The Contexts of Social Dreaming, Part 1. Designing Tertiary Artifacts: Learning for Possible Futures

• In Event: Imagining Future Selves and Possibilities: The Engines of Education in the Public Sphere

Abstract

The overall “Contexts of Social Dreaming” presentation includes two related but separate papers that address different dimensions of what it means to design transformative learning environments organized around the object social dreaming; that is, a collective dream and shared vision of a more just world now and in the future (Author 1, 2008; Author 2, 2009). Drawing on a body of empirical work on social design-based experiments that have had remarkable sustainability and academic success for the youth from nondominant communities, this set of two papers examine the historical, theoretical/methodological, and justice-oriented commitments and imperatives that undergird and inform an expansive approach to education, and learning more specifically, in two related ecologies. Developed in response to failing systems of education and learning, the Migrant Student Leadership Institute (MSLI) and the Las Redes afterschool program were designed communities developed across several decades as a means of promoting social and educational equity and transformative forms of learning for youth from a) non-dominant—notably immigrant—dual-language backgrounds; and b) migrant farmworker backgrounds.

This paper reports on two longstanding social design experiments that sought to transform social institutions and their practices through mutual relations of exchange with youth, teachers, and community as valued partners. These carefully cultivated ecologies functioned as mutually informing efforts that overlapped in time, people, and ethical/educational orientation. The author examines how each intervention instantiated a shared set of design and humanist-oriented principles that foregrounded 1) deep attention to history, 2) a focus on re-mediating activity (e.g., a focus on reorganizing the functional system, rather than fixing individuals); 3) employing a dynamic model of culture, where diversity is a key resource for learning/sustainability; 4) employing a cultural-historical theoretical orientation to learning/development; 5) a persistent emphasis on equity across the entire span of the design process—including the theorization, design, and implementation; 6) an emphasis on resilience and change, where change implicates the individual, the collective, and the ecology; and 7) an end goal of social and education transformation and sustainability (author & Jurow, 2016). A more situated analysis examines how the seamless movement of people (primarily graduate student researchers and instructors) across the two efforts created a circuit of experience between the two settings in ways that deeply shaped one another. Specifically, the analyses focus on how Las Redes’ (and author 1’s) Vygotskian (Vygotsky, 1978) roots provided a learning theory for MSLI in ways that distinguished it from other “consciousness-raising” efforts, with human and future-oriented learning at the center. It is what, as author 2 notes, “gave the heart and mind of MSLI a method”—a method that fostered a portability of innovations across sites. Several organizing constructs are examined: prolepsis, tertiary artifacts, historicity. The organizing construct of prolepsis (Cole, 1996), where learning is understood as the organization of possible futures is interrogated to understand the “productive tension between present and possible social realities” (author 1 & Vossoughi, 2010, p. 111). Finally, Wartofsky’s (1979) notion of tertiary artifacts and the importance of an historical epistemology, central to the designs, are reported.
(500 words)

Author

• Kris Gutierrez, University of California - Berkeley