Examine Educational Clichés in Digital Technologies
As we live in the oversaturated digital age, home-school relationships have adapted to omnipresent technologies. Families and schools are connected closely to solve ever-present problems and yet achieve one goal: to accompany children to grow as both a person and a student. This essay looks at ClassDojo and Seesaw to project how technology can assist and impede communication and learning in K-12 education. Due to the complexity of education, solving educational design problems requires designers to profoundly understand context and technology to critically consider how to translate the needs of parents, teachers, and children.
Introduction
Ever since my daughter started kindergarten this year, I have been exposed to various home-school communications on a daily basis. One day I received a report from the kindergarten through their social media platform of the entire class attending a dental visit, and it stated the dental health status of all the children. Most of the children in the class had 0–4 cavities, my daughter had two, but one child’s condition was very alarming, he had thirteen cavity teeth. As a parent, I realized that this was embarrassing for both this child and his parents and a burden on their minds because everyone was aware of his bad habit of not brushing his teeth properly and possibly giving him nicknames. A tool for communication has now triggered cyberbullying.
Children have a long history of behavioral issues in their everyday lives. The complexity of these educational puzzles is merely imposed on us by digital technologies, namely instant transparency and anytime-and-anywhere accessibility; however, it simultaneously offers opportunities for closely looking at the problems. Horst W.J Rittel and Melvin M. Webber defined these problems as wicked problems. (Rittel & Webber, 1973) “There are no ‘solutions’ in the sense of definitive and objective.” Unlike engineering or mathematics problems, societal and design issues are inherently wicked; they are “one-shot” operations that problem-solvers cannot try various runs without penalty, and every implemented solution is consequential. Due to wicked problems’ complicated nature, educational design demands adequate research to understand its complexity to avoid hasty design decisions.
My intention in this study is to closely examine the context and technology applications of home-school relationships through a lens of wicked problems in design and user experience, to critically consider how design may inspire designers to translate the needs into child-centered design.
Background
Wicked Problems
Horst W.J Rittel and his colleague Melvin M. Webber published the “wicked problem” theory in the journal Policy Science in 1973. This theory refers to societal problems as “wicked problems” and asserts that they are more complex than “tame” problems often addressed in science and engineering fields. Rittel and Webber believe that wicked problems can not be defined in a definitive formulation, and “in order to describe a wicked problem in sufficient detail, one has to develop an exhaustive inventory of all conceivable solutions ahead of time.” (Rittel & Webber, 1973) Every wicked problem is unique, and each can be considered a symptom of another problem. That is to say, every public issue we face today must be carefully examined on a case-by-case basis. We need to understand the consequences of these problems and anticipate more conceivable questions. According to Rittel and Webber, “Every solution to a wicked problem is a ‘one-shot operation’; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts significantly.” Unlike solving a science problem, where the problem-solver can try multiple trials without penalty, every solution to a wicked problem is consequential. For instance, an ill-considered curriculum may follow the students into their future lives.
Parent Engagement
For decades, the recognition of the importance of parents’ engagement in education has been growing. It is even more so in K-12 education that is often considered a combination of learning and childcare. Studies show that family engagement plays a significant role in children’s achievements in school and beyond. (e.g. Epstein, 1995; Goodall & Montgomery, 2014; Harris & Goodall, 2008) “[t]he main reason to create such partnerships is to help all youngsters succeed in school and in later life. When parents, teachers, students, and others view one another as partners in education, a caring community forms around students and begins its work.” (Epstein, 1995, p. 82) That is, healthy home-school relationships have the agency to bridge the various aspects of children’s lives; teachers and parents are encouraged to work together for their “shared interest” — to help children grow. Over the years, parental involvement strategies and techniques have evolved from early-stage interactions such as message exchanges, report cards to today’s technology-based channels such as texts, emails, and social media platforms.
Method
This study analyzes ClassDojo and Seesaw — two popular social media platforms focusing on home-school relationships with differentiated inception at behavior management and online learning. Through a lens of education being a one-shot-operation wicked problem, I will evaluate how these technologies facilitate or impede character development and academic performance — the two mainstream yet stereotype criteria emphasized in K-12 education today.
Case Study
Below are brief descriptions of each App before I go into the analysis. Despite the premise that both ClassDojo and Seesaw enable collaboration and communication between parents and teachers by direct messaging, the two social media platforms devote distinct underlying structures since their inception. ClassDojo emphasizes character development while Seesaw concentrates on academic achievements.
