Possibilities and Challenges of Collaborative Design for Transdisciplinary Civic Activity in Schools

• In Event: Civic Collaborative Learning Spaces: Reimagining the Civic Across Disciplines and Contexts

Abstract

Objectives:
Today’s complex challenges demand participation across domains of life to build toward a more just future. Teachers cannot be expected to take on the vast transdisciplinarity that civic learning entails alone. Responding to the need for solidarity and collaboration, the Transdisciplinary Civic Learning Collaborative (TCLC) is a participatory design collaborative made up of 12 educator-researchers across five PK-12 school districts and one University and three states convened to imagine, design, and enact transdisciplinary civic learning experiences with young people in schools. We asked, what can collaboration make possible and what are some of the limits and constraints of such collaborative work?

Theoretical Perspectives:
We define civic learning as the processes of learning just and thriving relations between beings and within communities (Author b, 2023). Indexing the vast multidimensionality of this work, we use the language of transdisciplinarity - the bringing together of disciplines and domains of life in a manner that makes possible new reflexive and emergent relations, identities, knowledges, and practices (Takeuchi et al., 2020). Beyond interdisciplinarity, civic learning also draws from extra-disciplinary forms of knowledge and practice such as familial, cultural, and linguistic knowledges (Ladson-Billings, 2014) and affective processes such as hope, empathy, and imagination (Mirra, 2018).

Methods:
TCLC is conceived as a social design experiment (Gutiérrez et al., 2020) and a space of teacher inquiry (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2015). Diverse on many axes, we include teachers experienced and novice, elementary and secondary, math, science, ELA, social studies, and American Sign Language. We are majority BIPOC and Queer and share diverse experiences of immigration, citizenship, and dis/ability.

Analysis uses an ethnographic approach (Emerson et al., 2011) to trace emergent themes in relation to the affordances and limitations of collaboration drawing on video, audio, fieldnotes, transcripts, and artifacts from a design retreat, monthly virtual meetings, teacher interviews, and classroom visits. We examined collaboration on whole group- and school-levels.

Findings:
We found the whole group collaboration supported ideation and the reshaping of professional vision (Goodwin, 2015). Routines for reflecting on lesson design and on student work supported (a) recognition of cross cutting curricular expectations surrounding inquiry and arguing from evidence and (b) a shared attention to the relationship between identity work, content, and classroom participation structures. Diverse geopolitical locations made possible learning about teaching across these contexts. However, the hostile political context of Texas muted some opportunities for openly critical work.

The three school sites that supported local teacher collaborations did so in dramatically different ways, responsive to the structures available at each school. In all three sites, time was a significant constraint including both curricular priorities and limited planning time. Notably, all three schools boasted non-traditional spaces for learning. These became vital locations for supporting the enactment of the collaborative transdisciplinary civic activities with students.

Contribution:
We contribute insight to the question of how teachers learn to design for and participate in transdisciplinary civic activity through an extended collaboration. Our findings reflect on possibilities and challenges, providing notes for practice at multiple scales.

Author

• Emma Carene Gargroetzi, University of Texas at Austin