Design for disagreement: provide a safe space for members to question community practices¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · 2 claims (1 for, 1 against) · 1 study (1 theoretical), q1 · 0 of 1 report an effect size · 2 claims rest on one study

Description¶

The article's tentative design suggestion is that "providing a safe space for members to question the practices of the community would naturally throw up more instances of failure to reach consensus" across the dimensions of knowledge, practices, and identities. Instead of designing only for agreement, designers should design for and document disagreement, treating failures to reach consensus as loci of unexpected and potentially rich learning and innovation.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• A safe space in which members may question the community's practices

Constraints¶

• The suggestion is explicitly tentative; the article acknowledges good reasons for mediation towards agreement and offers no empirical test of the design

Target Learners¶

• members of designed learning communities
• students in classrooms

Target Learning Goals¶

• construction of original ideas, practices, and identities
• innovation
• critical examination of boundary conditions

Affordances¶

• Learning Versus Conserving Communities Distinction

Claims¶

• Individual-level critical thinking instruction has an unimpressive track record, motivating communal-level intervention [+W]
• The four Special Issue learning communities mediated members toward consensus, with no reports of longstanding dissent [-W]

Related Strategies¶

• Use hedges, hypotheticals and questions to open space for safe exploration of new ideas
• Creating Space for New Ideas

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Trninic, D., Swanson, H., & Kapur, M. (2018). Productive dissent in learning communities. Instructional Science, 46(4). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-018-9466-0