Desettling Interaction Analysis

• In Event: What's Next for Interaction Analysis of Learning? Aligning Analytical Approaches With Theoretical Turns

Abstract

Designed learning spaces across Turtle Island have enacted and continue to enact violence through settler colonialism which reproduces colonial logics and ways of knowing, silencing Indigenous knowledge systems and communities (Tuck & Yang, 2012; Author, 2020a). As educators living in Turtle Island, we - three settlers joined by an Indigenous scholar - consider our (settler) responsibility to “set aside the ways of the colonist” (Kimmerer, 2013, p. 207) by learning with and from Indigenous Ways of Knowing (IWOK). That is, we are interested in learning, from Indigenous scholars, how to be human through a deep reciprocity in and with the More Than Human (MTH) world by desettling our research methods in order to contribute to more expansive understandings of learning. For centuries, Indigenous communities living across Turtle Island have built knowledge systems rooted in non-extractionist and liberatory understandings of learning (Cajete, 1994; 2000). While different in their particulars, IWOK center a relational ontology whereby reality emerges with and through the MTH world (Colleague & Author, 2015). Humans are not superior to the MTH in a material hierarchy, so learning emerges through relating in and with the world. Prioritizing a ‘relational epistemology’ (Colleagues & Author, 2018) requires decolonizing theories of learning and research methodologies that consider humans as implicitly separate from and superior to nature (Smith, 1999).
IA has allowed for close study of dynamically unfolding activity, detailing the intricate and widely varied nature of learning as well as meaning-making from learners’ perspectives (Jordan & Henderson, 1995). Yet these methods tend to be informed by and through colonial framings of space and time that prioritize humans and human action when analyzing learning activities. More recently, Indigenous scholars have begun to develop IA tools for expanding how we might study and recognize learning. For example, Author’s (2020) examination of observation and meaning-making with Indigenous families from Turtle Island illustrates how IA focusing on body-land movement and relations could ‘foreground the natural word as well as the body’ (Author, 2020, p. 31), illustrating how meaning-making is shaped by and shapes human-MTH relations, and coordinates learning as a collaborative, whole body activity (Author, 2020).
As a group, we see decolonizing IA as an ongoing process that challenges assumptions baked into protocols, data generation methods, and even what is considered data. This includes foregrounding the relational nature of interactions that generate data and that are depicted in video data itself. We (the settler authors) are cautious to avoid ‘settler moves to innocence’ (Tuck & Yang, 2012) in our desires to desettle IA through learning with and from IWOK. Therefore in addition to reimagining how we ‘see’ data, and learning to recognize how human-MTH relations shape meaning-making, we believe the work of desettling research methods must challenge and give up the practices and assumptions embedded in IA methods that privilege colonial ways of knowing and being. That is, we are interested in disrupting the processes of settler colonial violence by contributing to expansive understandings of learning that emerge through IA methods grounded in IWOK.

Authors

• Rishi Krishnamoorthy, Pennsylvania State University

• Colin Hennessy Elliott, Drexel University

• Jasmine Y. Ma, New York University

• Ananda M. Marin, University of California - Los Angeles