Cultivating Zones of Resistance: Designing Environments Where "Calling Out" Is the Learning Goal

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

Abstract

Using data from informal and formal contexts, we illustrate how different learning ecologies facilitated or constrained nondominant youth subversive naming practices. We highlight a specific discursive move, calling out, and illustrate how acts of calling out are fundamental to the production of counter-scripts (Gutierrez, 1995) that implicate power structures. We draw on theories of the sociopolitical dimensions of discourse (Bakhtin, 1934; Gee, 2007; Foucault, 1969; Vossoughi, 2014) to discuss how learners in each context recruited and created resources to contest power relations. We argue that critically attuning to these features of learners’ voices (naming and calling out) will facilitate the sociopolitical becoming of youth.

In the episode from a data literacy project in an urban northern California middle school, we describe how students called out “rigged” when their epistemic authority was revoked. After developing arguments about a scientific controversy, students viewed a science expert video that presented the “correct answer” to a previously open debate. The immediate response of one student calling out ‘it’s rigged” became a collective resource for others to join in to contest a project that felt deceitfully stacked against them. In the hip-hop arts education intervention in the Palestinian West Bank, we explore a youth-designed rap video in which a youth poet draws on hybrid language practices (Gutierrez et al., 1999): Arabic and English languages, symbols and dialect from Black American hip-hop vernacular (Alim, 2007), and local discourses from Palestinian political movements to call out how his environment has been rigged by forces of Israeli occupation.

The data utilized in this study includes videotaped classroom interactions between students and teachers in both contexts. We also included youth produced work, including written assignments from the science course and a rap video produced for the hip hop project. By exploring artifacts emerging from these two settings we consider how analyzing “calling out” episodes has design implications for the cultivation of liberatory education. We consider the processes, rituals, and tools (ideological and material) that co-constituted these episodes of vocal resistance. The result of our analysis are design principles for constructing learning environments that allow culturally-endogenous resistance practices to flourish, where youth can explore trajectories to become transformers of restrictive disciplines (i.e. Western science) and of social relations (i.e. occupying power).

Authors

• Kalonji L. Nzinga, University of Colorado - Boulder

• M. Lisette Lopez, University of California - Berkeley