Affect and Embodiment in Everyday Pedagogical Designs: Creating Sites of Possibility through Reflections on Multimodal Research Trajectories

• In Event: Designing for Affect and Embodiment: Ethical Attunements in the Futuring of Education

Abstract

Objectives
We bring together data from our individual ethnographic research (Author 2014; Authors 2018; Author 2020) to discuss the relationship between emic (community) and etic (researchers’) designs of learning environments. Through these studies, featuring urban Indigenous (Author) and transnational migrant (Author) communities, we demonstrate how findings from video-ethnographic research that attends to affect and embodiment (Author 2019; Author 2017, 2019) and that centers people’s everyday learning in their communities, carries over to our work of educational design. Starting from the premise that pedagogical designs do not exist in a vacuum, we ask the following questions:

What have we learned about the role of affect and embodiment in the learning environments that people themselves create/participate in their communities?

How have these observations informed the sensibilities we have brought into our processes for participatory design later in our careers?

Perspectives
This paper is anchored in sociocultural theory of learning (e.g. Nasir et al. 2014), which has a long and robust history of documenting community epistemologies, as actually practiced in multimodal, multigenerational, and relational learning ensembles (e.g. Rogoff et al. 2015; Urrieta 2013; Warren 2001). We further build on methodologies that recognize the role communities and families play in the design and enactment of research studies including, participatory design research (Bang et al. 2016; Bang & Vossoughi, 2016; Ishimaru et al., 2018).

Methods & Data Sources
We bring together videoethnographic data from key moments in our research as multimodal videoanalysts (Erickson 2006; Goodwin 2010, 2018) to reflect on the questions above.

Case Study 1: Case # 1 comes from two studies: The first features videoanalysis of interactions of immigrant children’s Arabic lessons and peer play (Author 2014), highlighting how affect and embodiment were centered. The second study (Authors 2025) focuses on an afterschool program from migrant youth which was collaboratively designed for multilingual and multimodal expression, including corporeal forms of participation that both adult facilitators and children were asked to join.

Case Study 2: This case comes from two studies, a video-ethnographic study that explored how young children and parents coordinate attention and observation while on forest walks (Author, 2020) and a co-design study with creative musicians (i.e., improvisational jazz artists) to explore the relational, historical, embodied, and affective dimensions of collaboration (Authors, 2024).

Results and Significance:
Our studies show how communities, and what we call in professional pedagogical settings “lay people,” engage in designing learning environments organized around local epistemologies. We argue that these pedagogical emic designs have lessons to teach us and are worthy of study.

We reflect on how ethnographic research that centers people’s multimodal learning across community contexts can support unlearning dominant pedagogical models of design and contribute to “unforgetting” the epistemological histories of the communities we serve. We show how this can be accomplished and provide evidence of how our current participatory research is being shaped by findings from our earlier studies, including designing contexts that can advance possibilities for dignity, joy, and ethical attunement.

Authors

• Ananda M. Marin, University of California - Los Angeles

• Inmaculada Maria García Sánchez, University of California - Los Angeles