Co-Designing Opportunities to Learn in the Kanien'kehá:ka Digital Youths' Project: Processes and Affects of Technocultural Change

• In Event: 25.033 - Designing for Learning With Digital Media Alongside Indigenous Communities: Ethics, Allyships, and Technocultural Change

Abstract

This paper describes a postqualitative approach to design research for literacy research and the learning sciences broadly, illustrating its use in a community-based research project focused on the following: How do adolescents currently living in the Kahnawake Mohawk Territory, a First Nations reserve near Montreal, use digital media in their everyday lives to develop their traditional, cultural identities and their identities as contemporary youth moving beyond the reserve? How might illustrations of this productive relation of identities affect change in teachers’ perceptions of digital media’s effects on sustaining traditional Mohawk culture? These questions emerged in conversations between the authors, a Mohawk literacy educator and a university researcher, as they worked with on-reserve educators skeptical of digital media, which they believe to be diluting traditional Mohawk culture amongst contemporary teens. Addressing their research questions, the authors employed a postqualitative approach to design, which develops concepts through engaged, anthropological experience (Lenz Taguchi & St. Pierre, 2017). They developed the concept “becoming traditional,” or the continuous emergence of what it means to be traditional in relation to shifting communicative landscapes and popular cultures, as a ‘thought experiment’ to exercise their capacities to respond in the moment to the affective intensities unavoidable in their social change project comprising two phases: (1) mentoring Mohawk teens in producing digital artifacts of their “becoming traditional” across multiple digital media in their everyday lives; (2) conversations with their on-reserve teachers around these artifacts.
The paper describes the development of new concepts such as “becoming traditional” as central to postqualitative design research, and affect as a central concept for knowing and producing change-in-the-making, like mediation in post hoc sociocultural analysis. Specifically, in both phases researchers felt moments of tension, surprise, shame, and passion, for example, that produced relational transformations between, youth-youth, youth-teachers, Mohawk researcher-white researcher, etc. These relational transformations were a registering on the body of something happening, a feeling of relations between human bodies, materials, time, and space becoming different. The paper therefore generates relational transformations as a feeling of educational change that works alongside mediation-focused social change projects in literacy studies and the learning sciences.

Authors

• Christian Ehret, McGill University

• Curran Katsi’sorókwas Jacobs, Nova Career Centre

• Luka Ciklovan, McGill University