Failure to Learn: Intra-Disciplinarity as a Process

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 11:45 am - Gold 4
  In Roundtable Session: Nested Realities: School, Society, and Transformation in Education

Abstract

This conversation examines how intra-disciplinary conversations—the integrated collaboration among a discipline’s subfields—reframe how scholars analyze social phenomena. Using the case of Amanda, a failing and disengaged student, we draw on the learning sciences, school psychology, and the cultural-historical approach to explore the entangled tensions of instructional, psychological, and sociocultural orientations. In doing so, we supersede deficit-oriented perspectives about Amanda to identify how learning tools, relational dynamics, and cultural practices collectively produce failure. The authors of this analysis call upon each other’s expertise to engender conceptual openings otherwise not seen without intra-disciplinary engagements. Intra-disciplinarity is not novel yet documenting how this process emerges exemplifies the transformational value of bridging a field’s voids by leveraging its intellectual diversity.

Authors

• Jonathan Desmon Russell Pérez, The School of The New York Times

• Quennie Dong, University of California - Berkeley

• Shreya Kailey Sheel, University of California - Berkeley