Imaginative Geographies of Community Change: Supporting Evidence-Based Argumentation From Spatial Data in Schools

• In Event: Literacies in Circulation: Exploring a Transliteracies Framework for Understanding Diverse Learning Pathways

Abstract

Purpose: This paper reports on classroom design experiments (Brown, 1992; Cobb, Confrey, diSessa, Lehrer, & Schauble, 2003) that constructed youth learning ecologies leveraging spatial argumentation for civic participation. Spatial argumentation (i.e., producing, critically interpreting, and making arguments with spatial data) is an emerging practice of contemporary life that fits within the broader context of making meaning and decisions from multiple, multimodal texts (Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear, & Leu, 2008). We investigated culturally and spatially responsive processes for supporting primarily African American youth in urban contexts in making spatial arguments supported by digital and geospatial tools. These multimedia arguments were a new form of civic action for participating youth.

Framework: Contemporary processes of civic engagement and community change require multiple stakeholders, including youth, to learn how to translate perceptions and affective engagements with places of importance into professionally-conceived/formal categories of space (e.g., Taylor, 2013). This translation process is critical for formulating persuasive arguments about how and why aspects of a neighborhood or community should change. A transliteracies framework enables an analytic lens on the movement of spatial arguments, themselves, in processes of change. For example, as these arguments, produced by multiple stakeholders, travel among those same stakeholders in community meetings (e.g., community zoning board meetings) and across documents (e.g., maps of proposed changes to zoning regulations), their success at effecting change depends on resonance and uptake across multiple temporal and spatial scales.

Method and Data: This design research involved iterative cycles of design, instruction, and analysis of a spatial argumentation curriculum in two classroom settings (middle school and high school) involving 60 students in a large urban school district. Data included field notes, audio and video recordings of design and teaching sessions, and interviews with teachers and students.

Findings: In this paper, we identify resonance and uptake as salient features of young people’s engagements with spatial argumentations in interrogating and producing imaginative geographies—i.e., representations of self and other formulated in connection and contrast across geographic space and time (see, e.g., Driver, 2005; Gregory, 1995; Said, 1978). We articulate supports for teaching and learning young people’s critical engagements with imaginative geographies 1) as a way of interpreting relevant histories, identities, and ideologies that have shaped their present passages through space and place and 2) as a way of effecting change in their communities and producing new futures.

Significance: While research points to young people’s unique perspectives on community life and on processes of civic engagement (e.g., Dennis, 2006; Kingston, 2007), few studies have focused on designing youth learning ecologies to support civic participation leveraging spatial argumentation. Although recent policy documents that guide instruction in U.S. schools (e.g., CCSS, NGSS) have prioritized the evaluation and interpretation of complex texts and the formulation of evidence-based arguments from multiple texts as vital skills for youth, spatial argumentation has received scant attention. This work offers innovative methods for engaging in teaching and learning spatial argumentation in schools and a theoretical perspective--imaginative geographies--that will inform future design work.

Authors

• Nathan C. Phillips, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Katherine Headrick Taylor, University of Washington - Seattle

• Simeko Washington, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Shawndra Allen, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Benjamin Sugar, Georgia Institute of Technology