Hands-Eyes-Voices: A Historicized View of Embodied Learning, Social Relations, and Educational Equity

• In Event: 34.018 - Excellence in Education Research: Early-Career Scholars and Their Work

Abstract

This project works from the premise that educational settings overtly focused on “access” and “equity” may, through particular assumptions and interactions, reproduce inequities in explicit and implicit ways. McAffee’s (2014) ethnographic study of an untracked math classroom shows how racial patterns and hierarchies emerged through the accumulation of everyday interactions, including the forms of talk enacted by the teacher. Medin and Bang (2014) illustrate how access to STEM learning opportunities is insufficient for bringing about substantive forms of equity if students’ indigenous ways of knowing are disregarded within pedagogical interactions. As a learning scientist and qualitative methodologist, I argue that this problem highlights the crucial need for empirical analyses of educational equity as a relational and interactional accomplishment that supports consequential forms of learning for non-dominant youth (Gutiérrez, 2008; Nasir, et. al., 2006). Further, while existing research on learning and equity provides detailed analysis of pedagogical talk, less attention has been given to the embodied (multi-modal and non-verbal) dimensions of educational interaction. Likewise, research on embodied learning tends not to foreground questions of power, relationality, and educational injustice/justice. Gaining a deeper understanding of how verbal and embodied forms of pedagogical interaction either restrict or support learning will therefore contribute to building adequately perceptive tools for the design and study of equitable educational environments.

Author

• Shirin Vossoughi, Northwestern University