Designing Critical Dialogue for Equity

• In Event: 51.078 - MTCC Roundtable Session 21
  In Roundtable Session: 51.078-4 - Tensions and Possibilities for Reimagining Equity-Based Design Research

Abstract

Given the enormous diversity that exists in our society today, learning scientists advocate a reconceptualization of the heterogeneity of human experiences and practices as fundamental to learning (Rosebery et al., 2010). However, as most studies are done in contexts with learners from non-dominant backgrounds, there is a little research regarding how to design for equity in multicultural contexts, especially when learners disagree ideologically amongst one another (Matusov, 2009). Drawing on Bakhtinian theory of dialogism and internally persuasive discourse (IPD), I argue that designing equitable learning spaces for multicultural engagement is more than creating spaces for marginalized voices. It is about creating spaces for critical dialogue, or IPD, where we must “struggle” (Bakhtin,1981), dialogically engage with “historically, culturally, and socially important voices” in relation to our own, and “develop responsible replies to them” (Matusov, 2009). This study explores tensions and possibilities as we design for critical dialogue through the employment of particular practices, specifically, whole-class discussion and documentary production.

The study features a civic documentary curriculum on immigration implemented in a high school social studies class of 30 racially and ideologically diverse learners. I attend to the presence/absence of dialogicality of diverse ideological perspectives in relation to two primary practices in the design, whole-class discussion and documentary production. The 10-week curriculum is informed by funds of knowledge (FoK) research (Moll et al., 1992), with an equity orientation to access students’ everyday resources, knowledge, and experiences, particularly marginalized students. It began with three weeks of discussion sessions on debates and policy positions around immigration. Students then worked in teams to produce short documentaries on how immigration policy affected people in their community. The data set includes field notes, video recordings, student documentaries, and interviews with each student group at the end of curriculum. To characterize respective ideological spaces, for whole-class discussion, I used a hybrid approach of inductive and deductive coding to analyze transcribed sessions by turns to identify the array of perspectives on immigration and emerging themes related to students’ interactions in terms of dialogism. For documentary production, I applied the immigration perspectives to analyze one focal group’s interview in conjunction with their video, focusing on the presence/absence of dialogicality between perspectives.

Findings from the discussion session demonstrate the potential of bringing in immigrant students’ FoK as it affords access to experiential knowledge and humanist perspectives, which are often marginalized in civic discussions. Nonetheless, these viewpoints were not dialogically engaged as the ideological divide generally followed along two opposing stances toward immigration, restrictive versus non-restrictive. In contrast, through documentary production, the focal group restructured the relationships between the two stances by drawing on their profilees’ experiences, while also responding to the conflicts in class by problematizing the opposing claims. These findings point to the deficiency of conceptualizing equity as simply leveraging non-dominant voices and highlight the importance of dialogic engagement with marginalized viewpoints in multicultural contexts. They further illustrate the potentialities of documentary practice in creating equitable spaces for critical dialogue.

Author

• Amy Chang, Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy Human Development and Social Policy