From Data Literacy to Collective Data Stewardship
This project aims to develop and investigate a technology-enhanced learning environment to engage youth from historically underserved communities in learning data literacy concepts and skills as they relate to the use of data for social advocacy. We partnered with a youth advisory board to explore how critical perspectives on data inform how such a learning environment should be designed, and how role-based collaborative frameworks might be used to enhance traditional approaches to data literacy. Our technology and curriculum will afford engagement with data literacy through the adoption of four different roles-artist, journalist, detective, and scientist-expanding the scope of data literacy instruction. Youth collaborate in ways that allow them to support each other in embodying these roles and shift between roles as needed. The ultimate goal is for our program to foster data literacy skills that can build understanding amongst youth of how data and data-driven processes influence their lives and communities, thereby fostering a strong civic identity and ideas for action.
Our work in this area has led to the development of the Data Roles platform, a fork of the Metabase data analytics software. The software features role-specific interfaces with unique affordances to emphasize differing ways of interacting with data for advocacy, such as creating artistic interpretations of data or performing more technical explorations. The system also integrates real-time collaboration features to promote interaction amongst various team roles. Users can switch between being a driver that interact with a particular role interface or navigator that observe and provide feedback. Future work will deploy the system in community learning environment and iterate on the design of the technology.
This NSF-funded project is a collaboration with Dr. Rosta Farzan and Dr. Jamie Booth at the University of Pittsburgh. Within the lab Zak Risha previously worked on the project.
Publications
Risha, Z., Mallavarapu, A., Farzan, R., Booth, J., Sondel, B., & Walker, E. (2022). Proposing a Role Based Framework for Data Literacy. Proceedings of the 16th International Conference of the Learning Sciences, 1601-1604.