Leveraging Queer Ephemera in Teacher Learning and International Remote Field Experiences

• In Event: Critical Pedagogies of the Fifth Dimension: Designing Intergenerational Learning Ecologies During COVID-19

Abstract

Queering in teacher learning spaces asks us to notice the oblique in our everyday cultural practices (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003) to move away dominant practices and discourses that reify the hetero-patriarchy. José Esteban Muñoz (2009), invited us to lean into the queer ephemera, discovering the “traces, glimmers, residues, and specks” of life that lead us to imagine and organize toward the not-yet-here. Educational psychology, from a cultural psychology perspective (Cole, 1998) privileges the learning that emerges through social activity (Vygotsky, 1980) and thus offers openings for seeing and leveraging queer ephemera as it travels across digitized learning ecologies (cf. Lizárraga & Cortez, 2020). We follow those who have examined the importance of designing for “mediated praxis” in teacher learning that privileges reflection, historicity, and the iterative practice of improving teaching practice (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010). However, we lean into the queer ephemera, including the disruptions and recalibrations that the COVID-19 pandemic caused in order to examine how the affordances of the practicum experience could still be replicated during a sudden shift to remote learning. Specifically, we bring attention to the learning that occurred as we connected student teachers from a predominantly white institution with youth in Thailand.

Our social design-based study (Gutiérrez and Jurow, 2016) examined how an iterative design approach to the teacher education classroom facilitated a nuanced and deep engagement of educational psychology concepts by nine student teachers as they tutored children in Thailand via synchronous zoom sessions and through asynchronous engagement on a customized enclosed social media platform called FabSpace.me.

Our findings reveal how designed “contact zones” (Pratt, 1991) opened opportunities for our student teachers to reflect directly with their own assumptions and biases relating to the relationship between cultural repertoires of practice (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003) and the learning and development of youth. Specifically, our teachers used concepts from the educational psychology course relating to gender identity and queer theory to decenter dominant ways of teaching and learning rooted in white heteropatriarchy.
Our findings show how technologies, media, and modalities were spread across assignments, texts, activities, and online and in-person contexts. In such tool-dense spaces, where learning was saturated with a variety of semiotic systems, archival processes by means of which students curated their own and their classmates’ language, images, responses, likes, and pins (cf. De Kosnik, 2016; Gutiérrez, 2008) became salient resources for relationship-building and the generating of narratives of new possible social futures. This work has implications for how digitally-mediated learning ecologies are designed to enact queering of spaces for teachers and youth. This is especially significant in light of the changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Author

• Kachine S. Kulick, University of Colorado - Boulder
  Presenting Author