"It's Not a Daydreaming Center, it's a School": Exploring Conflicting Educational Purposes through Design Futures CSCW024

Through design workshops and ethnographic fieldwork, this manuscript explores how students in hybrid alternative high-schools navigate their conflicting desires for nurturing educational environments and efficient certification. We highlight two competing visions in students’ designs of future educational technologies: one of affirmative and supportive spaces that address student mental health, sense of community, and identity needs; another that prioritizes expediency through self-paced, on-demand learning. We make three key contributions: 1) documenting how students struggle to navigate competing educational purposes; 2) analyzing how current hybrid school structures meet and conflict with student desires; 3) demonstrating how design ideas originating from students embody these tensions, sometimes offering paths forward for creative reconciliation. We argue that hybrid schools represent a critical site for understanding the future of educational technology, and advocate for designing digital tools and platforms that balance care and efficiency while supporting diverse student needs in increasingly digitized educational landscapes.