Family Storywalks as Educational Justice (Poster 1)

• In Event: Justice-Centered Pedagogy: Context-Specific Adjustments and Cross-Cutting Constants

Abstract

Objectives
This study critically re-positions Indigenous family and land-based intellectual systems as the first ontological grounds of teaching and learning at school, with educators as critical co-designers in the work. We study the practice of family storywalks as a kind of justice-centered pedagogy that can help locate families’ deep intelligences and dynamic practices in place that refuses Indigenous erasure, epistemic violence, and colonialism. We ask: How might attention to heterogeneous family practices through walking transform the core pedagogical practices, disciplinary understandings, and goals of teachers?
Theoretical framework
Extensive scholarship from sociocultural and political understandings of learning and human development has made visible how family and community life is an intellectual space of development that intersects with schools in robust ways (e.g. Ishimaru et al., 2019; Nasir et al., 2006). Learning to see and explicitly design classrooms with children and families’ diverse repertoires of practice transforms powered social relations as a first lever of social change (e.g. Lee, 2001; Vossoughi, 2014).
Methods
Termed Family Story Walks here, the activity structure of walking allows family members to share and renew their responsibilities as “playing their parts in intergenerational stories tied to particular places” (Whyte, 2017). We study the pedagogical possibilities and tensions where school design “begin with Indigenous families as the foundation for healing and education” (Bang et al., 2018, p. 9-10). While there is extensive scholarship on families funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992) and cultural sustaining pedagogies (Paris, 2012) that similarly emphasize importance of learning experiences that foster epistemic continuance with students’ communities,we consider specifically designing for distinct forms of social relations among, families, educators, land – physical geographic space and the underlying philosophies and relations (Styres, 2017).
Data sources, Evidence, Objects, or Materials
We study the iteration of these walks across two contexts – Thailand and Mexico and trace the affordances and tensions of designing walks in these two contexts. Using video and interaction analysis data, we study two 45- minute walks, the kinds of talk-in-interaction (Erickson, 2004) that are made possible through walking as a resource for pedagogical design and transformation.
Preliminary Findings
We find that two practices of walking opened up relational shifts to transform teachers’ instructional, curricular, and design practices, as they too navigate entanglements with rigid contexts of local and state control. First, intergenerationality was fundamental to attending to the multiple stories of place. Teachers listened to children in new ways and began to see home as deep intellectual sites for embodied science and mathematics interwoven with Indigenous ethics, challenging entrenched notions of learning disciplinary practices that no longer served their pedagogical practice. Second, land structured activity and it was through attention to the particular kinds of temporalities and seasonalilites on our walks together was a pedagogical lift that expanded possibilities of justice-centered pedagogies for teachers.
Scholarly significance
This study offers practice and theoretical contributions to in-service teacher education and how walking and storying lands held possibilities for designing new forms of education for families, and the land and waters on which this learning depends.

Author

• Meixi *, University of Minnesota