Desettling Colonial Constructions of Time in Representing the Development of Statistical Understanding

• In Event: Decolonial Mapmaking: Critical Methodologies Contextualizing Disruption, Refusal, and Relationality

Abstract

Objective
The theoretical and methodological choices we make as researchers convey how we view the world (Paris & Winn, 2014). They influence, and are influenced by, how we situate ourselves, the studies we undertake, and how we represent the communities with whom we work (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). This paper presents a secondary analysis of work by an interdisciplinary research team to trace the development of one youth’s statistical reasoning. Analysis focuses on three representations and their underlying multi-sited analytic orientation (Vossoughi & Gutiérrez, 2014). I ask, in what ways does a multi-sited orientation to mapping desettle participants’ and researchers’ positionalities as organizational stakeholders in learning spaces?

Research Setting
Data comes from an afterschool program Digital Studio (DS), committed to supporting underserved youth via learning in the areas of documentary film production, critical literacy, and civic engagement. Data centers around Lucas, who identifies as Brown - the child of a Bengali father and a white mother of French descent.

Theoretical Framework
Analyses are undergirded by a multi-sited sensibility (Vossoughi & Gutiérrez, 2014); understanding people as participants in multiple activity systems “...urg[ing] us to pay equal attention to the practices and forms of human ingenuity that emerge in and through the connections/tensions/contradictions within and across various social spaces and activity systems-particularly for non-dominant youth” (p. 607). While the data comes from within the single physical site of the program, we followed analytical threads that lead away from the initial site (e.g., home, school, childhood/adulthood, etc.). Analytically, this de-centers the official practices, goals, and scripts that organize the local context, and illuminates, youths’ engagements as sensible in relation to a history of participation within and across contexts (Author, 2019).

Data & Methods
Analyses of the audio/video observations iterated between microanalytic methods of interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) and grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006). This allowed us to see the development of Lucas’s statistical understanding as part of a broader ecology of his activities and experiences. We developed three representations (Image 1), or Mathematics Learning Pathways (Ma & Kelton, 2017) to make salient either ongoing activities, participants’ past/present/future (imagined) experiences, or personal/hypothetical experiences. The team met to discuss the analytic insights and limitations of each representation.

Findings & Implications
Studying learning through a multi-sited perspective de-centers a colonized sense of time and space by positioning past/future/imagined experiences and places as part of ongoing activity. Although the first analysis illuminated Lucas’s learning as connected with multiple sites, secondary analysis revealed that all three representations privileged linear time. This produced a Marxian/modernist telling of Lucas’s development as a trajectory from less to more knowledgeable, and obscured much of the ethnographic analysis (non-linear webs of times/ places/peoples/histories) afforded by taking a multi-sited orientation. As researchers we must reflect on how we conceptualize and represent data so that we honor stakeholders’ lived experiences. Interweaving multi-sited and decolonizing perspectives pushes against “common sense” thinking about time as linear. Further work will involve co-analysis with participants in developing the many possible representations of experience.

Author

• Sarah C. Radke, The Town School