Designing for Collective Transformation: Layered Intergenerational Learning

• In Event: 63.067 - Approaches to Informal Pedagogies: Preparing Educators to Teach in Informal Environments

Abstract

Objective
The present study examined the processes of mediated praxis (Gutierrez & Vossoughi, 2010), that is, how an educational ecology was organized to foster reflection and action (Freire, 1970). This study analyzed learning trajectories of undergraduate teachers whose participation spanned two environments: an innovative STEM-oriented after-school program and an associated undergraduate pre-service teacher course. We focus on the undergraduate classroom centrally to understand the following: How is the learning ecology organized to foster shifts in undergraduate understandings of teaching, learning and culture?

Theoretical Framework
Grounded in cultural historical theories of learning, social design experiments attempt to re-organize traditional forms of learning and re-mediate functional systems by saturating environments with new tools and practices oriented toward transformative ends (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010). Designed to foster mediated praxis, participants in social design experiments engage in a tool-saturated ecology organized around practices that promote reflection, build theory, and develop new pedagogical imaginations.

Data Sources and Methods:
Over the course of a semester, we collected 35 hours of undergraduate classroom interactions, 30 hours of audio from the instructional team and research team meetings, and 100 artifacts (75 field notes designed to help students integrate theory and practice, and 25 end of the semester self-reflections). Video and audio data were content logged, coded and analyzed through multiple analytic memos and data displays (Miles & Huberman, 1994).

Results
We documented shifts in undergraduate understandings of teaching, learning and culture—concepts central to robust pedagogical practices—that occurred through the appropriation of new theoretical tools, reflective-mediated practice, and sense-making. These shifts included an examination of undergraduate assumptions around teaching, learning and culture and resulted in new ways of engaging with the elementary students from the after-school program. With a focus on the design of the learning ecology and mediational tools present to foster such shifts, we found two important evidence driven design elements for a social design experiment: 1) intergenerational layers of learning, and 2) development of a pedagogical landscape. Intergenerational layers of learning included simultaneous learning across elementary students, undergraduate and graduate students where all participants were positioned as learners. This practice privileged a different distribution of labor—one that emphasized joint activity and distributed expertise—in ways that challenged the binary roles of teacher and student (Rogoff, 2003). Further we conceptualized the notion of a pedagogical landscape through boundary artifacts that stitched theory and practice together across environments and cultivated a “mirror” to create spaces for refracting and working through tensions (Engeström, 2001; Gutierrez, 2008). Understanding the pedagogical landscape allowed for a collective and developmental approach to learning (Cole & Gajdamashko, 2009).

Scholarly Significance
Through understanding the design and presence of mediational tools, this study contributes an understanding of how to design learning ecologies that help novice teachers identify and examine assumptions toward teaching, learning and culture, and more specifically re-conceptualizes how all students can be “smart” in an environment intentionally designed to support expansive learning (Gutiérrez, Hunter, & Arzubiaga, 2009). This is essential toward developing learning environments toward transformative ends, particularly for nondominant youth.

Authors

• Elizabeth Mendoza, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Kris D. Gutiérrez, University of California - Berkeley