Tensions and Possibilities for Political Work in the Learning Sciences Expanding Space for Politics in the Learning Sciences (original) (raw)

How can the learning sciences engage more directly with the political dimensions of defining and studying learning? What might this engagement offer for democratizing learning? This paper delineates a tension between deep studies of learning and explicit attention to issues of power, inequality and human dignity. We frame this as a productive tension that will generate new insights, as well as conceptual and methodological tools that contribute to the democratization of learning. We identify a history of ideas inside and outside the learning sciences that inform this objective, including the political dimensions of the field's founding theorists. We then offer examples of ways these tensions manifest in our own empirical work, and conclude by considering how explicit attention to political dimensions of learning can advance our theories about what learning is, about what it is for, and about the conditions that give rise to deep forms of learning for all. In this article we are grappling with the following questions: How can the learning sciences engage more directly with the political dimensions of defining and studying learning? What might that engagement offer for democratizing learning? Addressing these questions is crucial to educators and designers of learning environments who share a commitment to working with youth and communities contending with marginalization. The work is underway (Bang, et. al, 2012; Gutiérrez, 2008; Lee, 2001; Nasir, Roseberry, Warren & Lee, 2006). We believe the time is ripe for making this a more central preoccupation of the field. In our view the learning sciences has a political tension—a tension that has emerged as a shared thread across our work. Here, politics refers to explicit attention to issues of power, hierarchy and inequity, and to the roots of those issues. The field also has an edge that can ground and inform the work of colleagues in other fields who directly address political dimensions of education—we know how to investigate learning with methods that trust and are informed by locally situated social actors and their multiple forms of practice and knowledge. Here, we will describe the boundaries of this tension, ground the discussion in examples from our own work and propose a theoretical stance that privileges human dignity as a central concern. A key strength of scholarship in the learning sciences is in the combined commitment to theories that explore learning as situated in the lives and practices of people (Dewey, 1942; Vygotsky, 1978; Lave, 1987 Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003) while drawing on grassroots methods in research design (Hawkins & Pea, 1987; Barab, et al., 2004; Barab & Squire, 2004;). Theory offers a way of explaining phenomena of concern, but we sense an apparent contradiction within our field about what we want to explain. At times, learning sciences can orient toward a dominant frame regarding the purposes of education and learning: educational achievement and competition in a global marketplace. This frame was not created by the learning sciences, but the field is responsive to it. This frame is expressed in a variety of ways, yet competition remains the organizing feature. In this view individuals prepare to compete within an economic system and, through that system, collectively contribute to a country's economic standing—and in turn, degree of control (Eckert, 1989; Varenne & McDermott, 2008). In the learning sciences, this looks like a commitment to developing expert knowledge and deep conceptual understanding without a broader attention to the political and economic factors that shape and constrain trajectories of learning. We have operated as a future-oriented field, researching and designing toward learning environments that can consistently yield deep conceptual understanding, reflection, and expert knowledge that can serve our practice in the world (Sawyer, 2006). The challenge arises when we fail to or choose not to articulate to what end. In those cases, the dominant narrative is ready and waiting to absorb that future as its own. Put another way, it is one thing to marshal support for strong systems of education through calls to prepare people to be effectively competitive—people tend to envision being on the succeeding end of imagined competitions. It is the same thing, although not often articulated, to establish losers in the competition. This is where the political tension becomes taut. An alternative frame places its emphasis on human dignity as a mode of inclusion. Again, this alternative frame did not originate within the learning sciences, but the field clearly desires to be responsive to it (Esmonde & Caswell, 2010; Nasir & Hand, 2006; Nasir, et al., 2006). In this view, varied, localized, cultural ways of knowing can yield respect, reflection, and cooperation—if not riches. Notably, voices in the field organized in this way tend to express the politics at play in the work of learning and knowing. In this frame, deep conceptual understanding and the practices of novices and experts are still key features of the work. The