“Facilitated Reflexive and Multi-modal Exchange” (FRAME): Reflecting on EOL Grantees’ Gender Equality and Social Inclusion (GESI) advocacy frameworks

• In Event: Roundtable Session 12
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Advocating for quality education for all in a digitalising world: Civil society’s engagement in education policymaking through Education Out Loud

Proposal

Learning collaboratives are a group of Education Out Loud (EOL) grantees that come together both through physical meetings and online work to learn from each other’s experiences around a specific thematic topic, or organisational or advocacy areas of learning. These collaboratives can be considered as ‘digital assemblages’, that is, “a collection of digital and physical resources” (Jarrahi, Sawyer & Erickson, 2022, p. 232) as well as “routines, shared norms, and social practices that undergird generating, sharing, and other distributed knowledge practices” (p. 233). They constitute emergent and bottom-up forms of ‘informational infrastructures (II), that is, evolving, open, heterogeneous ecosystems that stretch across space and time beyond the boundaries of organisations (Jarrahi, Sawyer & Erickson, 2022).

In this paper, we examine the multimodal learning products created by a learning collaborative focused on the theme of Gender Equality and Social Inclusion (GESI) as outcomes/effects of dialogical processes among EOL grantees in terms of the ‘what’ of their advocacy efforts as well as the ‘how’, that is, the different modes in which grantees produced content given their differential access to resources. Based on this analysis, we outline the FRAME approach (Facilitated Reflexive and Multimodal Exchange) built upon our experiences with Delphi research methodology, photovoice, digital storytelling, reflexive mixed methods, design thinking, and video-cued multivocal ethnography. The FRAME approach involves facilitated digital engagements with the grantees of the learning collective that enable a collective reflection on both the ‘how’ (for example, EOL grantees’ GESI conceptualization, implementation, and policy advocacy successes and challenges to-date) and the ‘what’ of their advocacy efforts in GESI (for example, the different modes in which grantees produce GESI-related content). Further, the FRAME pedagogy invites EOL grantees to collect their own multimodal data through prompts to share their learnings and experiences in GESI programming and advocacy, intersected with examples of impact, policy advocacy, and implementation. Prompts are through the online (e.g., Moodle) platform, as well as integrated with multimodal sharing platforms (e.g. Flipgrid, Vimeo, and Kobo Toolbox). Following the collection of this data, subsequent digital engagements would be focused on reflecting on the data collected to reframe GESI, and to set new goals and plans for future GESI advocacy. We illustrate the FRAME approach as an informational infrastructural practice that aims to expand the digital resources available to this existing assemblage, and to strengthen the interactions between the various grantees within this assemblage even as we reflect upon the different, possibly unequal, sociotechnical relationships that each member may have to this assemblage.

Authors

• Aditi Ashok Arur, Christ University

• Joan DeJaeghere, University of Minnesota

• Christopher Johnstone, University of Minnesota

• Nancy Pellowski Wiger, University of Minnesota

• Matthew Schuelka, Fora Education