Toward a Multisited Sensibility for Research on Connected Learning Across Ecologies, Borders, and Diasporic Communities

• In Event: Eco-Cultural Frames: Examining Challenges of Race, Ethnicity, and Class for Youth Learning, Development, and Resilience

Abstract

Rigorous equity oriented research on out-of-school learning environments demands innovation in the methodological tools we use to understand the inherent complexity and ingenuity of human development, particularly in the context of migration, diaspora, and other forms of transnational and intercultural movement. Such contexts can reorganize the academic and the everyday in ways that both leverage and deepen students’ repertories of practice—creating hybrid environments with syncretic forms of learning where students can come to know and try out possible selves (Author, 2008; O’Connor & Allen, 2010). This paper brings together cultural-historical approaches to human development with interpretive and multi-sited ethnography in order to: 1) develop ethnographic tools that attend to the ways young people learn within and across multiple contexts; 2) draw from and contrast the methodological insights of single and multi-sited ethnography and; 3) glean principles that help constitute a “multi-sited sensibility” appropriate for taking a more expansive approach to learning, and a more adequately complex stance towards young people from non-dominant and diasporic backgrounds. We argue throughout that a “multi-sited sensibility” reframes the power of ethnography and expands conceptions of learning (authors, in press; Marcus, 2009).

The object of this work is to understand, design, and sustain learning environments that account for the institutional, political, and social demands and contradictions youth negotiate as they move in and across the ecologies that constitute everyday life (Ito, et al., 2013). Following Author (2008), we use the metaphor “learning as movement” to call attention to the ways in which youth develop repertoires of practice, and to push on extant theoretical understandings in which the cultural nature of learning is underspecified or misunderstood. We offer an alternative to methodological approaches that do not account sufficiently for current sociopolitical/demographic realities, or attend to the literal and symbolic borderlands and hybrid spaces that give refuge to and engender ingenuity for diasporic and non-dominant communities. Specifically, we take a generative approach to expanding our methodological toolkit by re-appropriating more conventional ethnographic tools for new and dynamic educational realities. This includes defining interpretive educational ethnography as: 1) centrally concerned with learning the meanings of social action for the participants involved grounded in, but not limited to, participants’ own cultural terms—themselves always shifting and poly-vocal; 2) deliberately searching for tensions, contradictions and counter-examples—resources for developing complex renderings of cultural practices and the people who engage in and re-shape them and; 3) making the “familiar strange” in order to surface assumptions and make visible the ways participants in all settings, including those understood as normative, “live culturally” (authors, in press; Moll, 1997).

Toward this end, we argue that the migration, transmigration, and mobility practices of youth across the globe demand robust methods that work at the intersections of expansive theories of culture and learning and methods that place human activity at the center of analysis. In line with our previous work on social design experiments—design based research oriented towards consequential learning—we offer resources for the design, practice, and study of education as it could be.

Authors

• Kris D. Gutiérrez, University of California - Berkeley

• Shirin Vossoughi, Northwestern University