MakingSPACE for Youth Perspectives

Dearborn, Michigan

I co-designed a workshop series for high school students with my MDes colleague, Colleen Clark and a high school social justice class in Dearborn, Michigan called MakingSPACE for Youth Perspectives. The project was a design research-based inquiry in partnership with the Center for Educational Design (CEDER) at the School of Education at the University of Michigan.

This inquiry was led by the following research question and hypothesis: How can we get students to see themselves as change agents by starting where the students are at? By making tangible the changes they want to see within the context of their everyday environments first - their school environment.

MakingSPACE for Youth Perspectives was developed as a workshop series that aims to build students’ spatial awareness and to think critically about how they experience different spaces and places in school. The goal for students to use these exercises to analyze these experiences to inform and articulate change in their daily learning environments. The workshop modules can work as a series or independently. They include UnderstandSPACE, SketchSPACE, and MapSPACE.

UnderstandSPACE is a warm-up activity to build spatial awareness and vocabulary through physically moving bodies and furniture in the classroom space.

Through simple drawing exercises, SketchSPACE aims to identify and articulate the characteristics of spaces that do and do not foster equity and belonging in their school.

Building off the data collected in SketchSPACE, MapSPACE aims to visualize the individual and collective experiences of these identified spaces onto a floor plan of their school.