Understanding Learning as Movement With Nondominant Communities: Ecological Approaches and Ethnographic Methods in Social Design Experiments

• In Event: 56.035 - Seeing Learning Anew: Shifting the Gaze Toward Ingenuity of the Everyday

Abstract

Objectives
In working toward the translation of “knowledge to action,” we centralize the question of how knowledge and practices can be translated into the design of more equitable research methods and responsive pedagogies—with the explicit aim of developing new futures and possibilities. In this poster we postulate that attention to design of learning ecologies and the methodologies within these spaces will help us, as a field, attend to the important question of how. Specifically, we elaborate the methods of Social Design Experiments, which seek to design and study learning ecologies through equity-oriented approaches (Gutierrez & Vossoughi, 2010; Mendoza 2014).

Perspectives
We locate this work in the field of design based research (DBR), in which research is used to conceptualize educational problems and enact solutions in a more useful, collaborative and socially relevant manner (Cobb, Confrey, diSessa, Lehrer, & Schauble, 2003, Penuel, Fishman, Cheng, & Sabelli, 2011). While sharing common features with DBR, Social Design Experiments are distinct in a number of ways including the role of participants and researchers and the object of activity, and evolved in response for the need to more centrally attend to issues of equity and diversity (authors, forthcoming). We seek to make explicit the methodologies embedded in social design that illuminate how social design experiments leverage empirical data and encourage critical reflection to allow for new ways of seeing everyday practices as meaningful sites for the investigation of teaching and learning.

Methods
Employing a multi-sited ethnographic approach (Marcus, 1995; Vossoughi & Gutierrez, 2015), we captured and analyzed data across multiple sites, including: 1) a preservice teacher course; 2) an innovative STEM-oriented after-school program and pre-service teacher practicum site, 3) family home data from 14 youth participants in the afterschool program, and 4) research team meetings. Our research team of professors, graduate students, and undergraduates organized this large corpus of data in order to enable the video and audio data to be content logged, coded, both inductively and deductively, and analyzed through multiple analytic memos and data displays (Miles & Huberman, 1994).

Results
This extensive data provided a generative source of understanding how learning and teaching practices travel across both space and time, and within social relationships. In this poster, we make explicit the role and design of ethnography in supporting the investigation of learning as it occurs in and across real-world settings to document learning as “movement” (Gutierrez, 2008). We elaborate on the role of ethnography as embedded in an equity-oriented research methodology that fosters rigor through triangulation, multivoicedness, and a tool seeing the world anew.

Scholarly Significance
This research holds equity-oriented implications for both education practitioners and researchers. The use of designed ethnography as a tool for in the moment reflection facilitates critical self-reflection, awareness of often unexamined assumptions, and offers insight to new ways of engaging in learning activities with students. A social design approach to research opens up new possibilities for methodologies that push against normative, and at times, inequitable ways of engaging in research with individuals and communities.

Authors

• Kris D. Gutiérrez, University of California - Berkeley

• Elizabeth Mendoza, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Daniela Kruel DiGiacomo, University of Colorado - Riverside

• Joanne Tien, University of California - Berkeley