Educational Intimacy, Prefiguration, and Learning Toward Social Change: The Case of an LGBTQ+ Youth Group

• In Event: Learning in and for Collective Action: An Intervention Into the Learning Sciences

Abstract

Background and Theoretical Perspectives
This study presents findings of a 1-year critical ethnography alongside Chroma (pseudonym), an LGBTQ+-themed community-based social group for youth ages 12–20 in the Midwestern USA. Chroma contains a Teaching Committee (TC), consisting of Chroma members who offer educative experiences for teachers and youth-serving professionals about working with LGBTQ+ youth. Since its founding in 2015, the TC has trained over 1,000 adults across local and regional platforms (Dennis et al., 2019). As an adult volunteer for the TC since 2016 and a researcher, I was an “unusually observant participant” (Erickson, 2012, p. 239) in the space. This study understands learning as organizing possible futures (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016). I therefore examine the TC’s learning through the question: what kinds of social relations developed in Chroma’s TC and how did those relations become consequential for youth’s future-shaping advocacy?

Method
This ethnographic study drew on audio data and youth-created agendas from 26 biweekly TC meetings (June 2018 - June 2019). In examining youth’s conceptual practices and their consequentiality (Hall & Jurow, 2015), I also sought to avoid a “damage centered” conception of youth activists (Tuck, 2009) and instead offer a more complex understanding of how their collective learning unfolded.

Findings
Findings reveal that TC meetings were abundant with sarcasm, adult facilitation rooted in humorous apprenticeship (Kirshner, 2015), and vulnerability through “intimate dissonance” (Sedgwick, 1992). This collection of sociodiscursive practices together foster what I term educational intimacy. Inspired by queer-theoretic perspectives on the learning sciences (McWilliams, 2016), educational intimacy describes the intimacy that exists between people who work together towards shared desired futures. Given its queer axiology, it is distinct from but related to other sociodiscursive qualities in equitable learning spaces such as intellectual respect (Rose, 2012; Vossoughi, 2015) and politicized trust (Vakil et al., 2016). Educational intimacy is not always present in learning environments, particularly in those where pedagogy is didactic and learners are tightly policed.

Discussion and Significance
This study theorizes how educational intimacy is consequential for learning as it supports prefiguration (Yates, 2014; Curnow, Davis, & Asher, 2019), in which Chroma youth make Chroma TC meetings into the kinds of sometimes-joyous/sometimes-difficult spaces that are typically denied to LGBTQ+ youth in school classrooms (Kosciw et al., 2018) — that is, the kind of space Chroma youth seek to bring about through their trainings and activism. For learning scientists, then, educational intimacy offers a new perspective on peer collaboration and adult facilitation practices that allow for deeper engagement and meaning-making. From the perspective of learning as future-organizing, educational intimacy offers an answer to Vossoughi and Booker’s (2017) questions, “What is the role of play in prefiguration? Of love?” (p. 228). This study helps characterize learning in community-based groups towards social transformation that learning scientists should take seriously.

Author

• Suraj Uttamchandani, Indiana University - Bloomington