Attuning to Indicators of Equity: Developing Axiological Commitments Across Research Partnerships

• In Event: Weaving Axiological Commitments, Social Dreaming, and Digital Storytelling Toward Sociopolitical Imagination: A Collaboration

Abstract

Objectives
This study examines ways that two out-of-school, community-based, STEAM-focused research projects approached and developed methodological innovations through partnership work on the common goal of advancing equity. Through program research, design and enactment, we detail the ways our two partnerships learned from each other by examining ways that we reflect on and design for equity and shape methodological tools to support this design and theorizing. Our collaborative efforts produced ideas and practices that help to imagine and design for toward education as it could be for all involved by embracing the complexity of learning as movement within and across ecologies, for both educators, researchers and students.

Theoretical Perspectives
Moving beyond the binary of adult versus child, student versus teacher, or researcher versus educator (Cortez, Davis, Hooper, 2021; Paradise et al., 2014; Vossoughi et al., 2021), both project teams took up designing for mediated praxis through co-theorizing, co-viewing, side-by-side apprenticeship of new teachers, witnessing learning and guided reflection on data (Bang et al., 2016; Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010; Winn & Ubiles, 2011).

Methods & Data Sources
LiTT is an afterschool collaborative program that brings together high school students, undergrads and mentors across digital and analog space. BREJOTL is a long term partnership between a midwestern university and a local YMCA, now moving into its 7th year of STEAM-focused summer programming for middle-school students. While data generation at each site consisted of multi-voiced fieldnotes, design meeting minutes and documents, and audio and video recordings, it was the way in which these data were analyzed in site teams and co-analyzed during our cross-site sharing and discussions that allowed for the noticing of axiological innovation emerging at each site.

Findings & Significance
We found that our teams engaged in the development of routine practices and creative artifacts that brought equity-centered community partnerships to life. These began with the articulation of shared axiological design principles with partner sites. At [LiTT] these took the form of design temples which were developed from young people's ingenuity in their everyday gaming practices. Members of the [BREJOTL] partnership, similarly, created design principles that held the ethical and political commitments of the group, revisiting them before co-analysis and curriculum design. Through our cross-team notes and conversations, a methodology (practice) for partnership emerged that enabled all members of the project to deeply participate in the research, teaching, reflection, analysis and sharing of student and teacher learning. In preparation for collective research analysis meetings we worked on individual and collective memos. This served as a way to document our thinking both for noticing powerful pedagogy, as well as students and teacher learning. As research partners we learned the importance of developing scaffolding documents to support memo writing and analysis.

Across both research projects, our axiological commitments were held in what emerged as we worked together to create the conditions for our students to experience a political education. The methodological innovations we share in this paper can help frame relational and political growth across the ecology of social-design based research partnerships.

Authors

• Edward Rivero, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Paula K. Hooper, Northwestern University

• Shirin Vossoughi, Northwestern University

• Arturo Cortez, University of California - Davis

• Melita Morales, School of the Art Institute of Chicago