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Designing "On-Ramps" to Anti-Bias Work in Schools: Participatory Design Research Catalyzing New Pedagogies Locally and Nationally

Sat, April 23, 8:00 to 9:30am PDT (8:00 to 9:30am PDT), Marriott Marquis San Diego Marina, Floor: South Building, Level 1, Pacific Ballroom 19

Abstract

Objectives

How can researchers support educators and youth to lift student voices beyond classrooms to counter bias, harm, and injustice? #USvsHate is an educator- and student-led “anti-hate messaging" project started by the Authors and partners in San Diego, in response to a nationwide spike in explicit bias and harassment incidents on school campuses (SPLC, 2019; Rogers et al., 2017). Piloted regionally in 2017-2019 and nationally in 2019-20, #USvsHate has engaged over 10,000 students, primarily K12, from kindergarten through college.

Our RPP model of participatory design research (Author 2017) leverages ongoing study with participants to design #USvsHate strategically to meet educators’ and students’ needs in a “hate-spike” era of vicious partisan divide. We continually explore how and whether the project’s “anti-hate” invitation or onramp to school-based teaching/learning (Authors, forthcoming) supports participants’ learning and action. Our presentation shares this multi-year, participatory design process and its outcomes.

Frameworks

At its core, #USvsHate is an invitation to amplify “student voice” within and beyond the classroom. Students and educators lift their voices as program participants and, if willing, as research participants, continually shaping a shared pedagogical innovation to meet local and national needs.

In inviting students to create public messages in any medium saying that “all people are equally valuable,” #USvsHate combines work on antiracist communication (Author, 2017) and “counterspeech” (Benesche et al., 2016) with scholarship on “framing” (Snow et al., 2019; Lakoff, 2004). #USvsHate also builds on school climate research calling for activities that “promote social inclusion” (Coulston & Smith, 2013; Cardillo, 2013) and taps education traditions inviting students to analyze and counter “the many -isms and phobias that they encounter” (Milner, 2011, p. 69), including multicultural (e.g., Nieto, 1999), antiracist (e.g., Author, 2008b), anti-bias (Derman-Sparks et al., 2020), social justice (Chapman & Hobbel, 2010), and culturally relevant pedagogical traditions (Ladson-Billings, 1995). In an era of vicious partisan division, we decided to invite “anti-hate” teaching, which we hoped could be agreed on regardless of party and neutralize critiques of the project being “partisan” and so, “off limits” to teachers (Levinson & Fay, 2019; Authors, forthcoming).

Methods & Data Sources

As self-critical researchers seeking to continually improve the project’s design (Barab, 2014; Dede, 2005; Penuel et al., 2011) and as “critical ethnographers” attending carefully to remedying injustice (Nelson, 2016), we have analyzed real-time reception and use of #USvsHate throughout, using a combination of interviews, focus groups, participant-observation, analysis of student messages and “backstories” submitted to contests, and social media analysis. Educator and youth input has shaped the project’s resources, text, definitions, and the “anti-hate” frame itself to be adaptable to local learning needs, and usable in schools with any demographic.

Results and Significance

Data analysis supports ongoing local and national expansion of the project through exploring experiences,challenges, and possibilities for “anti-hate” teaching and learning in a bitterly divided nation. Planned 2021 PD efforts will directly address deep tensions in our field, such as whether “anti-hate” teaching today is “partisan”; who decides what teachers can discuss in classrooms; and K12 “onramps” for tackling racism particularly.

Authors