Conditional Dreaming: The Role of Structural and Cultural Context in Civic Speculation

• In Event: Vice-Presidential Session. Consequential Futures: The Contested Pursuit of Truth in Freedom Dreaming

Abstract

Emerging scholarship in speculative education posits that rather than seeking to integrate youth into civic institutions that are fundamentally inequitable and inadequate for responding to the existential challenges of white supremacy, climate disaster, and democratic disintegration that they face, teaching and learning should be oriented toward the co-construction of alternative liberatory possibilities of solidarity and care that do not yet exist (Mirra & Garcia, 2022). A major question, however, is whether and how existing educational structures can change to foster dreaming beyond the normative, flawed logics upon which they were built.

In this paper, we analyze how the conditions amid which adults and youth seek to engage in speculative dreaming, which include the structures of formal and informal learning environments and multiple understandings about dialogue, relationships, and society, shape the nature, purpose, and experience of their dreaming. We tease out particular structures and cultural practices that support transformative speculation oriented toward equity, empathy, and justice. We draw upon RISE learning theory, which integrates biological and cognitive aspects of development within social, cultural, and affective activity systems to advocate for collective logics of thriving (Nasir et al, 2021) as well as sociocritical literacy development (Gutiérrez, 2008).

Data for this study was drawn from the Digital Democratic Dialogue (3D) Project, a social design-based experiment in which six high school teachers and their students (n=238) from across the U.S. leveraged digital media to excavate their civic histories, share current civic experiences, and dream civic futures (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016). We focused on transcripts from teacher retreats (n=2) and monthly team meetings (n=8) as well as youth discussion posts and multimodal artifacts. Rounds of coding were organized around: 1) activity systems in participants’ lives; 2) civic dialogue and reasoning practices; 3) developing of imaginative and relational capacities (Schreier, 2012).

We selected one vignette from each of the study’s three design cycles to illustrate our findings. Civic dialogue that was more deeply circumscribed by the normative logics of schooling tended to elicit framings of social challenges and possibilities that hewed closely to the logics of systems and theories of change of the world-as-it-is. For instance, teachers tended to limit the scope of their creativity when focused on daily lesson planning related to the 3D Project because of the constraints of district mandates around curriculum and instruction. Similarly, youth gravitated toward the norms of academic argumentation and neoliberal policy solutions when completing the organized “assignments” of 3D design cycles.

By contrast, more expansive speculative thinking emerged at moments when normative schooling structures were disrupted and more organic relationships were cultivated. Teachers dreamed of alterative educational designs during in-person and virtual team meetings freed from school constraints. Youth imagined futures of the world-as-it-could-be when inspired by their peers and released from school “work.”

This paper pushes our field to consider the extent to which our formal educational systems may work against the development of the equitable social futures youth deserve and desire and spark opportunities for transforming ecosystems of learning toward freedom.

Authors

• Nicole Mirra, Rutgers University
  Presenting Author

• Antero Garcia, Stanford University
  Presenting Author