Syncretic Approaches to Consequential Learning: A Cultural and Historicizing Perspective to Building Resilient Ecologies

• In Event: 14.023 - Cultural and Ecological Approaches to Understanding and Designing for Resilience, Motivation, and Engagement

Abstract

We draw on our design-based research, namely social design experiments, to discuss how learning ecologies are designed to recruit and extend participants’ repertoires of practice in ways that promote sustained engagement in motivated and consequential learning. Social design experiments (Gutiérrez, 2008; Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010; Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2014) intentionally leverage the cultural practices that people develop in and across the contexts in which they participate. In these designed environments, participants engage in historicizing practices that provide ongoing opportunities to see that that the solutions to their problems could be located in and as part of ongoing sociocultural and temporal endeavors, and to take action from this position of historicized agency. This sociocultural approach to motivation and engagement poses a challenge to individualistic approaches that downplay how context and purpose mediate the development of motivated action.

To illustrate our approach, we share examples from two social design experiments to illustrate how we design for and leverage engagement and motivation in our research. The first case draws on ethnographic and video data and student artifacts from an 11-year social design experiment for high school students from migrant farmworker backgrounds to report how participants developed new stances toward learning, engaged academic and social action, and new identities. Organized around hybrid and syncretic practices, students were engaged in a rigorous program of learning and social change in which historicized learning was central. Seeing oneself historically involved locating oneself in a history in order to become a conscious “historical actor” who invoked the past so that it became a resource for current and future action. The second case focuses on the development of community leaders’ transforming motives and methods for organizing a more just future for their historically marginalized neighborhood. Promotoras, resident leaders hired to make connections between community non-profits and neighborhood residents, are a critical component of this approach. The syncretic approach we developed combined two distinct cultural practices with different aims, histories, and methods: a traditional health and engagement model and scientific practices of representing the practices of community advocacy. Through this, knowledge of the promotoras’ advocacy work circulates in wider networks of influence and the promotoras’ sense of efficacy and possibility in their role has expanded.

Authors

• Kris D. Gutiérrez, University of California - Berkeley

• A. Susan Jurow, University of Colorado - Boulder