ClassDojo
ClassDojo is one of the most popular technologies in education today. According to its website, 95% of all K-8 schools in the US are actively engaged in ClassDojo. With its inception of a single-minded classroom management tool launched in 2011, ClassDojo evolved into a communication and learning social media platform focusing on improving children’s behavior and building close-knit communities. It enables teachers and parents to help children improve their behaviors by allowing teachers to define them by giving (or removing) award points. These so-called “gamification” mechanics of behavior improvement differentiate ClassDojo from other popular educational software. Oberprieler & Leonard advocate that gamification is about using points, badges, and leaderboards to incentivize individual performances or behaviors. (Oberprieler & Leonard, 2015) Ultimately, it creates game-like experiences applied through technology that can potentially impact the ways children engage in learning and behavior change. (Seen in Figure A)
Seesaw
Launched in 2015, Seesaw has quickly become the center of the learning process for over 10 million teachers, students, and their parents, claimed on its website. It offers children opportunities to keep visual study journals and share them with teachers, parents, and fellow classmates. Teachers may grade or critique each journal and engage parents in the learning process. Seesaw’s primary goal is to inspire children in learning and improve academic performance, which is a prevalent measure of success in most education systems today. Willis & Exley suggests, “The teachers at the school selected the app because of its: safety features; icon-driven platform which they considered user-friendly for young children using social media for the first time; and ability to closely connect parents with their child’s learning in the classroom.” (Willis & Exley, 2018) Basically, Seesaw’s child-friendly and content-driven interface keeps children in the center of their portfolio along with teachers and parents. (Figure B)
Findings
To Children: Character Development vs. Academic Performance
Education is essentially complex and esoteric, and solutions are not in definitive formulation and linear. However, character development and academic performance are often juxtaposed in K-12 discourses. If I compare the two notions’ quantification, character development’s measure of success is less tangible than the usual grade-based academic standard.
ClassDojo is potentially a game-changer to transform the ambiguous behavior-related assessments. Williamson asserts these behaviors are “children’s social and emotional skills, or what are variously described as ‘non-cognitive’ or ‘non-academic’ capacities and ‘personal qualities’ such as ‘character,’ ‘grit,’ ‘resilience’ and ‘perseverance.’ ” (Williamson, 2017) ClassDojo visualizes the assessment of characteristics throughout its behavior management features that allow teachers to award Dojo points for displaying appropriate behaviors and skills attributing to the gamification design. (Robacker et al., 2016)(Figure C) Of course, tangible encouragement on alteration and improvements can be more effective and serious for children than colloquial praises. “The use of games and game mechanics has become a popular approach to workplace learning due to the apparent capacity of the approach to increase collaborative problem solving and ‘user’ buy-in.”(Oberprieler & Leonard, 2015) The sticker-looking awards make assessment likable for children rather than other types of reports. Besides, each child may choose a cute-looking Dojo monster as an avatar to represent him/her in the classroom. (Figure D) These fun and cheerful designs endorse the happiness side of education and confirm the company’s pursuit of “Helping every child on Earth get an education they love.”
On the other hand, Seesaw tries to disrupt the traditional result-oriented education system by valuing the thinking process. Instead of just showing the outcomes for most homework, Seesaw enables students to present the entire process by posting videos and photos in their study journals. (Willis & Exley, 2018) Since children know that their originality and creativity are appreciated, it motivates them to find better answers. The journal design also helps children keep their work in one place rather than fragmented places, which can be easy to review the progress and accumulation of learning.
Naturally, when it comes to the topic of K-12 education, most of us will readily agree that education is to shape a child as a good person. Where this agreement usually ends, however, is on the question of whether schools should put character development first or academic accomplishments. Whereas some are convinced that schools’ primary duty is to teach knowledge — academic or cognitive capacities, others maintain that they are obligated to impart social and emotional skills and morals — non-academic or non-cognitive capacities. The differentiated perspectives and divergent design decisions of ClassDojo and Seesaw lead back to the binary cliché debate in education. As an illustration, in Finland, where the predominant culture accepts egalitarianism, the curriculum is deliberately designed without tests and grades in most K-12 schools. They believe competition may do more damage than benefit the children. In contrast, in Oriental cultures such as Japan, Korea, and China, where equal rights and opportunities are absent in society, education systems heavily depend on academic competition, precisely comparing grades. Children are compelled to devote more time to knowledge-intensive studies in their childhood; grades are paramount, and repetitiously determine achievements. It is irrational to compare apples-to-apples without other factors taken into accounts, such as each culture’s underlying social structure and socio-economic status. Hence, it is a formidable challenge to find any definitive solution since each child’s educational trajectory is distinctive and a one-shot operation without experimental runs. (Rittel & Webber, 1973) Different approaches to education will have different effects on a child’s future, and there is no way to measure or verify which is successful by readjusting the approach. Satisfactory performance cannot be replicated; unsatisfactory performance cannot be undone.
