Student-Centered, Interactive, and Equitable Pedagogies for Remote/Hybrid Learning

• In Event: Community Organizing During the Pandemic: Partnerships With Leaders, Teachers, and Families

Abstract

Objectives
The COVID-19 pandemic has required schools to transition to distance learning overnight. Several educational organizations have rapidly organized webinars and online resources to support teachers in developing skills for teaching online. However, research on teacher learning suggests that teachers need opportunities to collaborate with colleagues as they explore new ideas with their students, share successes and challenges, and expand their professional knowledge base (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017). To address this need, we have convened a workgroup centered on the question: How do we design learning activities in online and hybrid spaces that are student-centered, interactive, and equitable?

Perspectives
This workgroup has adopted a participatory design research (PDR) approach to co-create and test solutions with teachers and families. In PDR, researchers position community partners as collaborators and knowledge holders (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016). Additionally, we draw on scholarship about funds of knowledge in K-12 school contexts that foregrounds the cultural practices of minoritized families (González, Moll, & Amanti, 2005). We posit that online learning spaces can be designed to incorporate family-based assets similarly to ways teachers design science learning experiences in classrooms that leverage family practices (McLaughlin & Calabrese Barton, 2013).

Modes of inquiry
We invited four teachers from three schools serving predominantly low-income students of color and three parents to join a group of scholars, including two undergraduate students, three Ph.D. students, and a faculty member. Using a charrette approach to PDR, we organized three phases: (1) Backgrounding. Participants share their diverse expertise and, together, specify the problem they aim to collaboratively solve by identifying root causes using a fishbone diagram; (2) Ideating. Participants brainstorm and develop multiple ideas that may be experimented with to address these problems. This phase also examines opportunities created from distance learning that could be leveraged, such as access to home environments. Ideating involves storytelling to illuminate local values and practices and counterfactual-thinking that contributes to critical consideration of normative structures that may hinder innovative designs; and (3) Refining. Participants hone a smaller set of ideas that seem most promising, collaboratively refine them, and agree on a plan to be tested through Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles.

Evidence generation and planned analyses
We will audio record and take field notes of each co-design session. Additionally, we will collect artifacts, such as meeting slide decks, screenshots of online learning environments, and student work samples. Participants will be invited to co-author blogs, resources, and other efforts to share their experiences with colleagues and schools within our network. These artifacts will serve as sources of evidence to examine the workgroup design processes and outcomes. The analyses of this evidence will contribute to knowledge about ways relational configurations emerge during the design process, how design activities address potentially problematic norms and assumptions, and the affordances and challenges of the design process as evidenced by artifacts and participant reflections.

Scholarly significance
This project will contribute to an emerging literature on research-practice partnerships as innovative and equitable approaches to solve urgent problems of practice while building practitioners’ agency and capacity.

Authors

• Rossella Santagata, University of California - Irvine

• Jiwon Lee, University of California - Irvine

• Ha Nguyen, University of California - Irvine

• Khamia B. Powell, University of California - Irvine

• Muriel von Aspen