Using Personas to Encourage Student Engagement

By Thomas Barker | Fellow

This column focuses on a broad range of practical academic issues from teaching and training to professional concerns, research, and technologies of interest to teachers, students, and researchers. Please send comments and suggestions to ttbarker@ualberta.ca. or the column blog at http://theacademicconversation.ning.com/.

Technical communicators in education are always looking for ways to engage students in course materials. Time-honored methods, such as using discussions, exercises, blogs, forums, and quizzes, not to mention the old hack, the “reading response,” can help in this. But we know that syndrome of student attention and engagement, and even if you manage to light a fire one day with one approach, that same approach the next day might lead to students reaching for their phones or starting on their lunch in class. How to engage students challenges teachers constantly.

In technical communication classrooms, the challenge is even stronger because of the sense of professional practice that underlies all our teaching. The workplace challenge, the relationship to the “real world” experience of writing and publishing, is strong in our work. Course outcomes demand that students master complex workplace practices. Workplace practices demand not just understanding but application. Teaching professional writing challenges us to find ways to integrate these demands in ways that interest students.

The user persona, from the toolkit of the professional communicator and usability expert, offers one possible alternative to made up exercises, quizzes, or reading response reports. In this article I look at definitions of personas and how they tie in with educational goals. Then I report on how one might use personas as learning identities in the professional writing classroom to engage students in the professional and workplace aspects of writing.

What Is a Persona?

A persona, as defined by Usability.gov, is “a fictional person who represents a major user group for your site.” According to Usability.gov, “Personas help you identify major user groups of your website. You select the characteristics that are most representative of those groups and turn them into a persona.” User personas have been around since John Carroll popularized the idea of scenario-based documentation in the 1990s. The concept behind personas challenged documenters to construct narratives of usage for manuals and help as an alternative to menu- or feature-oriented documentation. Personas got a boost in popularity from Alan Cooper’s treatment of them in The Inmates are Running the Asylum, where he validated the use of personas for interface design, a validation that technical writers quickly took up to use in Web design and information product design.

Personas are well known to members of the Society for Technical Communication as models for persons to identify themselves as users of the Body of Knowledge Portal (http://stcbok.editme.com/). Members of the Usability and User Experience community study personas as ways of shaping testing materials for information products. But the connection between personas and learning in the technical communication classroom may not be so familiar to instructors.

Most persona use in education falls into what one might expect: using personas for the design of programs. For this use, those doing a needs analysis for a new educational program, say, in engineering, would employ personas to model students and do analyses for program design. For classroom use, however, their potential remains untapped. Sure, an instructor might construct an “in-class persona” to help remediate teaching. Such a strategy introduces a critical element of a persona, that it represents a real person but isn’t the real person. It’s “you but not you” for the sake of displacing your experience and introducing the element of control and focus into teaching. Teacher personas offer important means for instructors to construct their identity as teachers and, because of the displacement of identity, away from the personal toward the professional. Such identities are not fixed but fluid, variable, and, to some extent, controllable. In this dimension, the persona has a clear connection not just to the identities of customers or users and of teachers, but of learners themselves.

Personas as Learning Identities

Learning identities, those personas developed over time and reflecting a “stance toward life experience,” lie at the heart of the kind of engagement with concepts mentioned earlier. Alice and David Kolb, educational psychologists from Case Western Reserve University, cite the work of fellow psychologist Carl Rogers in describing how learning identities work. People with a learning identity, they argue, see themselves as learners and engage with life experiences with an inherent belief that they can learn. Learning identities lie at the heart of the kind of experiential learning explored by technical communicator John Carroll in his influential book, The Minimal Manual. Another pioneer in the area of learning identities, Paulo Friere in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, argued that oppressed individuals needed to construct an identity that enabled them to reflect on experience critically and take action to transform it.

For professional communication instructors, the challenge to get students to take a critical stance toward their research, reading, and project experience is a high goal. I found it particularly challenging in a community service-learning course in which students spent time doing risk assessment, management, and communication projects for organizational clients. Our dry readings on assessment processes, hazard identification, workplace safety legislation, and health and safety seemed to demand an alternative to quizzes and reading responses. Taking inspiration from my background in technical communication, I constructed an activity using the concept of learning identities to help students find ways to interact productively with their course material.

In the next section, I will outline the basic approach I took in my class and offer suggestions for how it might be adapted by other instructors looking for a new approach to student engagement.

