From Police Officers to Community Builders: Learning and Dreaming as Movement Between Speculative Spaces and Schools

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

Abstract

Imagining transformative possibilities for schools can often be constrained by the weight of existing ideologies and practices, particularly for those who interact with those spaces on a daily basis. At the same time, it is absolutely essential that transformative freedom dreaming (Kelley, 2002) about schools starts from people who experience inequities within the institution. This key tension was central in our planning and analysis of a multiday, interactive youth workshop that sought to surface expansive possibilities for collaboration in classrooms, and to demonstrate how artificial intelligence (AI) could make those ideal collaborations possible. Based on our analysis of previous workshop designs and their shortcomings, this study focused on the possibilities embedded in place, such as in-person visits to relatable collaborative spaces such as a 70 person student cooperative house. These visits presented the basis for dreaming about short-term and long-term transformative possibilities for the institution of schooling.

Our approach seeks to desettle (Bang et al., 2014) the day-to-day routines and ideologies of schooling through the use of speculative fiction (brown, 2017; Mirra & Garcia, 2022) derived from the everyday. Particularly when speculative fiction and design are accompanied by embodied experiences, they open up possibilities for dreaming that expands far beyond conventional lived experiences (Visser et al., 2005; Rozendaal et al., 2016). Towards considering how these speculative spaces may be incorporated into existing school experiences, we adopt the perspective that learning often occurs at the margins of activity systems (Vossoughi & Gutierrez, 2014). The design of our workshop builds from these theories to demonstrate how learners stabilize, challenge, and transform imagined boundaries between schools (Gutierrez, 2008) and speculative spaces of ideal collaborations.

The workshop was held in-person at UC Berkeley with 15 high-school aged youth of color from the California East Bay. Recordings of the workshop were transcribed, coded for instances of learning across sites, and detailed using analytic memos. During the workshop, youth built speculative collaborative spaces using scrap material, drawing from everyday versions of collaboration that they personally experienced earlier in the workshop. For instance, youth related deeply to the idea of a Community Builder, a formal role in the cooperative house they visited who worked with residents democratically to construct house norms and policies. The role of a community builder provided a tangible alternative to systems of threat, punishment, and policing with which they were most familiar. When juxtaposing these speculative spaces against the realities of schools, young people reconciled, at least partially, many contradictions; for instance, a speculative AI that supported youth in dreaming was initially deemed irrelevant for a school context. Ultimately, the youth tried on new stances that attempted to re-frame the goals of school itself (i.e., the goal of school can be both about work and dreaming together).

Our design of the workshops demonstrates the value of speculative spaces derived from everyday experiences as a means of expansive social dreaming within institutions. Additionally, the findings from our workshop has important implications for new applications of AI, situated within key pedagogical and institutional transformations in schooling.

Authors

• Michael Alan Chang, University of California - Berkeley
  Presenting Author

• Thomas M. Philip, University of California - Berkeley
  Presenting Author