With $750,000 in phase 1 funding, a multidisciplinary team will work with a diverse set of local partners to better understand the ways people navigate issues of trust in information systems.
A group of multidisciplinary researchers and partners led by the University of Washington Information School and The University of Texas at Austin is one of 28 teams selected as part of the National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator 2021 cohort, receiving $750,000 in Phase 1 planning funding for a project that aims to reimagine how digital literacy and critical reasoning skills are taught. The project will develop locally and culturally relevant educational approaches for building more inclusive and trustworthy communications ecosystems.
The “Co-designing for Trust: Reimagining Online Literacies With Underserved Communities” project team, composed of a multidisciplinary set of researchers from the University of Washington (UW), University of Texas at Austin (UT), Washington State University (WSU), Seattle Central College (SCC), and Black Brilliance Research (BBR), will plan, facilitate, and assess a series of seven workshops that will focus on critical reasoning skills, the psychological and emotional aspects of information, and broader sociocultural dimensions of trust in information ecosystems. The workshop series will be hosted in collaboration with a diverse group of local stakeholders in Washington state and Texas, including urban and rural libraries, news outlets, civic organizations, and underrepresented communities.
“When addressing problematic information, one solution does not fit all; intervention efforts need to incorporate sociocultural elements often ignored but critical to fostering more trustworthy information environments,” said Jevin West, a UW Information School (iSchool) associate professor and UW Center for an Informed Public (CIP) co-founder who is a principal investigator on the project.
UW iSchool senior research scientist and CIP research fellow Jason C. Young, who is senior personnel and co-leading the project, said that the goal of the collaboration is to dramatically expand approaches to addressing problematic information.
“That requires creativity and multidisciplinarity, and an expansion of who has access to the spaces in which interventions are designed,” Young said. “We have established partnerships to ensure that perspectives that are overlooked within existing research are integrated into the core of our work. We believe this will produce solutions that are more broadly accessible and, ultimately, more effective at supporting people as they navigate issues of trust and information in their daily lives.”
The team will design, deploy, and test curricula intended to yield empirical and theoretical contributions to knowledge about existing digital divides, forms of social marginalization, and structural forces of inequity that intersect with the challenges of problematic information people encounter in their everyday lives. The work in phase 1 will also provide case studies for understanding how diverse populations, including rural and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities, draw on social and epistemological resources to address problematic information and build trust — and furnish design implications for supporting these activities.
“Co-designing and testing educational resources with our partners will furnish valuable insights into how existing digital divides, forms of social marginalization, and structural drivers of inequity interact with vulnerabilities to problematic information,” said Ahmer Arif, an assistant professor at The University of Texas at Austin School of Information who is co-leading the project as a principal investigator.
Other core institutional partners within the research team include Seattle Central College (SCC) and the Black Brilliance Research Project, a Black-led research collective with strong relationships to diverse BIPOC communities across Washington state. BBR’s team includes people with expertise in navigating education contexts — including elders, teachers, cultural workers, data scientists, librarians, students, journalists, community technologists, professional researchers, and evaluators.
“As the world’s largest Black-led participatory action research project, we’re excited to be centering the wisdom, expertise, and leadership of communities that are targeted by problematic information. Our communities are eager to create equity solutions that change the material conditions of people’s lives. This work is one way that our communities are leading the way. BIPOC communities are creating what we need to thrive,” said Shaun Glaze, co-lead and research director at BBR.
“Seattle Central College is excited to participate in this project co-leading the five participatory design sessions and evaluating the literacy curriculum and platforms with our collaboration partner the Black Brilliance Research Project,” said Chris Webb, a Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Business (STEM-B) department faculty member at Seattle Central College. “Our student body being the most diverse of the Seattle Colleges District, we are equally excited for them to participate in this research by contributing invaluable insights that will inform our work and project outcomes.”
Media partners, who will participate in community workshops, include KUOW Public Radio in Seattle, the West Texan Media Group and KUT Public Radio in Austin. Microsoft News and Microsoft’s Defending Democracy program will also participate in the community workshops.
Museum and library partners include the Pacific Science Center in Seattle; the Whatcom County Library System and Burlington Public Library in Washington state; the Smithville Public Library in Bastrop County, Texas; and The Public Library Association, a division of the American Library Association. These partners, spanning urban and rural geographies, will participate in the community workshops, with the future goal of implementing participatory design sessions with library and museum patrons in future phases. The team will work with K-12 partners including educators from Teachers for an Informed Public, a Washington-based educator group.
Other partners include AARP, the national interest group with more than 38 million members that focuses on issues affecting those over the age of 50, and the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, a national nonprofit focused on supporting broadband access and local technology training.
In addition to West and Arif, the team has three other principal investigators, Emma Spiro, a UW iSchool associate professor and CIP cofounder; Katie Davis, a UW iSchool associate professor; and Samuel Woolley, an assistant professor at The University of Texas at Austin School of Journalism and Media.
In addition to Young, Glaze, and Webb, senior personnel on the project include Tanu Mitra, a UW iSchool assistant professor and CIP faculty member; Kate Starbird, UW Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) associate professor and CIP faculty director; Cindy Aden, professor of practice at the UW iSchool; Jennifer Turns, UW HCDE professor; Carl Bergstrom, UW Department of Biology professor; Veronica Yan, a University of Texas at Austin Department of Educational Psychology assistant professor; and Michael Caulfield, director of blended and networked learning at Washington State University-Vancouver.
The project will also be supported by CIP postdoctoral scholars Madeline Jalbert, Kolina Koltai, and Rachel E. Moran.
About the NSF-Convergence Program
Launched in 2019, the National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator builds upon research and discovery to accelerate use-inspired convergence research into practical application. The program funds a cohort of teams to work interactively toward solving grand societal challenges that impact thousands of people positively.
“The Convergence Accelerator’s curriculum, consisting of human-centered design; user discovery; team science; early-stage prototyping; and pitch preparation is designed to provide our funded teams the tools to transition their solutions into practice,” said Douglas Maughan, Office Head of the NSF Convergence Accelerator program. “Phase 1 teams are expected to apply the curriculum; as well as focus on cross-cutting partnerships as most national-scale challenges cannot be solved with a single discipline and expertise.”
NSF-Convergence’s 2021 cohort represents an investment of $21 million across the convergent research teams. Sixteen teams are funded under the program’s Networked Blue Economy (Track E), and 12 teams, including the one led by UW, are funded under Trust & Authenticity in Communications Systems (Track F).
Funded teams in the NSF-Convergence 2021 cohort begin in phase 1, a fast-paced nine-month hands-on journey, which includes the program’s innovation curriculum, formal pitch, and phase 2 proposal evaluation. The innovation curriculum includes user discovery, human-centered design, team science, communication skills, and pitching to assist the teams in developing their solution and preparing them for the next phase. The program’s team-based approach creates a co-opetition environment, stimulating the sharing of innovative ideas toward solving complex challenges together, while in a competitive environment to try and progress to phase 2.
NSF-Convergence teams are comprised of disciplines and expertise from academia, industry, government, non-profit, and other communities of practice. Disciplines include all science and engineering fields, but also other disciplines such as law, healthcare, communications, and business management to accelerate the solutions forward. As teams apply the program’s convergence research fundamentals and innovation processes, the teams’ pioneering ideas are transformed along the journey — moving it to a proof-of-concept, then prototype, and finally a solution. Teams also develop partnerships to support their solutions toward sustainability and transition to practice.
