The Contexts of Social Dreaming, Part 2. Educational Dignity: Keeping Our Eyes on Educational Processes

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

Abstract

In the two social design experiments addressed in this paper, social transformation is sought by creating a significant re-organization of systems of activity in which participants becoming designers of their own futures is an essential aim. In other words, a desired outcome of these interventions was the development of conscious–i.e., more intentional–historical actors (author 2, 2003) who can become designers of their own futures (author 1, 2008). At the same time, the two efforts differed in important ways. Las Redes, a university and school/community academic year partnership, was an afterschool environment designed to improve undergraduate and teacher education experiences, as well as to open up a rich opportunity for co-learning for K-5 children and their university student partners who were striving to develop a new pedagogical imagination and expansive learning theories and cultural-historical understandings. MSLI brought high school youth from migrant farmworker backgrounds from across the state of California to UCLA to participate in a month-long summer educational experiment that reframed what it meant to be a learner and an agentic social actor. Employing hybrid language practices, the conscious use of social theory, play and the imaginary situation, the program’s historicizing social science and literacy practices worked to link the past, the present, and an imagined future (author 1, 2008). Both papers draw on empirical data from the two designed environments: video recordings of instruction and joint activity across a range of learning practices, activity logs of videos, cognitive ethnographies, curricula, field notes, analytic memos, and student generated artifacts (e.g., writing, responses to guiding questions, digital stories, etc.).

Matters of dignity are always at stake in educational activity (author & Vossoughi, 2014). Usually, the concept of dignity is approached deductively and treated as a matter of belief rather than fact (See: McCrudden ed., 2013; Waldron & Dan-Cohen eds., 2013). Here, the notion that dignity in education can be studied inductively through close attention to talk and interaction is submitted. Using audio-video data from the MSLI, the second author develops the concept of "educational dignity" or the multifaceted sense of a person’s value generated via substantive intra- and inter-personal educational experiences that recognize and cultivate one’s mind, humanity, and creative potential. This paper will demonstrate how a method grounded in an examination of the "total social set-up" (Dewey, 1938) of the educational process can help alter and sharpen the "professional vision" (Goodwin, 1994) of educators and policy-makers. Through an analysis of the MSLI context, the author will show how a social interactional approach can be used to establish the "social fact" (Durkheim, 1895) of dignity. The paper further discusses how MSLI was an educational-ethical context that both envisioned and organized learning as a means for shaping the world into what it ought to be—i.e., it was a setting that practiced the historical activity of social dreaming. To conclude, the paper demonstrates how the social fact of educational dignity can be used to reinvigorate the argument regarding education as a fundamental right of personhood. (495)

Author

• Manuel Espinoza, University of Colorado - Denver