Today, it may not be a question of character development and academic performance, which should come first, but how can we harness both prefabricated formulas for children’s bright future? Can we exert technology to cumulate wisdom from divergent or contradictory educational philosophies and methods to envision education?
To Home-School Relationships: Positive Culture vs. Inspiring Environment
If there is a consensus with ClassDojo and Seesaw on understanding educational problems, both platforms recognize the importance of home-school relationships. Conventional wisdom has it that what children have learned in school will likely reflect other life experiences when they come home, vice versa. Grant reminds us, “If education aims to enable children to participate socially, economically, and culturally in the world in which they live, it needs to connect with the rest of their lives.” (Grant, 2011) Epstein complicates matters further when she writes, “The way schools care about children is reflected in the way schools care about the children’s families. If educators view children simply as students, they are likely to see the family as separate from the school. That is, the family is expected to do its job and leave the education of children to the schools. If educators view students as children, they are likely to see both the family and the community as partners with the school in children’s education and development. Partners recognize their shared interests in and responsibilities for children, and they work together to create better programs and opportunities for students.” (Epstein, 1995, p. 81) Then, my goal is to demonstrate that healthy home-school relationships displace the contradictory interests of teachers and parents to fulfill one ultimate goal of both sides — to help children grow. As technologies have become adept at mediating the relationships, they also tantalize more possibilities and dimensions of the affiliation.
ClassDojo invites families to the “positive culture” communities focusing on improving children’s behavior with a consistent visual vibrance from classroom to home. Parents often suspect if their children behave differently while in school and at home. Grant states: “Parents expressed frustration with having to wait until something was ‘really wrong’ to find out if there was a problem, and a teacher emphasized the importance of timely communication: ‘the closer it [feedback] is to the event, the more impact it has’.” (Grant, 2011) With ClassDojo’s seamless behavior reports and feedback, parents can see their children’s “positive” and “needs work” explicitly to examine their improving progress. “There was considerable agreement between teachers, parents, and children that the main — or only — purpose of good communication between home and school was to avoid or resolve problems children had in school, focusing on behaviour or academic progress.” (Grant, 2011) I agree that communication aims to solve problems, a point that needs emphasizing since so many people still believe home-school communication is a one-way relationship. Technology endeavors to mutualize the connection between parents and teachers with its visibility of making each side’s efforts explicitly on screen.
Regardless, parents often assume that it is the teachers’ job when it comes to learning; also, the ambiguity of each side’s duties alludes to the reluctance of reciprocal relationships. Epstein corroborates, “In some schools there are still educators who say, ‘If the family would just do its job, we could do our job.’ And there are still families who say, ‘I raised this child; now it is your job to educate her.’ ” (Epstein, 1995, p.83) Admittedly, schools are most children’s primary institutions of learning. Can parents and teachers complement each other and enrich the learning process? Seesaw includes parents in the learning process by viewing children’s work and exchanging feedback with teachers; children are positively reinforced and motivated to try harder by knowing the audience is not just teachers. (Figure E) Children know that parents care about their learning progress and difficulties, which is also a kind of affirmation and encouragement. (Willis & Exley, 2018)
Granted the premise that ubiquitous technologies are welcomed in home-school relationships, occasional outcomes may radically deviate from the original plans. For example, ClassDojo’s gamification features may cultivate a classroom’s performative culture in the same way as the “golden star stickers” from the old days. Accordingly, it is not easy to examine children’s intrinsic and extrinsic motivation or the composition of both. Extrinsic rewards and motivators such as points, badges, and any other game currency can crowd out intrinsic motivation, drive children to focus on superficial achievements instead of the pursuit of the target behavior and transformation of learning. (Hamari, 2017; Oberprieler & Leonard, 2015) In short, a culture of routine prizes is joyful for winning; simultaneously, it can be performative and manipulative. Williamson agrees when he writes, “It also invites children to ‘game’ the system by treating positive classroom behaviour as something that can be exchanged for points, rewards and competitive positioning. In this respect, ClassDojo turns classroom behaviour into a quantifiable source of value for children to use as a public display of their compliance with classroom norms and expectations.” (Williamson, 2017) I suspect this power to manipulate children is significant only second to mentioning Santa in a parent-child dictatorship. Consequently, the most welcomed encouraging inception can turn into its dark side of consumption of signs, such as points and rewards, and likes, and sadly can be distorted into a cunning tool that stifles children’s innate qualities such as vivacity. Furthermore, some parents complain that ClassDojo can be associated with student shaming because every child’s Dojo points can be displayed to the entire classroom. (Manolev et al., 2019) Likewise, comments in Seesaw can turn into a bullying installation. Yet, some readers may challenge my view by insisting that the misconduct is long-standing trouble in education, and they did not just come about after the advent of social media. My point is that since the technologies can amplify these cliché problems, is it possible to avoid amplifying them?
