Designing for Diverse Futurities: Expanding Partnership to Center Culture in the Sixth-Grade Classroom (Poster 4)

• In Event: Educational Partnerships as Collective Resistance: Perspectives From Emerging Scholars and Collaborators

Abstract

Education and learning are often driven by future-oriented discourses. Formal learning environments in settler societies such as the United States, however, have historically committed to White settler futurities (Tuck & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013; Kulago, 2019) but are often considered acultural spaces (Bang et al., 2012) that normalize certain ways of being, knowing, and learning. These settled and Euro-westernized expectations continue to define whose knowledge, values, beliefs, values and practices are recognized within the education system (Arada et al., 2023). Therefore, formal learning environments limit the relationship between students and their diverse cultural experiences, which is reified in the design of formal learning environments and takes the form of settled relationships – static or limited relationships with culture.

As a response, we join the current endeavor to develop the centrality of culture (e.g., Nasir et al., 2020) in formal learning environments as a research-practice partnership (RPP; Coburn & Penuel, 2016). Since 2018, we have worked toward making visible Whiteness and embedded cultural norms (e.g., San Pedro, 2018) in the sixth-grade curricula. Our partnership starts with a focus on designing a cross-cultural river trip experience to engage students from an Experiential Learning School with Indigenous cultures and practices. We recently expanded our goal from bringing in Indigenous perspectives to centering diverse cultures as our equity-in-mission (Farrell et al., 2023). As a multicultural team, we particularly focus on our cultural affiliations (Wegemer & Renick, 2021; Bang & Vossoughi, 2016) as one pre-existing boundary in our RPP. Specifically, we ask, how do we expand our RPP to design curricular units that support youth’s relationships with culture?

In the 2021-2022 school year, one emerging researcher and two K-12 educators were leading the design of a series of iterative curricular units to develop students’ diverse relationships with culture. We share the design of three curricular units as cases (Stake, 2008) to illustrate how our RPP expands to be culturally centered: San Juan Digital Story Project, Cross-Cultural Playground Poem, and Personal Culture Augmented Reality. The three cases demonstrate how we work across boundaries of research and practices as well as cultures. We share how we (1) re-engage Indigenous perspectives with the land through collaborating with community knowledge holders, (2) respond to minoritized Asian cultural knowledge in the classroom, which was shared in a research interview, and (3) re-purposing technology to support the development of students’ relationship with their own cultures.

From the three cases, we highlight the interdependence in our RPP as we design these curricular units as boundary objects (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011) that not only connect research, practices, and cultural experiences but also expand our work to center culture for developing students’ relationship with their own culture and other cultures. One teacher co-author articulates the theme of interdependence as “working side-by-side” collaboratively in the design process for identifying Whiteness and creating rupture (San Pedro, 2018) for new relationships with culture to take hold. Our work in developing these culturally centered curricular units demonstrates our collective resistance to formal learning environments as acultural spaces (Bang et al., 2012) through RPP.

Authors

• Lili Yan, Michigan State University

• Stuart Baggaley, Edith Bowen Laboratory School

• Jennifer Jenkins, Edith Bowen Laboratory School