Interrogating the Notion of Giving Voice: Designing for Transformative Agency Across Learning Ecologies

• In Event: Learning From Learners' Voices: Resistance and Transformative Activism Through Liberatory Education

Abstract

Robust and equitable learning environments are often conceptualized as spaces that give and amplify voice. The current context of COVID-19 has fomented arguments that the “digital divide” is exacerbating the silencing of voices, specifically of non-dominant learners, by obstructing access to digital instruments and educators. These arguments often essentialize digital tools and the adult educators behind them as the givers of voice. This paper examines how a group of adult educators, researchers, and parents learned how to imagine and voice new social futures for themselves and their communities in the context of a digitally-mediated learning community. More specifically, we illuminate how these adults learned how to design for robust learning environments that provided young people an opportunity to leverage their cultural repertoires of practice (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003) as they jointly engaged in the everyday digital practice of video-game play. Through this research, we argue that rather than relying on digital technology as panacea and adults as givers of voice, that consequential learning can emerge from the intentional design of critical digital pedagogies that center design principles of play as leading activity (Gutierrez, Higgs et al, 2019), relational equity (DiGiacomo & Gutiérrez, 2016), multivoicedness, and transformative agency (Gutiérrez, Becker, et al, 2019).

Study participants included thirty-two (32) adult participants of a summer graduate course title Critical Digital Pedagogies. These participants included pre-service teachers, in-service teachers, non-profit educators/directors, and researchers from the U.S. and Finland. We triangulated multiple data sources (field notes, semi-structured interviews, recordings of video-conference class meetings) collected over the five-week course, and engaged in the following types of data analysis: (1) fieldnotes and semi-structured interviews that were inductively coded; (2) video analysis of recorded sessions; and (3) discourse analysis of key events. Through these analyses we examined the micro-moments through which relationships were built across a heterogeneous group, and skills and knowledge were forged through the mediation of online and face-to-face spaces.

Our analyses revealed that everyday digital game play was a rich zone of learning for young people, and that when our adult participants and young people engaged in such practices it supported adults in learning how to see and design for the development of youth’s agency and voice. In this regard, a cultural historical approach to the design and examination of learning afforded our adult learners with the necessary conceptual tools in order to center equity, historicity, and sustainability in their work with young people.

Our work has implications for how we understand notions that educators and researchers are in the position to give voices, agency, or empower youth. We consider how these conceptions of giving voice suggest that learners can receive voice, power, and/or agency at specific predefined moments from adults. Instead, our work draws upon cultural historical perspectives to examine how learning environments can be co-designed to support teachers in learning how to amplify and leverage youth’s everyday cultural practices, especially within the context of online and virtual spaces.

Authors

• Arturo Cortez, University of Colorado - Boulder

• José Ramón Lizárraga, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Andy Castro, San Francisco Unified School District