Toward Gentle Futures (Poster 9)

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

Abstract

Objectives
Maturing into ethical human beings to live in healthy, regenerative relationships with others and the rest of the living world is not just an important dimension of human development, it is central to the continued survival and thriving of our species (Bang, 2020; Deloria Jr., 1979). This paper explores ways that teachers and students strengthen and develop healthy, regenerative relations through gentle futurity gestures (Recollet, 2016) in dialogue and interaction. These gestures extend perspectives on space-time relations, more specifically, how adults and children draw from their dynamic placed-based systems of relationalities to co-create collective ethical futures together in northern Thailand.

Theoretical framework
Through a syncretic approach, this paper draws on both scholarship on Indigenous futurity (e.g. Harjo, 2019; Lewis & Skawennati, 2018; Recollect, 2016) and critical sociocultural theories of human development (e.g. Esmonde & Booker, 2016; Lee, 2001; Politics of Learning Collective, 2016). These bodies of work guide my current understanding of gentleness and gentle futurity gestures to highlight the curves and contours of listening in additive ways leans into another’s atmosphere, negotiating and navigating with them imaginations and enactments of what should be by drawing from one’s existing and future relationalities.

Methods and modes of inquiry
I draw from six sets of teacher-student dialogues within a larger participatory design research project (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016) at Sahasatsuksa school, an urban Indigenous school in northern Thailand. Students led these dialogues, based on an important home practice of their family (e.g. trap fishing, cloth dyeing). I analyze each pair’s talk-in-interaction (Erickson, 2004) to characterize the ways that teachers engaged in gentle futurity gestures - the kinds of moves and contours that were visible and importantly, what this opened up for Indigenous education and Indigenous futures in Thailand.

Data sources
Each hour-long video was transcribed in Thai and translated into English. The design team watched and coded the videos for moments of gentle futurity gestures. These moments were then collected across the episodes to better characterize the moves and what they opened up for the pair.

Preliminary Results
Together, the six dialogues illustrate how everyday historical actors, in particular Indigenous children routinely engage in gentle futurity gestures, and in so doing, cultivate Indigenous futures that are based on strengthening and our systems of relationality - the ethical, moral bonds that we as humans have to each other and the rest of the living world. Further, this study provides visions of how teachers might cultivate gentleness within teaching and learning at school.

Significance
This paper offers practice and methodological contributions to support teachers and researchers in enacting more gentle ways of being and learning with each other, and how we might study them in interaction towards more livable worlds as an antidote to these times of violence and destruction. Additionally, I suggest explicit attention to space-time dimensions in how we design, study, and support our ethical development and maturation as human people will be necessary for these times in human history, and foundational to advance more consequential education and truth.

Authors

• Meixi *, University of Minnesota
  Presenting Author

• Sukanda Kongkaew
  Presenting Author

• Panthiwa Theechumpa
  Presenting Author