Creative Data: Exploring intersections of Data and Community with Neighbors Helping Neighbors on the Main Line
Semester: Fall 2024
Course Instructor: Darlyne Bailey
Field Site: Neighbors Helping Neighbors
Field Supervisor: Muneera Walker & Rachael Omansky Chou
Praxis Poster:
ARJ_Creative Data_Combined_Reduced
Further Context:
Neighbors Helping Neighbors (NHN) on the Main Line is a grassroots organization supporting underrepresented communities and youth in the Greater Philadelphia region. One of the three cornerstone initiatives of NHN programming is their Education Empowerment work. During the school year an important part of this work takes place during their Homework Club which provides Free in-person after-school homework help and healthy snacks, Monday through Thursday. Tutors include retired teachers and students from Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges. Our praxis project focused on collecting and analyzing data to both qualitatively and quantitatively measure the success of the NHN Homework Club program. We aimed to understand and illustrate how NHN’s efforts effectively support their participants’ academic success, using both qualitative insights and quantitative metrics.
We had to redefine the project several times as we had to be particularly careful about the data we were collecting since the work we were doing was with children; permission forms and ethics, and protecting privacy were especially important. Defining those rules and making sure we understood those parameters took some exploration and help from our mentors.
Next, understanding how to best frame our survey questions to present information in a format that the children would connect to was challenging. After two days of implementing paper surveys with lukewarm reception, we were inspired by a class reading to pursue a community data collection method called photovoice. Making data collection FUN drastically changed the levels of excitement in participating – no participant opted out, and several tried very hard to convince us to take the survey twice so they could take additional photos.
Finally, data sorting, labeling, and interpretation are the biggest remaining chunks of work that our team is left with, and in retrospect, we think collecting the data should have been half the project and an entire separate semester could have been dedicated to sorting and interpreting the data.
Our Creative Data team is left still wanting to better understand how to represent and communicate the data we have collected to clearly define next steps, maybe not for our project, but to leave the work we have done in a better place for another project to be able to use the photos and paper surveys as a foundation for their own photovoice work with NHN. One semester was just too short a timeline to accomplish a project of this scope. Our group’s final step will be the sorting and labelling all of the images that we collected with their corresponding descriptions collected verbally from the children as the photos were taken. Following this, we hope the photos could be used as tools in a series of discussions at NHN to find themes and meanings, perhaps using the 10S Framework, and drawing inspiration from the Photovoice project and the teachings of Paulo Freire.