Educational Research and the Transformative Activist Stance: Being, Doing, and Knowing for Social Change

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

Abstract

The characterization of effective teaching and learning as the performance of and mastery over elite forms of curricular capital has promoted the view of teachers, researchers, and learners as solitary, oppositional, and competent / deficient providers, devisers, or consumers of knowledge (Lobman, 2010). Within this corporate framework, the goals of educational equity and social justice have been reduced to an individual, instrumental, or institutional test score. Teachers, researchers, and students alike are offered few pedagogic, theoretical, or pragmatic tools to understand or embrace the multiplicity of the human experience.

Contemporary educators and researchers can draw on Vygotsky’s project as a unique framework espousing his commitment to social justice. In a shift from neutral science and objective experimentation, the Vygotsky projects’ theoretical tenets, methodologies, and practical applications embodied equality, multiculturalism, and equity. Instead of copying and striving to disclose reality “as it is,” the approach endeavored to create processes under investigation to study the act of co-construction via cultural mediation.

Expanding Vygotsky’s approach, the Transformative Activist Stance (TAS, see Stetsenko, 2015) asserts that people are agentive co-creators of their own lives and development, as well as the world they collaboratively create, while they, themselves, are interactively created. The mutual, co-construction of self and society occurs in a dynamically recursive and bidirectional process through individuals’ creative and agentive acts that collectively actualize the world. Through TAS, the deliberate transformation of the world serves as the foundation for human development, encompassing the integrated processes of being, doing, and knowing. TAS predicates ontology and epistemology on the notion of moving beyond the status quo, enacting the future through agentive contributions to collaborative practices across past, present, and future intersections of individual and collective agencies.

TAS takes to heart the Vygtoskian motto that what is most at stake in teaching, learning, and educational research includes the discovery of how learners came to be what they are, as well as how they can become what they not yet are. Toward this end, TAS emphasizes the synergistic, mutual becoming of educators /researchers/ scholars and their students /participants/learners while these agents challenge each other through the collaborative development of meaningful projects affecting personal and social transformation.

This paper outlines the historical antecedent and core components of a TAS approach necessary to legitimate models of teaching and research that cultivate educational equity and social justice. It highlights the ways in which teacher-researchers have aligned the processes of acting, being/becoming, and knowing with the commitment to social transformation for educators and learners alike. Implications of the approach will be reviewed, including an explicit and open articulation of the constituents’ evolving commitments as a legitimate aspect of the critical, dynamic explorations and evolving research methodologies. In capitalizing on permanent changes in social dynamics, the TAS locates activist agencies as ontologically and epistemologically central to being, doing, and knowing that defines authentic teaching, inquiry, and learning by teachers, researchers, and learners as activists in pursuit of critical, social transformation (cf. Freire 1970).

Authors

• M. Cathrene Connery, Central Washington University

• Anna Stetsenko, City University of New York