Abstract:

Map the Gap is an in-development mobile-Health intervention/prevention tool intended to reduce the burden of housing insecurity in Philadelphia by:
1) providing personalized navigation of Philadelphia’s housing system,
2) facilitating communication between parties, and
3) enabling service exchange (a local currency).

The social framework Map the Gap is located within serves as an educational space in which the academic research and development team, long-term West Philadelphia residents, and local housing and health agencies organize collectively to empathize with one another’s priorities.

This paper will explore the Map the Gap digital tool development process as a nontraditional, community-driven educational space intended to promote community efficacy, cultivate community capacity to address self-set priorities, empower political voices, redistribute scarce resources, and constructively address historic wounds between long-standing West Philadelphia residents and local institutions. The problem-solving, project-based process of developing the Map the Gap tool serves as a technology for cultivating an empathetic, flexible learning environment in which constituents vacillate productively between expertise roles -- roles not accessible to all within the traditional educational environment.

Subsequently, this paper will explore the tensions that arise in diverse, non-traditional educational spaces as well as the Map the Gap team’s solutions to such tensions, will detail the way in which framing the educational space as a process can operationalize students and educators to challenge traditional pedagogic roles and the limited knowledge production that role staticity affords, and will delineate how the uptake of new roles cultivate unprecedented relationships to expertise which render the educational reality and its products constituent-driven. This paper ultimately seeks to reframe the way educational spaces are conceptualized to in order to operationalize research and development spaces as active educational environments.

Keywords:

Design research, project-based learning, collaborative learning, process-based learning, expertise.