Designing Collective Teacher-Children Personas in Preschool: A Methodological Approach

This work in progress proposes a new approach for the design of personas representing children in preschool (aged 3-6 years old). Starting from the need to design technology for the collective use in the classroom, we looked at the group composed by the children and the teacher, the different possible ways teachers relate to children in a classroom context, and the way they work together towards a common goal. In this study, we analyse the dynamics of the group in relation to literacy-building activities and storytelling in school. Considering the inherent difficulty in interviewing children of preschool age, we decided to conduct interviews with teachers and experts and adopt a proxy approach to design of our personas. Using the data gathered from interviews and extracted from the literature regarding child-personas and adult-child reading, we start outlining a framework for the design of teacher-children collective personas in a formal educational context.

[1]  Gary W. Ladd,et al.  The Teacher-Child Relationship and Children's Early School Adjustment , 1997 .

[2]  Peter Gregor,et al.  Experiences obtained from designing with children , 2003, IDC '03.

[3]  Manfred Tscheligi,et al.  Using probes to create child personas for games , 2011, Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology.

[4]  Alissa Nicole Antle,et al.  Child-personas: fact or fiction? , 2006, DIS '06.

[5]  Pontus Wärnestål,et al.  Co-constructing child personas for health-promoting services with vulnerable children , 2014, CHI.

[6]  Alain Giboin,et al.  From Individual to Collective Personas Modeling Realistic Groups and Communities of Users (and not Only Realistic Individual Users) , 2011, ACHI 2011.

[7]  Roberta Annicchiarico,et al.  Participatory design for challenging user groups: a case study , 2010, ECCE.

[8]  Ciarán O'Leary,et al.  Towards Reusable Personas for Everyday Design , 2016, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[9]  D. French.  Children's Knowledge of the Social Functions of Younger, Older, and Same-Age Peers. , 1984 .

[10]  B. Mawson.  Children's Leadership Strategies in Early Childhood , 2011 .

[11]  Bernard J. Jansen,et al.  Persona Perception Scale: Developing and Validating an Instrument for Human-Like Representations of Data , 2018, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[12]  Alan Cooper,et al.  The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity (2nd Edition) , 1999 .

[13]  Brendan Walker,et al.  Cultural probes and the value of uncertainty , 2004, INTR.

[14]  Tara Matthews,et al.  Collaboration personas: a new approach to designing workplace collaboration tools , 2011, CHI.

[15]  Muriel Garreta Domingo,et al.  Scenario-based persona: introducing personas through their main contexts , 2011, CHI EA '11.

[16]  Karin Slegers,et al.  Personas and Behavioral Theories: A Case Study Using Self-Determination Theory to Construct Overweight Personas , 2017, CHI.

[17]  Alan Cooper,et al.  About Face 3: the essentials of interaction design , 1995 .

[18]  William W. Gaver,et al.  Design: Cultural probes , 1999, INTR.

[19]  Gunn Elisabeth Søreide,et al.  Narrative construction of teacher identity , 2007 .

[20]  Teachers’ perceptions of their roles in promoting literacy in the context of play in a Spanish-speaking kindergarten , 2001 .

[21]  Nicola Marsden,et al.  Personas and Identity: Looking at Multiple Identities to Inform the Construction of Personas , 2019, CHI.

[22]  Ole Iversen,et al.  Using digital cultural probes in design with children , 2003, IDC '03.

[23]  Alissa Nicole Antle,et al.  Child-based personas: need, ability and experience , 2008, Cognition, Technology & Work.

[24]  Manfred Tscheligi,et al.  Revisiting personas: the making-of for special user groups , 2012, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[25]  Thomas D Grace,et al.  Designing dyadic caregiver-child personas for interactive digital media use , 2020, IDC.

[26]  G. Ladd.  Having friends, keeping friends, making friends, and being liked by peers in the classroom: predictors of children's early school adjustment? , 1990, Child development.

[27]  Erik Stolterman,et al.  Personas: from theory to practices , 2008, NordiCHI.