Challenges of Social Dreaming Within the Grammar of Schooling: From Mutual Care to Disciplinary Action

• In Event: Navigating the Dilemmas, Tensions, and Contradictions of Teaching Critical Issues in the Pursuit of "Truth"

Abstract

While significant investment goes into the technical development of emergent technologies for education and beyond, there is insufficient anticipation of the full consequences of these tools for users (Philip & Garcia, 2015; Selwyn, 2013). Building on a responsible innovation framework (Stilgoe et al., 2013), and with the intention of creating space for students to address their hopes, dreams, and concerns about the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) based technologies in schools, we designed a multi-day interactive workshop that brought together students, educators, educational researchers, and computer scientists. Signaling the generative possibilities we hoped for, we termed these sessions Learning Futures Workshops. We sought to support high-school aged youth to envision the forms of collaboration they desired in schools, and to propose how AI may help to make those ideal collaborations a reality. While our workshop was designed as a critical space (Gutierrez et al., 2009) that emphasized the disparate impact of technology on different racialized and gendered groups in particular (Benjamin, 2019; Noble, 2018), youth participants ultimately proposed and advocated for AI-based proposals that reified dominant deficit-oriented ideologies about their peers, such as an AI that kept “off-topic” or “misbehaving” youth on-track during collaborations.

The 5-day workshop was held on Zoom with thirty youth of color from California, Colorado, and Oklahoma. Discussions during the interactive workshop were recorded along with artifacts created along the way to document youth thinking. Each discussion was transcribed, coded, and analyzed in an analytic memo. Starting from scholarship that views learning as constituted through interaction, power, and ideology (Vossoughi, 2014; Philip et al., 2018), our coding is based on two types of ideological stances that youth tried on. First, many youth took a stance that justified technologies and practices through their social imagination, a shared collective vision justifying the institutional structuring of relations (Castoriadis, 1975). Second, many youth also took a stance of social dreaming (Espinoza, 2008), where they re-imagined schools as centering relationality and care, arguing that this would mitigate existing academic hierarchies. Taken together, we coded how social dreaming and social imagination stances interact to either converge or expand the ideological playground available for discussion (Fairclough, 2003; Philip et al., 2018).

Through our analysis, we demonstrate a key challenge of social dreaming within the “grammar of schooling” (Tyack & Tobin, 1994): without naming and re-articulating contradictions between existing social imaginary stances and social dreaming stances, students tend to converge to dominant ideologies within social imagination. Our insights have important implications for the design of critical spaces and shows how pedagogical practices and structures rooted in dreaming such as the Theater of the Oppressed (Boal, 1985) must attend to how existing practices, routines, and tools – which are not politically neutral but are in fact externalizations of the social imaginary – come to shape learning and the field of possible dreams. Moreover, co-design spaces that are predicated on technology development should examine the role of technology in the imaginary and how that comes to shape the space of problems that technology can and should solve.

Authors

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

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