Maintaining White Innocence: Reconceptualizing Inquiry Through Social Design–Based Experiments

• In Event: Being/Becoming an Activist Scholar: Lessons From Cultural-Historical Activity Research

Abstract

This talk addresses two related themes: 1) How we as researchers study cultural communities lies in the intersection of our methods, theoretical perspectives, our personal and professional ideologies, beliefs, and practices, and the position of power and privilege we hold vis-­à-­vis the communities involved in our research and in the academy, and 2) Rupturing educational inequality and ensuing inequities involves new forms of inquiry that help reconceptualize what it means to work with nondominant communities. Toward this end, the paper extends earlier work to examine how educational researchers become complicit in framing youth from nondominant communities in ways that reinscribe and support dominant narratives about members of cultural communities. Research about nondominant communities is generally conceptualized from a majoritarian perspective, making the dominant subject position and its discourses invisible, such that commonsense approaches to inquiry and understandings of cultural communities are sustained. The paper then advances an approach to design research that is organized around a commitment to transforming the educational and social circumstances of members of non-dominant communities as a means of promoting social equity and learning. I refer to this approach as social design-based experimentation.

Author

• Kris D. Gutiérrez, University of California - Berkeley