World-Making, Dreaming, and Learning in an Intergenerational Course on Educational Justice

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

Abstract

“What are today’s young activists dreaming about? We know what they are fighting against, but what are they fighting for?” (Kelley, 2002, p. 8).

This paper closely analyzes the forms of pedagogy, learning and social dreaming (Espinoza, 2008) that emerged in an intergenerational course on educational justice. The course brought together high school, undergraduate and graduate students with youth workers and university faculty to examine histories of educational injustice alongside efforts to transform education towards community well-being and self-determination.

The course centrally involved wrestling with the ways justice work can “move from the negation” (Bang, 2020) in ways that routinely cede the grounds of our imaginations to powered systems and enclose opportunities not only for dreaming, but for enacting educational dreams through the learning environments we design—what we conceptualized as a practice of worldmaking. This strand was brought to life through the forms of pedagogical mediation enacted by the teaching team (an intergenerational group of educators of color from the university, high school and local community based organizations), collective annotations within reading groups, students’ interviews with children and elders about their educational experiences and dreams, field notes of in-school and out-of-school settings as well as a speculative fieldnotes that documented—in proleptic form—the kinds of interactions students were designing for, and a weekly futurities journal that aimed to nurture students’ pedagogical and political imaginations. Data sources include documentation of these course assignments, audio-video recordings and field notes of classroom interactions, audio-recorded debriefs among the teaching team, and field notes and audio-video recordings of a setting students co-designed for middle-school youth in the summer following the course.

Through ethnographic and interactional analysis (Erickson, 2012; Jordon & Henderson, 1995) of these data sources we consider: How specifically did social dreaming and imagination take shape within the pedagogical practices enacted in this setting? How did they emerge over time within student thinking, learning and educational design? Our findings elucidate the specific forms of theorizing, historicity and futurity that shaped pedagogical storytelling, and the creative ways ideas about educational dreaming and design were taken up and wrestled with in student annotations, writing, and course participation. Here we are particularly concerned with 1) practices of worldmaking, or the relationships between dreaming and design, what Simpson (2014, p. 8) describes as not just “dreaming alternative realities, but creating them, on the ground in the physical world, in spite of being occupied” and Wartofsky (1973) refers to as “tertiary artifacts” or lived-in imaginations that color our perceptions of reality; and 2) the transformative openings for human development that can emerge when young people and educators are supported to nurture dreaming and imagination as core to the lived ethics of social change.

We present these analyses as educators who designed, taught and studied the course alongside 2-3 students who took the course. Together, we will highlight the intellectual and relational conditions that supported student learning, the specific tensions and complexities that emerged through processes of dreaming across the data set, and what they can mean for ongoing design and research.

Authors

• Corey Winchester, Northwestern University
  Presenting Author

• Shirin Vossoughi, Northwestern University
  Presenting Author

• Megan Bang, Northwestern University
  Presenting Author