Shifting Deficit Thinking: Understanding Purposeful Organization and Movement in a Social Design Experiment

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Our interpretations and our biases are difficult to recognize because they shape our ‘common sense’ understandings of the world (Gramsci, 1999). Educational programs, like people, are comprised of ideologies that emerge through history and solidify through the establishment of program structures (Moll, 1998). Increasingly, for example, policies and strict accountability measures are reifying and reducing learning to memorization and test scores. Further, teaching is being correlated to students’ performance on the tests (Darling-Hammons, 2012). Through participation in multiple settings and systems, educators are exposed to a range of common sense or everyday notions of teaching and learning, many of which have limited opportunity to be examined systematically. One goal of research is to find new ways of knowing and seeing to challenge our common sense notions about race, educational attainment, equity, class, and other social categories to work toward a more equitable educational system (McDermott & Raley, 2011). There is a need to identify and challenge common sense understanding of teaching, learning and culture and their intersection with social categories to shift pervasive deficit views of non-dominant children. The central question, then, is how to design learning environments that engage in reflective practices of both the self and systems and provide more expansive notions of teaching and learning through theory and practice.
One approach, a social design experiment, pioneered by Gutiérrez, is a design based, formative experiment that seeks to create transformative learning ecologies in pre-service teaching preparation (Gutiérrez, 2008; Gutiérrez and Vossoughi, 2010). A social design experiment is a complex and equity-oriented learning ecology that fosters intergenerational learning through isomorphic environments. It is also saturated with tools designed to engage participants in reflective practices and renegotiate the relationship between learning and teaching to create environments were all participants can be smart (ibid). For this presentation, I gathered data on a social design experiment that engages undergraduates in theories of learning with an associated elementary school practicum site organized around the same theories of learning being taught in the university setting. I focused on the organization of the undergraduate course and learning trajectories of the undergraduate students as well as the instructional team.

Key Elements and Preliminary Findings
For this poster, I present three key elements of my findings: 1) shifts in undergraduate understandings of teaching, learning and culture; 2) the messiness of tensions that lead to deeper understandings of theory and practice; and 3) tools that aid in the cohesion of the learning ecologies.

Author

• Elizabeth Mendoza, University of Colorado - Denver