Intersectional Infrastructures for Educational Change (Poster 7)

• In Event: Critically Examining Space and Time in Learning and Design for More Just and Equitable Futures

Abstract

Objectives and Frameworks
Existing power relations in education, which exclude nondominant school stakeholders, such as students of color, are often excluded from educational design, research evidence, and implementation (Noguera, 2007). An intersectional (Crenshaw, 1989) lens brings further analytic precision to such power relations by illuminating how multiple axes of power and oppression are shaped by varied identities. Yosso’s (2016) Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) framework brings to light how these intersecting forms of oppression contribute to cultural tools such as family networks, language, and knowledge for resistance that challenge reproductive power relations. However, as Penuel (2019) suggests, there is a need for greater theorizing on the kinds of infrastructures - the designed social processes and structures for participation in design - that recognize, transmit, convert, and activate these assets for educational transformation in schools.
This paper illustrates the ways in which students' intersectional forms of CCW informed their participation in a participatory design project, and how the expression of such assets were directly connected to specific features of the collaborative infrastructures as described in a previous study (Authors, 2019). By doing so, this paper argues that infrastructures for educational participation must account for intersectionality.

Methods, Data, and Analysis
This paper draws on qualitative data from a 4-year participatory design partnership between a university researcher and high school students to design technology-mediated educational practices (Authors, 2019), and the participation of four students in the partnership. Using an intersectional lens (Crenshaw, 1989), the paper pays particular attention to how students’ intersecting experiences of exclusion and resistance informed the cultural resources (Yosso, 2005) they leveraged to participate in the design and implementation work.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view
Specific infrastructures created to mediate their participation offered students opportunities to leverage their CCW, derived from intersectional experiences of exclusion and resistance, in the design process. For example, one student, Michelle, claimed his participation in design, which in his view required a level of comfort with making one’s ideas visible and open to critique, was built on perspectives he developed observing his mother's fight for immigrant rights. He shared that watching his mother march to raise wages for immigrant workers reassured him in his own coming out as gay, which in turn led to feeling comfortable making his identity and thinking visible to others.
Previous studies (Authors, 2019) have found that existing infrastructures and practices at the school level, and ongoing refinements to the specific infrastructures to support the participatory design work, both played integral roles in creating opportunities for students to leverage their existing cultural assets (Yosso, 2005) in their participation in design.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work
Viewing the cultural assets that students brought to bear to a participatory design setting from an intersectional lens, combined with previous findings that opportunities to leverage these assets were mediated by specific infrastructures (Authors, 2019) that were built for student participation suggests the need for such infrastructure building to respond to the intersectional nature of exclusion and resistance.

Authors

• Ung-Sang Lee, University of Nevada - Las Vegas
  Presenting Author

• Kristina M. Stamatis, University of Nebraska - Omaha
  Presenting Author