Brief: To design an experience that addresses the democratic process
Group: Chuyi, Jiayi, Alexandra, Yuki, Tanvi
This project started off with us thinking, in effect, what democracy means, and how it is executed. Everyone had different opinions about how they perceive democracy in their homeland. Being from India, the world’s largest democracy, I feel that there is still a long way to go before political equality is achieved.
Democracy, as a principle, is usually related to a governmental system. My group wanted to focus on how democracy is attained in everyday life. Alexandra suggested that we could work on the system of democracy in schools. We noticed that during feedback sessions, usually only a few students communicate their thoughts. The majority of the class chose to not voice their opinion. This action translated to not voicing out their opinion in the real world, which in turn leads to voter apathy. From here, we chose to focus on ‘giving each individual a voice’. We had to follow two research methods for this course -
Literature review
In this particular method, we had to widen our knowledge by collecting and analysing pre existing research conducted on the topic. These sources included published articles, books, thesis papers, etc. We opted to each take 3 references and write our literature review. I chose books and articles about ‘Voter Apathy’ as well as ‘Democracy in education’ and how they are associated.
This was my literature review:
This method provided us with the necessary fundamental knowledge needed on this topic. We analysed this information and started marking down the reasons why people feel uncomfortable voicing their opinions. At this step, the research method AEIOU, which we had applied in the previous projects, helped a lot. It gave us a chance to notice and examine the behaviour of students without making anyone nervous.
After this analysis, we started to notice the co-relations between the classroom and the governmental system. Factors which seemed to be in common were; fear of society, fear of the leader, fear of consequences, lack of interest and lack of understanding. We decided to research on each of these factors independently.
Prototyping
The next research method was prototyping. We struggled a bit to understand how to prototype our ideas as we did not have a physical model. We decided to take prototyping in a literal sense, which means testing out your ideas.
We thought of making a new feedback system which would make people feel comfortable to speak out. We ideated 5 activities ,which tackled the earlier factors, and decided to test them out in class. Out of all these methods we chose the ones which worked the best, and tried combining them. We also storyboarded them and made them into a book.
One of the reasons, we found, why students do not speak, was their lack of understanding about the project. This was majorly because of a language barrier. We decided to gather each group’s brief and send them to everyone a few days before the final presentation, so that they would have the chance to read and understand the project beforehand.
Final presentation
For our final presentation, We decided to give the class a topic to talk and give us feedback about it. We developed an activity particularly for this topic. We changed the arrangement of the room, so that students could sit in smaller groups. We randomly allocated students a table with the help of colour bands.
The topic that we chose was ‘What do you think about UAL?’
We gave each table a prompt to follow- The prompts were —
We gave the class 2 minutes to discuss between themselves as a small group. From our prototyping, we derived that more time and smaller groups will make people more comfortable talking. After they had spoken between themselves, we told them to give us a feedback about UAL. There was a significant increase in the responses people gave. It was a good experience to hear feedback from people who usually do not prefer to do so.
Feedback and takeaway
Our project was based on feedback methods, so our peers did give us quite a lot of feedback. Someone pointed out that giving the briefs of each group before hand, takes the fun out of it. People who are usually shy, liked the idea of talking in a smaller group first.
My takeaway from the project would be to understand the research methods as a whole, and implement them according to my project. I also feel that there were a lot of communication gaps between the group, which I would want to improve.
References
Agranov, M., Goeree, J.K., Romero, J. and Yariv, L., 2017. What makes voters turn out: The effects of polls and beliefs. Journal of the European Economic Association, 16(3), pp.825–856.
Fish, S., 2014. Versions of academic freedom: From professionalism to revolution. University of Chicago Press.
Flowers, T., 2016. Discussion in the College Classroom: Getting your students engaged and participating in person and online. Jay R. Howard, 2015, Jossey-Bass: San Francisco, 224 pp., $38.00 (Hardcover). Journal of Research Initiatives, 2(1), p.13.
Oyedemi, T. and Mahlatji, D., 2016. The ‘born-free’non-voting youth: A study of voter apathy among a selected cohort of South African youth. Politikon, 43(3), pp.311–323.
Rosenberg, M., 1954. Some determinants of political apathy. Public Opinion Quarterly, 18(4), pp.349–366.
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