Designing a New Public Sphere: Learning and Civic Dreaming Through Digital Democratic Dialogue

• In Event: Practicing Democracy Online: The Potential and Perils of Civic Education in the Digital Age

Abstract

This paper illuminates the organization of learning within a teacher digital design collective engaged in a movement to foster educational justice through the practice of critical civics pedagogy. It responds to this year’s conference call for scholarship that delves deeply into how partnerships among teachers, researchers, and youth can be leveraged to support the public good. Specifically, it examines how teachers utilized digital communication tools to create and launch interactive, cross-site learning experiences that helped themselves and their students imagine equitable and agentic social futures. It analyzes how the structures of the collective’s activity system, which was mediated across digital and geographic space, honored expansive expressive repertoires of practice among adult and youth participants and encouraged heteroglossic dialogue (Bakhtin, 1981; Vossoughi, 2014) to elicit dreams of a renewed public sphere. This work offers a unique contribution to learning in the humanities and social sciences by exploring the possibilities and tensions of advancing civic reasoning and discourse in the digital media environment; it also contributes to a more critical sociocultural theory of civic learning and development by exploring the ‘means’ of critical civic pedagogies rather than only the ‘ends’ (Vossoughi & Gutierrez, 2017).

The Digital Democratic Dialogue (3D) Project includes six high school humanities teachers from across the United States who, along with two university researchers, formed a working group aimed at transforming today’s polarized and divided public life through fostering mutual humanization and dialogue in classroom civics pedagogy. Grounded in social design-based methodology (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016; Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016), this paper draws upon participant observation of multiple events and artifacts over the course of one school year – including team meetings, personal reflections, interviews, and collaboratively designed curricular materials – to show the learning that occurred as participants moved between the activity systems of the 3D project, their individual communities, schools, classroom contexts, their personal sociopolitical identities, and discourses of public life.

The paper draws upon frameworks of cultural historical activity theory (Cole & Engestrom, 1993) and critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970) and shares interpretive ethnographic analysis of several key interactions among the participants to reveal how the activity system of the 3D Project afforded opportunities to re-mediate binaries that often stymie efforts at critical civic dreaming (Mirra, Coffey, & Englander, 2018) and movement building in formal learning spaces (Zavala, 2016) – binaries including liberal/conservative, school/community, and objectivity/bias. It focuses on moments of digital discourse that speak to possibilities of dialogue across difference as well as the ways that the grammar of schooling and normative structures of U.S. civic life continuously interrupt and complicate these moments. In addition to interactions between adult participants, it introduces an interaction that occurred between students from all six schools through a digital communication platform to demonstrate how young people dialogued about their civic concerns.

This paper will be of value to educators, organizers, and researchers by making teacher (and student) learning publicly visible and pushing the purpose of public education toward the creation of a more just and empathic society.

Author

• Nicole Mirra, Rutgers University