Part of the inspiration and ideation processes of weeks 15 & 16 was searching academic literature for case studies and theoretical frameworks that can inform our project. While reports of specific case studies would help to identify challenges and issues which previous similar projects might have encountered and find design patterns that have worked well, theoretical frameworks would provide a more general synthesis of concepts and pedagogies that could form the theoretical basis for our project.

Which theoretical framework?

As discussed in our regular Friday call, I was meant to search for theoretical frameworks which proved to be rather difficult. In all of our prior activities and discussions we had very much focused on details of our project and tried to carve out its context and real situation of our personas. At this stage, it was still possible to select from a very broad range of theoretical approaches or pedagogies and I had to pretty much pick a few which I felt would meet the expectations and ideas we had formed as a group so far.

My selection

Finally, I went for two rather broad concepts which seemed to provide some useful terminology for a project dealing with minority groups and marginalized individuals/communities – Empowerment and Participation – and a study investigating a learning design for student-generated digital storytelling.

Difficulties

The resources provided by the course – ‘Design narratives explained’ and the example narrative ‘Healthy Eating’ – have not been useful to me. They have been confusing because both of them referred to case studies and did not provide any hints on how to best search and select theoretical frameworks and document the findings.