Proleptic and Ecological Approaches to Design-Based Research

• In Event: Cultural-Ecological Frameworks for Understanding and Impacting Opportunity to Learn

Abstract

In contrasting U.S. and Soviet research on human development, Leontiev (cited in Bronfenbrenner, 1977, p. 528) commented,
It seems to me that American researchers are constantly seeking to explain how the child came to be what he is; we in the USSR are striving to discover not how the child came to be what he is, but how he can become what he not yet is.
This paper advances an approach to design research organized around imagining what is “not yet,” that is, the proleptic property of learning that brings “the end into the beginning” (Cole, 1996, p. 183). Motivated by a commitment to transforming the educational and social circumstance of youth from nondominant communities, “social design experimentation” developed over three decades of ethnographic/design research to counter systems of education and learning that were failing immigrant youth, ELLs, youth from under-resourced schools and communities (Gutiérrez, 2008; 2014; Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2014).

Building on longstanding traditions of ecological approaches to research by scholars in the cultural historical tradition (Cole, Gay, Glick, & Sharp, 1971; Cole, Hood, & McDermott, 1982; LCHC, 1983; Rogoff & Lave, 1984, Scribner & Cole, 1981), social design approaches aim for ecologically-valid studies and interventions that recognize that people participate and learn in dynamically organized ecologies. Utilizing anthropological approaches and tools of psychology, we document and test hypotheses about behavior and cognition in ways that findings to speak beyond a laboratory setting’s accounts of intellectual activity. Such experiments rely heavily on observational data derived from real world settings and the valued practices of individuals and their communities. This approach privileges historicity and attends to: (1) local and fuller histories of activity systems and the history of the theoretical and material tools that have shaped the activity over time; and, (2) understanding that the tensions, constraints, and possibilities of activity systems should be understood against their own histories (Engeström, 1999); (3) understanding the history of people’s participation in practices that give meaning to their lives. This attention to ecological history makes possible our proleptic arrangements for learning. As researchers and for participants with whom we collaborate, understanding the world as it was and how the past is indexed in the present, helps us develop and engage in newly imagined futures; through the design of new tools and arrangements, the future is materialized in the present.

To illustrate this approach, we draw from a long-term study on the new media practices of Latino families and their children in our designed afterschool environment. We engage in ethnographic study of everyday family life and design ecologically valid experiments to test our hypotheses about how the social organization of activity in the home and afterschool shapes how expertise and interests move and are distributed across children and adults, how artifacts may develop as boundary objects to expand and connect learning across contexts. This work shows how parents view and enact technology use on their own and with children intersects with issues regarding children’s and families’ health, safety, family time, and learning.

Author

• Kris D. Gutiérrez, University of California - Berkeley