“We’re Reimagining What’s Possible”: Co-Designing Project-Based Learning Toward Antiracist Practice

• In Event: Constructing Educational Possibilities With Teachers at the Center of Project-Based Learning Design and Enactment

Abstract

Purpose
Project-based learning (PBL) has potential to increase equity in educational spaces by offering opportunities for young people and teachers to engage together creatively around authentic purposes (Authors, 2018). In this paper, I question the ways that co-design with teachers of project-based learning environments might lead to more equitable and antiracist practice.

Perspectives
Participatory design suggests transformative approaches to education must include the perspectives not historically invited to reimagine educational spaces (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016). Knowing that the collaborative design of PBL holds potential to transform classrooms (Authors, 2021; Penuel et al., 2011), I partnered with one 9th grade teacher and her students to redesign their PBL experience in order to disrupt the dominant narratives – those that centered whiteness and heteronormativity (Stornaiuolo & Thomas, 2018) – that were present in their rural-suburban school. Together we engaged critical perspectives (e.g. Freire, 1970) to reimagine what PBL could do to support antiracist teaching and learning.

Methods & Data Sources
This qualitative, ethnographic study took place over the course of the 2018-2019 school year. Elizabeth Murray, a white educator who had taught for fourteen years, had 53 students participate in the study. 30% of students identified as people of color, mostly Latine. The school, Elizabeth’s classes, and the town were mostly white, and tensions arose amongst residents as they navigated the violent political rhetoric that was prevalent both locally and nationally during this time. Data included design and student artifacts, images and audio recordings of design meetings and classroom activities, and interviews with Elizabeth and students.

Results
Although she had PBL experience, Elizabeth explained she was unsure “how to teach all students” in her mostly white setting. In order to center students with historically marginalized identities, Elizabeth suggested we redesign PBL curriculum toward students’ individual experiences, allowing them to tell their own stories. She began leading small group discussions, drawing from students’ projects to pair them and support their critical interrogations into questions of marginalization using students’ projects to help them question their own perspectives. As students engaged in the projects, we found that they also often began to question their own perspectives. For example, Jax, a white student who began the year with a number of racist comments, eventually asked questions to understand, “Why can’t I say it?” and ended the year with a project that explained how the impact of words on others mattered. Another student, Lee, whose family was from Southeast Asia, reinforced the importance of this co-designed space when he explained, “Usually I don’t talk about my family. But I did here.”

Implications
As Elizabeth explained, “We’re reimagining what’s possible by giving them space to explore themselves.” By engaging in the redesign of her ELA PBL classroom, Elizabeth was able to creatively address the needs of her students and community, teaching them all, while honoring and expanding their perspectives toward greater inclusion, care, and criticality. This paper has implications for engaging teachers in creative design of PBL to reimagine what equitable and antiracist learning spaces can look like.

Author

• Kristina M. Stamatis, University of Nebraska Omaha