Seeing Space Anew in Neoliberal Times: Transformative Pedagogies and Everyday Learning in the City

• In Event: 35.077 - MTCC Roundtable Session 13
  In Roundtable Session: 35.077-1 - Co-Designing (Analog and Digital) Social Futures: Leveraging Multimodality to Foster Educational Justice Locally and Globally

Abstract

This paper explores the role of youths’ everyday learning opportunities as crucibles for fostering new educational and social opportunities for non-dominant youth. In particular, the paper examines how novice teachers design for expansive learning environments (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016) that aim to leverage the full range of the linguistic and cultural practices that youth deploy when overcoming dilemmas in the various contexts they navigate within the San Francisco Bay Area. Specifically, I argue that justice pedagogies (Paris & Alim, 2017) must centralize the political, cultural, and historical processes that mediate the spaces non-dominant youth navigate across various sites within cities.

Non-dominant populations traverse spaces within the city and challenge the neoliberal re-making of the city (Author, in review) in their everyday lives. In particular, young people engage in everyday resistance (Pacheco, 2012) as they deploy, revise, and develop new cultural tools and practices within spaces of the city, such as sidewalks, parks, and even schools. In this respect, like any other social construction, youth engage in process of spatial production (Lefebvre, 1991; Soja, 1996). This paper advances a conceptual framework for understanding how pre-service teachers co-design robust pedagogical spaces that account for spatial production in order to organize for new equitable futures for non-dominant youth.

In this Social Design Experiment (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010), data draw on the learning and development of 10 novice teachers enrolled in a teacher education course at a university in San Francisco, California. In particular, the paper centralizes their systematic reflection over the course of several months as they co-design learning environments with youth.

Video and audio data were collected of activities in the teacher education classroom, as well as novice teachers’ field notes, other written assignments, and semi-structured interviews. Video and audio sources were logged and interviews were transcribed. All data was inductively coded. Units of analysis included teachers’ collective and individual sensemaking of pedagogical practices that leveraged, expanded, and amplified youths’ socio-spatial practices.

This study offers insight for how spatial production practices of non-dominant youth and teachers afforded more expansive (Engeström, 1987; Gutiérrez, 2008) and robust learning ecologies. Of note, this paper highlights how teachers made sense of and transformed the object of learning activities by designing for discursive practices, participation structures, tools, and task structures that supported the amplification of youths’ everyday cultural practices. In particular, the development of such practices emerged as teachers jointly-reflected on their pedagogical interactions in the teacher education classroom. Over the course of the semester, teachers learned how to see and design for learning that helps youth navigate the dilemmas they face in their everyday lives.

Few studies have examined how teacher learning can be designed to account for the role of spatial production, especially as it relates to the everyday practices of non-dominant. Asking teachers to focus on the everyday activities of non-dominant youth has important implications for how teachers develop practices and curricular interventions that lead to equitable learning opportunities and the development of transformative sites within the city.

Author

• Arturo Cortez, University of Colorado - Boulder