Understanding the lived textures and temporalities of impact within justice-oriented research on learning

• In Event: Tracing the Contours of Having an “Impact”: Reflections From Learning Sciences Faculty

Abstract

Purposes: This presentation considers the layers of impact that can take shape within participatory, ethnographic and micro-interactional methodologies that work to co-design and study justice-oriented learning. Looking across several projects and 20 years of design and scholarship, I reflect on the lived meanings and temporalities of impact as tied to: 1) the relationships between everyday processes of human learning, dignity, and social and educational transformation; 2) collaborative methodologies as learning environments; 3) the role of ethical witnessing and writing for researchers and co-participants; and 4) the ripple effects and “sister spaces” that emerge across time, generation, and place.

Theoretical & Methodological Perspectives: Socio-cultural theory provides robust conceptual tools for analyzing the relationships between micro-genetic, ontogenetic, and cultural-historical change (Rogoff, 2011; Lee, et. al., 2021), such as the zone of proximal development (Vygotksy, 1978), prolepsis (Cole, 1996), and substrates: the resources or material provided by prior actions that are re-used and modified to create something new (Goodwin, 2013). Goodwin argues that building next actions using substrates is simultaneously structure-preserving and transformative, a process through which we “inhabit each other’s actions, including those of no longer present predecessors” (2018, p. 31).

Data sources & results: Bringing these concepts into conversation with a rich corpus of ethnographic and interactional data, I consider how closely analyzing and working to render the textures of pedagogical interaction over time, within and across contexts, reveals important insights around impact, particularly with regards to the ways learning environments can become lived arguments for the possible. Drawing on data documenting co-design sessions, collaborative research, writing and other forms of language work with multi-generational groups of educators, I discuss the shifts in participation and role re-mediations (Author 2 & co-Author 2016) that have emerged through sustained efforts to deepen communal forms of educational imagination, renewal and self-determination, and to expand the contours and values of disciplinary learning (Warren, et. al., 2021). I also consider how analyzing the relationships between learning and social change involves studying the ways liberatory educational experiences can mediate other social and familial relations in students’ and educators’ lives (Author 2 et. al., 2021) as tied to “cascading programs” (Bang. et. al., 2016) or “sister spaces:” settings that grow from prior settings through the people that carry forward and evolve particular axiologies and political visions across time and place (Author 2, 2018; Espinoza et. al., 2020; Zavala, 2016). Here I highlight how students’ and educators’ experiences across multiple contexts with resonant values can substantiate generative and humanizing educational praxis as routine rather than exceptional, creating new capabilities, responsibilities, and sensorial horizons of possibility.

Significance: Definitions and measures of impact within the Learning Sciences are shaped by our views of the axiological processes, purposes, and ongoing outcomes of learning. Understandings of historicity and social change as unfolding within multiple scales of human activity, including moment-to-moment forms of mediation and sense-making, signal a need to attune to such micro-interactional layers of experience as contexts and conditions for worldmaking. [486]

Author

• Shirin Vossoughi, Northwestern University