Cyborg Speculative Fabulation: Youth Transmedia Practice as World-Making

• In Event: Youth Media as Method and Message: Participatory Approaches Toward Educational Equity

Abstract

Objectives:
This presentation begins with the premise that in a world of the everyday cyborg (Haraway, 2013), digital technologies play an important role in mediating everyday human activity, in both formal and informal learning contexts, that is socio-political and humanizing (Authors, 2020). Furthermore, this conception of the everyday cyborg, facilitates speculative fabulation, that is “about worlding ‘naturaltechnical’ worlds [...], worlds needy for care and response” (Haraway, 2014, p. 242). The following argues that designing learning environments for the everyday cyborg, in this case middle schoolers in a Latinx-serving after-school program, fosters an engagement with everyday dilemmas in ways that serve as catalysts for further learning (Engeström, 2006) and new world-making or speculative fabulation (Haraway, 2014). This presentation will include the participation of the youth in our program as they walk us through some of their creations.

Theoretical Perspectives:
The work presented here builds on previous projects that have sought to examine how everyday cultural practices (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003) can mediate meaningful and consequential learning that is, at its core, socio-political and transformative for communities of color (Gutiérrez, Becker, et al., 2019).

Methods:
This paper draws from analysis of an after school digital story-telling program that served fourth, fifth, and sixth graders. Participants included 10 middle school students from schools that served a Latinx community. Video and audio were logged on a variety of metadata, interviews transcribed, and digital artifacts analyzed using multimodal analysis (Hull & Nelson, 2005). Codes were developed inductively (Bogdan & Biklen, 1997). Through these analyses micro-moments were examined to gain an understanding of how meaning-making mediated in face-to-face and virtual interactions.

Data sources:
The study draws from 75 hours of classroom and after-school program video data, 15 hours of interviews, and 400 digital artifacts produced by 24 participants. Data also included data analytics from a custom-designed digitized learning management system.

Findings:
As a social design-based experiment (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016), this study engaged in an iterative process of leveraging participants’ everyday cyborg practices that we describe as digital/face-to-face collaboration that was characterized by careful relationship building, and the creation, sharing, and remixing of multimodal and syncretic artifacts/texts. Through this collaborative cyborg activity, where expertise was distributed, young people collectively examined and developed models for engaging with everyday socio-political issues and designing for new possible futures. We specifically highlight what we have coined as cyborg sociopolitical technical reconfigurations (CSTR), where learners assembled ideational and material tools to craft objects of learning activity that went beyond those established by teachers and schooling.

Significance:
As the youth-produced digital stories and the youths' discussion of them during this symposium will show, this study offers implications for how to design learning experiences that thoughtfully leverage the everyday knowledges and cultural practices of young people from non-dominant communities. It further presents recommendations for the use of digital technologies in learning design that goes beyond “learning management” and rather centers collaboration and transformation.

Authors

• José Ramón Lizárraga, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Arturo Cortez, University of Colorado - Boulder