Learning as Movement: An Ecological Approach to Research With Nondominant Communities

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

Abstract

Objectives
This study examines the use of an ecological approach to research with nondominant communities. Drawing data from a multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, 1995), we interrogate the ways by which students develop repertoires of practice (Vossoughi & Gutiérrez, 2014) across place, space, and time. We find that attention to students’ ecological histories enables us to develop a broader picture of the tools, support systems, and constraints available to the student, and thus design new tools and arrangements for proleptic learning.

Perspectives
Ecological approaches to research are based on the idea that human development occurs through processes of progressively more complex reciprocal interaction between the human organism and the people, objects, and symbols in its environment (Bronfenbrenner, 1994). However, rather than viewing ecologies as nested levels (Bronfenbrenner, 1994) surrounding the individual, we utilize a Vygotskian perspective that understands ecology as “actively achieved” (Cole, 1996, p.134), “like tangled roots” (Packer, 2010, p. 24) rather than concentric circles (Gutiérrez, 2016). Activity systems exist interdependently as ever changing, fluid practices, grounded in a larger history (Cole, 1996; Lee, 2010).

In contrast to conventional ethnographic research which focuses on a single site, a multi-sited ethnographic approach to research examines how cultural meanings, objects, and identities are circulated across time-space (Marcus, 1995). This mobility allows for an ethnography of movement and change (Vossoughi & Gutiérrez, 2014), shifting the methodological gaze away from deficit perspectives, highlighting instead, sites of boundary crossing and hybridity.

Methods & Data
Data that inform this discussion include home video recordings, family interviews, and survey data captured across multiple sites within a learning ecology linked through a common vision, theory, and goals. These include: 1) a preservice teacher course organized to foster expansive notions of learning; 2) an innovative STEM-oriented after-school program; 3) family home data from fourteen families of participants in the afterschool program; and 4) research team meetings. Video and audio sources were logged in two- and ten-minute intervals, then further reduced through analytic memos. Sources were then triangulated and analyzed using open-ended and focused thematic codings (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007).

Results
Our emergent analysis suggests that an ecological approach enables researchers to capture horizontal or everyday forms of learning, and the transformation and hybridization of practices across space and time. We find that learning occurs as movement across both informal and formal settings. As a result, expertise is in reality a distributed phenomenon. Furthermore, we find that tools can enable or constrain learning across practices, as both tools and practices get reorganized as people move within and across ecologies.


Significance
Often, understandings of learning, either formal or informal, are observed in a singular setting. The data allows us to investigate learning across multiple settings, paying particular attention to the everyday learning that occurs in the home of fourteen families from nondominant communities. By attending to learning as movement across classroom, afterschool, and home life settings, this study pushes us to develop more nuanced understandings of learning as a sociocultural process, enabling researchers and educators to design for more robust learning environments in the classroom.

Authors

• Peng Yin, Berkeley University of California

• Krista L. Cortes, University of California - Berkeley

• Patrick Johnson, University of California - Berkeley

• Koyuki Suzuki, University of California - Berkeley

• Kris D. Gutiérrez, University of California - Berkeley