Co-creating an online platform on disaster risk reduction with highschool students in Quito, Ecuador: Lessons from Evaluation
Abstract as pdf
Corresponding Author:
Agathe Dupeyron
University of East Anglia United Kingdom
a.dupeyron@uea.ac.uk
Author(s):
Paul Narvaez1 and Casandra Sabag2
1Sindicato Audiovisual, Invisiblesindicato@Gmail.Com, ECU
2Sindicato Audiovisual, Invisiblesindicato@Gmail.Com, MEX
We present here the co-creation process that led to the design of “Reducir Riesgos en Quito”, an outreach platform focusing on multi-hazards and resilience in Quito, Ecuador. The platform, launched in June 2021, is primarily intended for students who are about to complete their secondary education. It was built in a partnership involving students from two schools in Quito, The Sindicato Audiovisual collective, academic partners from the Tomorrow’s Cities research hub, and the Fundación Museos de la Ciudad. The platform also creates strong links between Disaster Risk Reduction and public history. It encourages its users to visit local museums such as the Museo del Carmen Alto, Museo de la Ciudad and Museo Interactivo de Ciencia, where exhibitions on Disaster Risk Management were curated in partnership with the Tomorrow’s Cities Quito research hub. The platform and museum exhibitions are complementary, exploring how the entangled themes of memory, disaster and resilience could engage citizens into a reflexive process around the nature of risk and its political underpinnings. This paper focuses on the evaluation of the outreach platform, and the reflexive process it generated. The evaluation fulfilled two main objectives: to shape the co-creation process with the students, and research how successful it was at reaching the desired impact, which is for students to understand the social and political dimensions of risk. Students were involved at the design stage through initial workshops in November and December 2020, in which they explored concepts such as resilience and memory, disaster and risk. Initially, the evaluation activities focused on accompanying the creation and design of the platform, and enabled reflexivity as we interrogated our assumptions to adapt to the students’ language, interests, and learning needs. Through discussions with the students and surveys conducted in December 2020, March and June 2021, we obtained detailed feedback from the students at every step of the way, and modified and adapted the platform design to ensure greater relevance to Ecuadorian teenagers in 2021 and beyond. We present practical examples of this co-creation process here, with implications for the visual language and content of the platform, such as the creation of the platform’s main character ‘Andesita’, the inclusion of memes, videos and trivia as well as accessible and interactive scientific information. In a second stage, we escalated these insights to weave evaluation into the platform, so that future users may also share with us the ways in which the platform changed their perception of risks and mitigation strategies. The platform’s pedagogical guide includes a participatory evaluation activity: the users are actively involved in the creation of narratives reflecting their own understanding of risks in their neighbourhood, what they have learnt and how they can act. This takes the form of a podcast creation activity aimed at school groups across Quito, which they are encouraged to share with project managers in Quito. Smaller surveys, inspired by the responses we received from the pilot schools, were also implemented within the platform. These evaluation activities will be launched in July 2021, and preliminary results may be shared during the session. This paper therefore focuses on the reflexive role played by evaluation in the co-creation of the online platform, and presents preliminary evaluation results from the intersection between public history, disaster risk reduction and the digital future.
Envisioning the future by learning from the past: arts and memory in interdisciplinary disaster risk reduction reserarch