Designing to Support “Wondering With”: Disciplined Improvisation and Ethical Pedagogical Mediation Within Field-Based Inquiry

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 11:25 am
  In Roundtable Session: Emancipatory Movements Toward Justice and Joy: The Role of Improvisation in Transformational Learning (Table 28)

Abstract

We draw upon work in a participatory design-based research project (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016) to elevate the role of design-based structures in supporting disciplined forms of interactional improvisation (Stevens & Hall, 1998; Sawyer, 2011). Specifically, we characterize how our work supports more ethical and dignified forms of pedagogical mediation (Espinoza & Vossoughi, 2014; Espinoza 2020) that contribute towards refiguring powered relations between educators, youth, and more-than-humans beings. Grounded in a pedagogical uptake of wonder (Schinkel, 2017; Opdal, 2001; Hadzigeorgiou, 2013) and situated within contexts of interdisciplinary and place-based learning (Nxumalo, 2019; Pugh 2019; Tuck & McKenzie, 2015), this work examines connections between the design-based aims of our project and the often-improvised interactions that make up everyday moments of teaching and learning (Erickson, 2004; Bourdieu 1977; de Certeau, 1984).

We take up Shotter's formulation of "withness" (Shotter, 2006; 2015); a systemic orientation which supports forms of knowing and being grounded in an understanding of how we live and act as participants within unfolding social processes that we have the capacity (and often the responsibility) to affect through our living involvement with them. Designing to support educators from within everyday interactions, we describe how our work contributes towards developing educators' interpretive power (Rosebery et al, 2016), or their abilities to see and respond to learner sensemaking in ontoepistemically expansive ways that open up space for transformative forms of socio-ecological engagement (Rosebery et al 2010; Warren et al., 2020).

In tracing connections between elements of our design work and collaborative moments of improvisation, we analyze how interactional openings are created for consequential shifts in participation that position learners and more-than-human beings as authentic and vital co-contributors of unfolding inquiry (McDaid Barry et al., 2023). We see this stance as offering powerful ways to disrupt dominant approaches that routinely position children as receivers of facts and the more-than-human world as a largely-inconsequential background of activity, and an important step in creating more ethical futures through positioning youth as historical actors in the here and now (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016; Gutiérrez et al., 2019)

Applying methods of micro-ethnography (Agar, 1996; Roehl 2012) and analysis of interaction (Derry et al., 2010; Erickson, 2004; Hall & Stevens; 2016; Goodwin 2017) to data gathered within routine outdoor activities we call "wondering walks," we elevate the role of improvisational activity in supporting field-based noticing and speculation that creates interactional conditions whereby all participants are recognized as dignified and agentic contributors who meaningfully shape inquiry. Through micro-longitudinal and micro-latitudinal analysis of a series of wondering walks (DeLiema et al., 2015), we make visible how the improvisational activities of educators create openings for sensemaking premised on the pedagogical dignity and relationality between educators, youth, and more-than-human beings.

Work described in this paper reconsiders the role of educators, youth and more-than-human beings within unfolding inquiry towards more just and livable socio-ecological futures. This paper has implications for how we consider the central role of wonder, field-based learning, and improvisational activity to nurture and sustain more ethical forms of relationality between and among people, places, and more-than-humans beings.

Authors

• Jordan D. Sherry-Wagner, University of Washington - Bothell

• Megan Bang, Northwestern University