Dismantling Racial Injustice: Contributions of the Science of Learning and Development

Session Type: Invited Speaker Session

Abstract

The theme of the 2024 conference focuses on “Dismantling Racial Injustice.” This session proposes to examine how emerging syntheses across the sciences of human learning and development can contribute to the theme by: 1. offering scientifically rooted guidance for efforts in research, practice, and policy; 2. assisting community-based organizations to wrestle with the underlying belief systems that sustain systemic racism; and 3. identifying the features of robust learning environments for learners (and for the array of adult stakeholders supporting children and adolescents).
Systemic change, particularly at scale, requires re-examination of assumptions that fuel decision making. These assumptions always have historical roots and impact how human communities perceive their self-interests. This attention both to self-interests as well as connections with others has foundations in our history as a species. We are social animals who run in packs. At the same time, our capacity for symbolic reasoning and our perceptions of connections with others allow humans to re-examine the beliefs that fuel their actions.
Thus, we argue in this session that seeking to understand the underlying belief systems that create in-groups and out-groups is essential to efforts to re-examine communal belief systems. Such belief systems undergird the ways that racial justice is conceptualized and that racial injustice begins to be dismantled.
The construct of race is relatively new in human history. However, systems of creating in- groups and out-groups is not new, but persistent. The construct of race is also a moving target, both within U.S. history and its manifestation in other parts of the world through European colonialism, but also other historical precedents of othering within the history of nations around the globe. The emerging syntheses across the sciences of human learning and development along with examinations of the histories of othering across human communities provide tools that can inform our systemic actions to transform human sensemaking away from otherings based on attributes of race and contingent associations of race with class, gender, and ability.

Essential to unpacking these issues is understanding human learning and development as unfolding within complex, dynamic systems. It necessitates that scholars across contexts understand how both individual and collective activity entail complex, dynamic relations among perceptions of the self along multiple dimensions, the emotional salience people attribute to experiences, and the nature of relationships humans experience in activity. These relationships are dynamic and not fixed and are malleable across the life course. Scholarly understanding of these relationships is in its most basic sense based on understanding the physiological processes that drive human functioning. Moreover, these dynamic relationships involve coaction among physiological processes and other biological characteristics with people’s participation in routine cultural practices within and across time. These coactions are at the heart of what needs to fuel our examinations of transformations of each human’s belief system.
Conceptually, these dynamic relationships have strong correspondence with other processes of development (e.g., when, through use of a quantum physics lens, the change processes of life course development and even of human evolution are studied). But this revolutionary re- conceptualization stands in tension and contrast with the histories of scientific investigations of human functioning rooted in presumptions about genetic determinism; linear relationships from genes to behavior; and fixed hierarchies of race, privilege, and power . We have built histories of purportedly objective data rooted in such assumptions, and as a consequence have fostered self-fulfilling prophecies wherein these assumptions are reified in fixed hierarchies and presumptions about superior and inferior pathways of development. The often unrecognized and unchallenged bias and conceptual and methodological flaws in such egregiously flawed science has served to re-affirm attributions of hierarchies of humans, with such hierarchies manifested most perniciously by pejorative and counterfactual construals of race, ethnicity, and gender.
On the one hand, these conceptions of human learning and development appear to be so complex as to be inaccessible, especially in public domains. On the other hand, dynamic models and methods associated with grappling with these complexities enable reality to be observed. We can easily document such complexities if we have the humility to observe human behavior within and across people’s participation in multiple settings, and in particular in our humble observations of children. These conceptions invite us to re-examine the role of prior knowledge in new learning, of resources for resilience in the face of challenge, and of understanding our inter-dependencies within and across communities.
In this session, we propose to articulate and illustrate these complex conceptions of human learning and development, to use these insights in examining how interpretations of race operate and have evolved, and to offer recommendations for how educators can build upon these complex conceptions to re-structure systems that currently disenfranchise racialized communities along with other attributions of group membership around gender and ability that are also systemically connected with attributions of race and experiences of racial injustice.
We will offer findings from research that help us understand issues of conceptual change and implicit bias as levers for influencing changes in vested belief systems and will highlight how

these findings can be taken up within the potential elasticity of our system of governance within the U.S.

Sub Unit

• AERA Presidential Session

Chair

• Carol D. Lee, Northwestern University

Discussant

• Hirokazu Yoshikawa, New York University

Papers

• Evolutionary, Biological, and Cultural Relationships That Drive Human Learning and Development - Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, University of Southern California; Pamela Cantor, Turnaround for Children; Na'ilah Suad Nasir, Spencer Foundation

• Fundamental Principles of Complex Dynamic Systems as Windows Into Interrogating Racism and Its Systems - Richard Lerner, Tufts University; Ezekiel J. Dixon-Roman, Teachers College, Columbia University; Odis Johnson, Johns Hopkins University

• Historical Record of the Evolution of Race as a Construct and a Moving Target - Jarvis R. Givens, Harvard University; Tabbye Maria Chavous, American Educational Research Association; Manuel L. Espinoza, University of Colorado - Denver

• Complexities of Participation in Cultural Practices as Essential and Normative - Barbara Rogoff, University of California - Santa Cruz; Kris D. Gutiérrez, University of California - Berkeley; Geoffrey B. Saxe, University of California - Berkeley

• Implications for Research and Practice - Carol D. Lee, Northwestern University; David M. Osher, American Institutes for Research; Vivian L. Gadsden, University of Pennsylvania