Extending the Vygotskian Project With a Transformative Activist Agenda in a Community College

• In Event: Public Scholarship, Development, and Research With Transformative Agendas: A Vygotskian Approach to Passionate Egalitarianism

Abstract

This paper highlights the central role of positioning students as activist social actors in the dialectic process of personal and collective transformation aiming at equity and social justice. Building on the transformative activist stance, which posits human development and learning to be grounded on agentive contribution to transformative collaborative practices, the authors will discuss the implementation an expansive model of transformative education reform with and for community college students. Termed the Peer Activist Learning Community (PALC), this project seeks to engage students as co-creators of activist communities of learning aimed at transforming alienating and oppressive educational practices in the college and beyond.
Based on the analysis of students’ learning/developmental trajectories as part and parcel of the project’s growth, the authors describe PALC’s increasing impact on institutional change as instantiated by participating students’ learning and development, including their expanding contribution at the intersection of a range of college and related educational and community practices. The first author will focus on how PALC fosters and builds on students’ strengths to demonstrate how this project serves as a site where students build on their own range of cultural repertoires to critically reflect on their college and life experiences as they master critical theoretical concepts introduced in their courses and in PALC. By drawing on social theories as tools with which to critically analyze and expand student’s own discourses and stances toward a range of social issues and their own emerging life agendas, this model is particularly germane to engage minority students from underprivileged backgrounds in meaningful learning that empowers them as social agents.
To this effect, the second author will explore how researchers and students collaboratively investigated and redefined student agency/passivity as a dialectical process. As a former participant, the author will discuss how PALC challenged students’ passivity and resistance in relation to learning and social practices, including striving to overcome the traditional power asymmetries between teacher and student. Indeed, part of the methodology building in PALC aimed at creating a space for collective discussion whereby the group encouraged and even challenged each other to consider ways in which they actively contributed to those practices by which they themselves felt oppressed and constrained. Thus, not only resistance but also, paradoxically, passivity were taken as expressions of participants’ agentic stance and, hence, opening possibilities for change and as a basis for transformation. The upshot of this shared activity was participants’ increasing realization of their changing activist stances.
Importantly, this presentation will address how PALC interrogated these preconceived passive stances as always-active contributions directly shaping this TAS-based research project. By highlighting the centrality of students’ contributions to institutional and educational change, based on developing a vision of and commitment to social justice and equality, the authors will discuss how this model moves beyond influential constructivist, liberal agenda reforms whose focus on active engagement still remains narrowly defined.

Authors

• Eduardo Vianna, LaGuardia Community College - CUNY

• Michael Rifino, The City University of New York