Shirin Vossoughi

Lifting off the Ground to Return Anew: Mediated Praxis, Transformative Learning, and Social Design Experiments.

This article examines a praxis model of teacher education and advances a new method for engaging novice teachers in reflective practice and robust teacher learning. Social design experiments—cultural historical formations designed to promote transformative learning for adults and children—are organized around expansive notions of learning and mediated praxis and provide new tools and practices for envisioning new pedagogical arrangements, especially for students from nondominant communities. The authors examine one long-standing social design experiment, the UCLA UC Links/ Las Redes partnership and the work of one exemplary novice teacher to illustrate the importance of mediated, reflective practices in helping apprentice teachers develop a coherent and orienting framework for teaching and learning that has both heuristic and explanatory power. The authors illustrate how cultural historical concepts of learning and development and situated practice become the means for university students to gain distance and reflect on the beliefs and practices that have informed their understandings of teaching and to “rise to the concrete” practices of learning jointly and resonantly.

Making through the Lens of Culture and Power: Toward Transformative Visions for Educational Equity.

In this essay, Shirin Vossoughi, Paula Hooper, and Meg Escude advance a critique of branded, culturally normative definitions of making and caution against their uncritical adoption into the educational sphere. The authors argue that the ways making and equity are conceptualized can either restrict or expand the possibility that the growing maker movement will contribute to intellectually generative and liberatory educational experiences for working-class students and students of color. After reviewing various perspectives on making as educative practice, they present a framework that treats the following principles as starting points for equity-oriented research and design: critical analyses of educational injustice; historicized approaches to making as cross-cultural activity; explicit attention to pedagogical philosophies and practices; and ongoing inquiry into the sociopolitical values and purposes of making. These principles are grounded in their own research and teaching in the Tinkering Afterschool...

Participatory Design Research and Educational Justice: Studying Learning and Relations Within Social Change Making

This special issue brings together a set of articles by scholars working to expand equitable forms of learning and teaching that contribute to a socially just democracy—or what we might call “social change making” projects—and to advance fundamental knowledge of learning and development. Many scholars have charted and enacted innovative forms of theory, method, and praxis to extend the possibilities of productively disrupting historically powered relations as part of working towards equity and forms of just democracies. Often these efforts are focused on developing effective interventions that cultivate transformative agency amonghistoricallymarginalized individuals and communities toward specific and consequential ends. To accomplish these goals, increasingly scholars are focused on the development of theories of learning that account for critical historicity, power, and relationality. This special issue aims to contribute to this scholarship by drawing attention to growing engagements in the field of education with a method that we are calling participatory design research (PDR). The works featured in this special issue are primarily from early career scholars, some in collaboration with more senior scholars, who explore the ways in which PDR is beginning to shape a newer generation of research epistemologies. These epistemologies may be essential for expanding our fundamental knowledge of learning as well as developing theory that can help create sustainable and transformative social change. Our introduction aims to chart some of the emergent contributions and future directions we think PDR may afford.

Social Analytic Artifacts Made Concrete: A Study of Learning and Political Education

In an educational setting designed for high-school-aged migrant students, social analytic artifacts—tools that deepen the collective analysis of social problems—were examined in relation to two questions: What kinds of artifacts were developed and emphasized in this setting? How and toward what ends did students use these artifacts? This article describes how students appropriated two artifacts—heteroglossic attunement and semantic sharpening—to engage in consequential forms of intellectual, social, and political work. Findings highlight (a) the pedagogical role of epistemic openness, (b) students’ perceptions of new problems and decisions to intervene, and (c) the development of solidarity across difference.

The Learning Sciences in a New Era of U.S. Nationalism

ABSTRACT What responsibilities do researchers of learning have in the wake of Trumps election and the proliferation of far-right, populist nationalism across the globe? In this essay, we seek to prompt and engage a dialogue about the political role and responsibilities of our field at this historical moment. First, we situate the social hierarchies that were most pronounced during this election within a longer history of U.S. policies and practices. We then examine the ostensible division between research on learning and the political contexts and consequences of learning. We argue for the need to address this false chasm and build on scholarship that has demonstrated the inextricable links among learning, power, and politics. We conclude by exploring how research on learning might more meaningfully engage with the political dimensions of learning through teaching, engaged research, publishing, professional forums, and service.

Rewriting Race, Class, and the “culture of poverty: ” Ethnographic Work by Eleanor Leacock, 1959–1980

ABSTRACT Eleanor Leacock (1922–1987) was a cultural anthropologist and prominent critic of the “culture of poverty” framework. This paper analyzes Leacock’s writings on the culture of poverty with the following questions in mind: How did Leacock’s critique of the culture of poverty framework evolve over time? What was her dissatisfaction with the available conceptual vocabulary and how was she struggling to grow beyond it? We illustrate the shift in Leacock’s critique of culture of poverty discourses by juxtaposing key writings from 1960 and 1980. We then offer an interpretation of the shift by discussing four central themes across her work: the we–they dichotomy, definitions of culture, a critique of research methods, and the real-world effects of the culture-of-poverty thesis. We conclude by drawing insights from the evolution of Leacock’s thinking to advance a critique of contemporary culture of poverty discourses, and to help develop an alternative conceptual vocabulary.

Confronting the Home-Field Disadvantage

This book provides a broad, historically informed, methodologically sophisticated argument for diversity in the conduct of psychological and anthropological research that seeks to understand the relationship between culture and thought. The authors’ focus is on the role of culture in human development, particularly contrasting orientations to nature between rural and urban Native American groups (the Menominee in Wisconsin and the American Indian community of Chicago) and European Americans from the same two kinds of settings. Supplemented by evidence from studies of the history of science and sciences studies, as well as other relevant cross-cultural research, their basic message extends to the enterprise of scientific inquiry broadly conceived. The book is written in an accessible and engaging manner that makes it an important resource for teaching, as well as research. A bit of history can help to explain why this book is so timely and why we have been allowed to devote a good deal of space to summarize its contents.