Exploring Participatory Design Methods to Engage with Arab Communities

ArabHCI is an initiative inaugurated in CHI17 SIG Meeting that brought together 45+ HCI Arab and non-Arab researchers/practitioners who are conducting/interested in HCI within Arab communities. The goal of this workshop is to start dialogs that leverage our "insider" understanding of HCI research in the Arab context and assert our culture identity in design in order to explore challenges and opportunities for future research. In this workshop, we focus on one of the themes that derived our community discussions in most of the held events. We explore the extent to which participatory approaches in the Arab context are culturally and methodologically challenged. Our goal is to bring researchers/practitioners with success and failure stories while designing with Arab communities to discuss methods, share experiences and learned lessons. We plan to share the results of our discussions and research agenda with the wider CHI community through different social and scholarly channels

A participatory approach for digital documentation of Egyptian Bedouins intangible cultural heritage

The Bedouins of Egypt hold a unique intangible cultural heritage (ICH), with distinct cultural values and social practices that are rapidly changing as a consequence of having settled after having been nomadic for centuries. We present our attempt to develop a bottom-up approach to document Bedouin ICH. Grounded in participatory design practices, the project purpose was two-fold: engaging Egyptian Engineering undergraduates with culturally-distant technology users and introducing digital self-documentation of ICH to the Bedouin community. We report the design of a didactic model that deployed the students as research partners to co-design four prototypes of ICH documentation mobile applications with the community. The prototypes reflected an advanced understanding for the values to the Bedouins brought by digital documentation practices. Drawing from our experience, three recommendations were elicited for similar ICH projects. Namely, focusing on the community benefits; promoting motivation ownership, and authenticity; and pursuing a shared identity between designers and community members. These guidelines hold a strong value as they have been tested against local challenges that could have been detrimental to the project

Erehwon: For a cartography of change

We introduce a work-in-progress collaborative research project, which aims at creating an interactive real time cartography of socio-political performative projects within Europe and beyond. The cartography will be designed as a digital platform for rehearsing new ways of direct democratic practices and experimenting with potential forms of public space transformation that these practices can lead to.Creativeworks Londo

Higher Education Exchange: 2008

This annual publication serves as a forum for new ideas and dialogue between scholars and the larger public. Essays explore ways that students, administrators, and faculty can initiate and sustain an ongoing conversation about the public life they share.The Higher Education Exchange is founded on a thought articulated by Thomas Jefferson in 1820: "I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education."In the tradition of Jefferson, the Higher Education Exchange agrees that a central goal of higher education is to help make democracy possible by preparing citizens for public life. The Higher Education Exchange is part of a movement to strengthen higher education's democratic mission and foster a more democratic culture throughout American society.Working in this tradition, the Higher Education Exchange publishes interviews, case studies, analyses, news, and ideas about efforts within higher education to develop more democratic societies

Towards Learner Centredness in Higher Education: Exploring English Language Classrooms in the UAE.

This thesis presents an exploration into the manifestations of pedagogy intended to be learner centred and the effect of such pedagogy on learning and learners’ in English Language Teaching (ELT) classrooms, at a University in the UAE. As an insider researcher using a sociocultural perspective, I explored student perceptions in the face of an educational reform: the implementation of learner centred approaches in my own English language classrooms to understand the way students’ construed the social reality of learner centred classrooms. Foregrounded by theories of social constructionism, this study uses Alexander’s (2004) principles of Dialogic Teaching that emphasise the communicative tenets of learner centredness through the development of classroom interaction that encourages student voice, engagement, critical thinking and active learning, to analyse the quality, dynamic and content of talk that occurred through various teacher led interventions. Considering learning and development as social processes, the study assumes a poststructuralist stance to understand how discourse shapes one’s sense of self and self-worth. Grounded by these theories, this thesis explored pedagogy that aimed to be learner centred by investigating the way students and teacher used shared talk in ELT Classrooms to extend and develop their learning and by extension their identities. Interpretive data collection methods were used to collect video recordings of lessons, semi-structured interview data as well as written response data over the course of one semester. Using the Nvivo software, transcribed data from the development of shared classroom talk was analyzed to understand how the teacher attempted to implement learner centred instruction and how learners experienced it. Findings indicated that classroom dialogues were of low dialogic quality, consisting of limited, brief exchanges that were teacher fronted. Further, findings also revealed the complexities in implementing dialogic, learner centred practices which reinforce such instruction as being theoretically rich but difficult to apply. While researchers theorize the way learner centred, dialogic instruction needs to occur, the subjective and fluid aspects of learning and learners, who prefer the familiar and resist change, result in manifestations of this instructional approach to appear quite differently in the reality of the classroom context. Despite the low educational value of current classroom talk, the results demonstrated that the development of learner centredness through dialogic instruction has been initiated within ELT Classroom contexts and are in a ‘fledgling’ stage. In recognizing that the analysis of classroom discussions revealed an inherent ‘talk norm’ that was teacher directed and teacher dominant, shared whole class interactions demonstrated attempts by myself as the teacher to model dialogic talk. Two things emerged as a result of data analysis, first that attempts to implement learner centred instruction is made during whole class interactions, however such instruction is not very dialogic in engaging learners with the learning; secondly the potential for such learning to develop further to become more dialogic is apparent through the ‘talk awareness’ that participants demonstrated during the interactional episodes.Education InternationalEsmee Fairbairn FoundationBritish AcademyJoint Information Systems Committee (JISC)Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE)Teaching and Learning Research ProgrammeArts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)Arts and Humanities Research CouncilBritish Council - ManchesterAlan Turing InstituteCulham St Gabriel's TrustFalmouth College of ArtsNational Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics (NCETM)Esmee Fairbairn FoundationQatar National Research FoundationUniversity of MalayaHigher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE)Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Geography Earth & Environmental SciencesBritish AcademyRoyal Society (Government)Youth Sport Trus