Learning Identities Exercise

To create learning identities exercises for my students, I followed a four-step process. That process required me to find representative professionals in the workplace as starter identities, and then help my students work from these exemplary profiles to create a set of characteristics that could function for them as a learning identity, in the guise of which they could engage with our readings.

Phase One: Find the Model Identities

Risk communication is a rich field of endeavor, with practitioners in areas like chemical and environmental engineering, education and training, management and quality control, government policy, and communication consulting. I used public Internet sites that featured professional profiles (which abound in all areas of industry, government, and education) to identify persons with interests in risk communication from four major employment roles: research scientist, facilities manager, government minister, and risk communicator. Looking over these exemplary role models, I found the characteristics that seemed to construct their identity: educational background, project work, interests, employment history, and, to some extent, values and personal characteristics. I shared these profiles with my students and asked them to reflect on how they themselves might identify with or someday even have careers similar to those in the model identities. I think it helped that they were real people, often with photographs.

Phase Two: Create an Identity Survey

I wanted my students to see themselves as professionals and so I created a survey that included questions geared toward helping them make career decisions that they thought were conducive to their interests, and also to identify characteristics they shared. For example, I asked them to choose their educational background, their discipline, and their preferred research methods. They were also encouraged to select mentors (from the profiles we had discussed earlier) and to select special issues (e.g., policy formulation, use of social media, worker health and safety) that they found interesting. Similarly, students chose work environments (e.g., laboratory, industry,), associates (e.g., other specialists, teams), and personal styles and values. Many of them felt comfortable, for example, with an authoritarian instead of an egalitarian style, or with being process-oriented instead of product-oriented. Above all, the students chose traits that reflected their own personal interests, but that would work also on a professional level.

Once the students took the survey, I composed narratives of their learning identities that they could then use as an interpretive lens when reading or exploring resource material.

Rick Sanchez, Risk Management and Communications Officer

Rick uses his BA in business and MA in management and policy to help the Alberta Provincial Health and Safety Policy Division create and formulate effective community health policy. He has worked with Yvonne Winslow, freelance writer and science media specialist, to develop collaborative, community-based risk management policies for the province. Rick also teaches a health and safety course at a local college and presents regularly at the Alberta Conference on Workplace Health and Safety (ACWHS).

Personal Statement

“I enjoy working with my colleagues and in small communication teams to develop community health efforts. I just like watching small-scale efforts have large-scale results. I approach my work in a casual way, but like all my efforts to result in effective communication products. My favorite quote is from Aristotle, ‘Democracy arose from men thinking that if they are equal in any respect they are equal in all respects.'”

Keywords: health, safety, community, risk, management, government, policy, consulting, university, business.

Phase Three: Use Learning Identities in Activities

Students could now follow exercises with a degree of focus brought about by their “you-but-not-you” learning identity. For example, “From the perspective of your learning identity, find an article [from a health and safety magazine] that a) you might find valuable in your work, b) you might want to suggest to your associates or mentor, or c) reflects the kinds of values you think are important. Read the article. Write a brief paragraph telling why you chose this article.” Another exercise listed some risk communication websites and suggested the following: “From the point of view of your learning identity, pick a topic or concern that you face in your work. Then research that topic on the three websites above. Imagine you have been asked by your employer to suggest good Web resources for your colleagues. Write a brief critique of the websites, explaining what treasures or what gaps you find in them. Keep your issue or concern in mind as you write.”

Phase Four: Evaluate the Use of the Learning Identities

The results of a focused investigation of resources, such as indicated above, using learning identities as a filter proved to be mixed (as one might expect when trying something out for the first time). While some students saw their constructed identities as an interesting challenge that motivated them to look for something new in their reading experience, others questioned the activity, wondering why they just couldn’t use their own identities. Their reactions to using these lenses for a few exercises suggested ways one might adapt the process. For example, it seemed important that the students felt comfortable that the identity they created really did reflect “who they were” as well as “who they might be.” Similarly, I found it useful to remind them of their identity and use it in class discussions that ensued from their readings. In sum, the students’ willingness to enter into the persona, or learning identity, was what made the experiment somewhat successful.

Conclusion

The challenge of engaging students in readings and research faces all teachers. Those fortunate enough to have the tools of the technical communicator at hand can find some ideas, in this case personas, that they can adapt to a variety of learning situations. And, as I found, just trying something like this is a learning experience in itself.

Thomas Barker (ttbarker@ualberta.ca) is professor in the Communications and Technology Graduate Program at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.