Race to Discourse: Organizing Digital Tools to Support Critical Conversations About Race

• In Event: Critical Digital Pedagogies: Educators, Parents, and Rsearchers Co-Designing Consequential Learning Through Play and Transformative Agency

Abstract

The current context demands that we build on the momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement and assume responsibility as educators and researchers for designing learning environments oriented toward interrupting and re-imagining systemic racism, especially in online spaces. Therefore, our study highlights our collective efforts to intentionally design for critical digital pedagogies that leverage digital tools and activities in order to build on and develop learner’s agentic practices, while simultaneously providing opportunities for disrupting traditionally static conceptions of the expert-learner dichotomy. Our poster offers insights and considerations for the design of digital discursive practices that promote racial justice and equity across three cases, within a secondary humanities classroom, a computational educational technology course, and a professional organization.
Our analytical focus is on the development of critical racial discourse as both a process and outcome. Our design-based study interrogates discourse that illuminates how race is embedded in the history and practices of the disciplines we teach. We animate aspects of two theoretical constructs: third space (Gutierrez, Rhymes, and Larson, 1995) and relational equity (DiGiacomo and Gutierrez, 2015). Third space disrupts expert-learner paradigms and focuses on the hybridization of discourse practices of the classroom and the everyday. In the classroom, this may mean bringing together learners’ discourse around lived experiences of structural racism with literacy practices in the classroom. The intersection of subject-matter content and sociopolitical criticism invites learners to shift narratives about themselves through conversation and through the creation of hybridized learning products (Gutierrez, 2014).
Acknowledging traditional teacher-student power relations, relational equity intentionally shifts the participation structures delimited by hierarchical social organizations, privileging co-authoring and conversation. In practice, this requires the intentional assessment of student knowledge, encouragement to share such knowledge, and organizing participation to support student agency in activity. We conjecture that intentionally designing for relational equity to promote hybrid discursive spaces supports conditions for learners to engage in social and historical critique, to connect social perspectives with course content, and to co-imagine new social futures.
Field notes, recordings from video-conferencing, and transcriptions were collected over the course of several weeks from two online learning contexts: a high school humanities class and an educational technology class, in which the authors were both researcher and teacher. Our analysis is guided by the following research questions: 1) How does the organization of digital tools and ideational materials support relational equity in and hybrid discursive spaces that focused on race? 2) How do these discussions support students’ social imaginations and engagement in new social practices in the classroom and beyond? and 3) How do these conversations support new forms of engagement within the discipline? All data was triangulated and inductively coded.
This study offers pedagogical and theoretical contributions for the design of digital learning environments, with specific attention to activities, across the P-20 disciplines, that examine the socio-historical construction of race in our country. Methodologically, it offers considerations for the design of researcher-practitioner partnerships that centralize investigations of teaching and learning within our current context.

Authors

• Bria Myles, San Jose Unified School District

• Nicole Bulalacao, University of California - Berkeley

• Patrick Williams, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Arturo Cortez, University of Colorado - Boulder

• José Ramón Lizárraga, University of Colorado - Boulder