watching movies and television shows - 15 votes

• Exercise – making a crime - 15 votes

• Games and competitions - 15 votes

• Mock trials - 8 votes

• Interview people - 4 votes

20 different types of activities were recommended, some traditional (reflection papers, presentations, class discussion) and some unique (content analysis of social media public comments, and role playing scenarios). While almost anything in theory can sound like a good assignment, whether or not they connected with the students depended on their design. For that, I was going to rely on the students as well, as I am going to have them help design the actual assignments. However, they didn’t know that yet.

Materials

Finally, I was interesting in hearing what materials they found most effective at transmitting information to them. The traditional academic approach is reading books and articles. ‘This generation’ has been said to not read. Nothing could be further from the truth. They are constantly reading; they are just reading their phones. But in a multi-media age, is reading the best method? Reading what exactly? And what type of reading? Or not reading at all?

The students provided some interesting responses again, perhaps surprising or not:

• Guest speakers - 21 votes

• Debate - 17 votes

• TV and movies - 16 votes

• Prison pen pals - 12 votes

• Games - 12 votes

Not surprisingly, textbooks did not factor significantly into the final results (in fact, there were some “no textbooks” votes). I have to admit to being surprised at “Prison pen pals” as an idea raised by the students, and strongly endorsed. Additionally, “Debate” was surprisingly as well. I thought of these students being generally conflict adverse, not wanting to engage in debate in the classroom. Here they were telling me the opposite. It might be the case that they find the idea of debate more attractive than actually doing it. But once again, it was their voice in the votes, and provided some interesting ideas for development.

Lessons

• Don’t be afraid to ask the obvious-sounding question. It might sound odd to ask student what topics they want to cover in a course that is defined by a topic, but you don’t know what interesting takes on that topic they might have.

• Don’t be automatically dismissive of ideas. In design thinking, we will adopt a “How might we” orientation during the divergence phase of brainstorming. “How might we use games to talk about prison social systems?” “How might we use creating criminal activities to talk about social justice?” “How might we combine debate and competitions to explore celebrity criminals?”

• Don’t be worried about losing time in the semester. We had just used up one week of the course, and do not yet have a syllabus with set assignments. For many, this might be terribly alarming to not have the semester mapped out. However, the excitement generated by the students was more than making up for the lack of clarity on the next 15 weeks.

• Trust the process. In reality, there is not a set process here. However, the approach is rooted in participatory design approaches and activities. The faculty member has to be willing to move into a discomfort zone in order to create an environment and exploration.