In sum, it is the designers’ responsibility to inspect the problems and protect the positive and inspiring communities and vulnerable groups of children. There may not be right or wrong solutions to these wicked problems; nevertheless, the damage is irreversible to children who are victims of misconduct. Again, each childhood is a one-shot operation that leaves traces, and there is no opportunity to learn trial-and-error. Overlooking even trivia problems may lead to severe psychological consequences that eventually undermine the whole community.
Discussion
Be child-centered but rigorous.
Children have their ways of making connections between learning and playing and between home and school. The designers’ responsibility is to identify and discover these methods and connections, to better help children make school achievements or calibrate behaviors. Miss hearing children’s voices may hinder the technologies to exert their agency of users. It is also crucial that parents and teachers understand their underlying contribution to children is to be supportive and respectful; their strategies and tactics of disciplining children should not surpass the goal. Educational design is developed to empower children to thrive in the future life, not any instrument to support teachers and parents in manipulating or dictating.
Though I concede that it is innocuous that child-centric design attractions can be strategically child-friendly to get closer to users, I still insist that it is not an excuse to leave intellectual and academic rigor aside. Educational technologies such as online learning tools or home-school communication tools are of serious means. This constrains playfulness in a design should always serve its educational purpose; otherwise, children are likely confused with playing and actual learning. Keep in mind that we all love the children to be happy; we also train them for their future.
Be progressive but keep traditions.
When we talk about educational design, designers often tend to reflect on their own childhood. There are two sides to it. Admittedly, technology-based education design is relatively new, and it may be contextualized in a particular background with concrete needs. However, the efficacy of “golden star stickers’’ to children in the past is similar to the digital stickers in social media platforms today; the gamification mechanics migrate into new presentations. The cultural traditions are passed along and iterated with the progression of society and technology.
Despite the social context and economic background, each generation is uniquely advancing with new technologies. In other words, designers cannot simply compare a 4-years old child today with one born 30 years ago and make assumptions that their cognitive capabilities are relatively the same. Instead, assume the children grasp more sophisticated technologies comprehensively, attributing to the digital epoch they immerse today. Empirical-oriented design decisions can be seen as going back in time. I urge designers to think progressively, think forward, and think far from now.
Be conscious of real motivations.
Granted, children may understand the rules of educational incentives that are not gifts but need to be earned. Although motivating children with awards can be as dangerous as bribing them. Educational design’s social responsibilities should include protocols to protect children’s self-driven capacity and innocence by staying away from unnecessary temptations and superficial motivations.
As a result, I believe that the best incentives in K-12 education are the design eventually disappear or fade away. (Weiser, 1991) They are the support systems to facilitate children’s achievements, such as nurturing a useful skill; simultaneously, they are not meant to be dependent on. To put it another way, the scaffold needs to be “part-time” or “invisible,” like teaching a child to ride a bicycle — parents engage briefly then let go of the bike without being noticed. Eventually, children realize that they can be autonomous without extra help. This ineffable spirit of education challenges designers to delineate “invisible” motivation systems for children and then get out of their ways.
Be mindful of the entire community.
I posit that each child is distinguished in the ways of interacting with others and the world. They learn things at a different pace, and with a plethora of devices, they take encouragement in different tones and interpret them diversely. For instance, personalities may decide whether they like to share their work with the public or not. Since all children deserve equal delicate attention, design solutions need to be differentiated to accommodate individual needs. The topic of equity and equality will be discussed in future research after additional investigation.
Conclusion
Parents and teachers aim to guide children to be better people and great students, and both character development and academic performance are fundamentally crucial for the purpose. It is an ill-formed question to ask parents if they expect their children to grow up well-mannered or knowledgeable; similarly, to ask a child to choose between a gift from Santa or a trophy to win at the science fair. Nevertheless, educational problems are not binary, and so are the solutions. The influence of every solution is irreversible. To translate the needs into pragmatic implementation, designers need to closely examine the complex yet invaluable elements in education. Despite the growing consensus that technology is integral to the reciprocity of the parent-teacher-child relationship, it is an ultimate challenge to parents, teachers, and designers: how can we transcend disciplinary boundaries to envision future educational design?
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