Re-Mediation, Social Dreaming, and This Bridge Called My Back: Coalitional Relations in a School/Community Change Effort

• In Event: Dreaming and Living Emancipatory Educational Space: Studying Mediation and Learning in Freirean Pedagogy

Abstract

Recent scholarship by learning scientists reveals re-mediation as a transformative, learner-centered, and robust form of literacy (Gutierrez, Hunter & Arzubiaga, 2009; Espinoza, 2008; Vossoughi & Gutierrez, 2010; Cruz, 2013). In this presentation, we examine practices of re-mediation from participants in a collaborative school/community change effort that used digital storytelling as a pedagogical tool for critical consciousness raising. Specifically, we draw from the dialogical and interesectional theoretical frameworks offered by This Bridge Called My Back: Writing by Radical Women of Color (1981) to think about the process of writing as re-mediation and the use of digital stories as artifacts for coalition building. Throughout the paper, we reflect upon potential alternative relations and socialities that may be produced through these practices of re-mediation.

This presentation composes an embodied and relational understanding of re-mediation to consider critical consciousness raising as a literacy-based learning process. This praxis of re-mediation is an interactive process of naming an integrated analysis of the multiple, often simultaneous oppressions that create the conditions of women of color lives (Combahee River Collective, 1981, p. 210). Exemplifying an intersectional writing practice that helps its author understand the contradictions of their lived experiences, writing as re-mediation becomes a “theory in the flesh,” a practice that potentially reconfigures relations of bodies - human bodies, bodies of knowledge, bodies of land, and social dreaming.

Drawing from interview data of 20 participants (parents, community leaders, and school leaders) in an 8 year case study of a school and community change effort, this presentation will highlight participant experiences telling their stories and their reflections on using the digital stories as pedagogical tools. In showing participant intentions and experiences, we focus on moments where people changed the way they saw themselves, each other, and the world. Thinking with Bridge, Vygotsky, and Freire, we explore this form of re-mediation as it relates to the dialogical dynamics among the stories and the people, and the social dreaming that may open new kinds of relations and socialities for future-oriented work.

Authors

• Linnea Kristina Beckett, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Cindy Cruz, University of California - Santa Cruz