Expanding Remote Multimodalities to Honor Urgent Everyday Multi-Pandemic Learning

• In Event: Moving Beyond "Learning Loss": Drawing Constructive Lessons and Insights From Research During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Objectives
In this study we explored how innovative/flexible remote methodologies supported data co-generation with youth and families, resulting in novel approaches and implications for studying out-of-school learning. When the COVID-19 multi-pandemic disrupted traditional research activities, participants helped expand data co-generation approaches. This expansion revealed new opportunities for seeing learning across life spaces, using new digital tools for embracing critical learning multimodalities.

Perspectives
In long-term research-practice partnerships (RPPs), we used critical ethnographic participatory methods to understand how people learn/respond to COVID-19 in “daily, (extra)ordinary, and intentional” work (Villenas, 2019, p. 153). We also questioned how we could attend to our shared research-and-practice repertoires remotely, drawing from critical witnessing (Villenas, 2019), and standing with participants (Tallbear, 2014), toward conscientization with communities historically marginalized by systemic inequities.

Methods & Data
We draw from participatory and critical ethnographic traditions for conducting research with rather than on/for participants. We involved 60 participants across metropolitan areas in the midwestern and western US, starting with remote participatory interviewing and experience sampling. But methods evolved with participants through multimodal, dynamic data cogeneration redesign, framed and mediated by long-term relationships. We co-analyzed data in a constant comparative, continuities/contradictions approach (Charmaz, 2017).

Together, we remixed previous research tools to expand possibilities. For example, we called and texted participants to co-strategize what methods families wanted to use, when, how, and for what (e.g., co-planning a video-based dialogue during family dinner). We also used remote methods to meet research and life needs (e.g., using video-based interviews to also collaboratively sew masks and coordinate supply sharing).

Results
As our research went fully remote, and as researchers and participants leveraged years-long relationships of trust and shared vulnerability to co-develop new multimodal and organic design elements for continuing our research remotely, new ways of viewing learning emerged. For example, as we created new hybrid spaces for co-analyzing youth and family data repertoires, we were able to more clearly see youth critical engagement with STEM knowledge/practice as they applied it to navigate a global health, economic, and racial injustice multi-pandemic. As a result, we saw and were able to openly/directly question/discuss how participants collaborated to create new data and data-sharing infrastructures that could better serve their needs as they learned the science of COVID-19 and its equity-related complexities (described in Authors, 2020). Furthermore, remote multimodal co-generation with researchers (e.g., link sharing with candid in-the-moment commentary, social media screenshotting, meming, informal texting) brought about new possibilities for understanding out-of-school learning in vital new-media-mediated ways developed by families and youth (e.g., pushing us to explore intergenerational dimensions of social media curation as coalition-mediated STEM learning). It also expanded dissemination forms to support youth in presenting their learning to external audiences as valid and crucial (e.g., blogs, podcasts).

Significance
This research conducted in partnership with families during the COVID-19 multi-pandemic holds broader research implications regarding new methods, tools, questions, and conceptual framings for expanding how we view and position out-of-school family learning in a multi-pandemic.

Authors

• Day W Greenberg, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• Denise L Jones, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• Angela Calabrese Barton, University of Michigan

• Devon Riter, University of Michigan

• Chandler Turner

• Leslie R. Herrenkohl, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• Elizabeth A. Davis, University of Michigan