Toward an Expansive Methodology for Learning With Nondominant Communities

• In Event: 34.035 - Funds of Knowledge, Community Cultural Wealth, and Forms of Capital: Strengths, Tensions, and Ethical Considerations

Abstract

This paper addresses theoretical and methodological tensions that cut across the theoretical notions of funds of knowledge, community cultural wealth and forms of capital and other work seeking to leverage the cultural repertoires of nondominant communities: What counts as culture across these various theoretical conceptions? What notions of cultural communities are proffered, and in what ways do they advance dynamic understandings of these communities, including notions of identity and agency? What are the methodological and design principles that undergird these theoretical frames? Finally, toward what notions of equity and transformative learning are shared or in tension with one another across these frames?

These are important questions that have both ideal and material consequences on how we understand and leverage cultural histories, practices, and tools in ways that craft new social and educational futures for members of nondominant communities. This paper will address these questions and tensions and will introduce additional frames and methods into the mix to bring into conversation key notions of ecological validity and build theoretical power—in short, to develop a more expansive framework and methodological kit by re-mixing key concepts, methods, and design principles.

One of the enduring criticisms of extant work on cultural communities is that it has not accounted sufficiently for the dynamic constitution of communities or the ongoing movement and flow occurring especially in communities experiencing migration and transmigration. The increased interest in studying the effects of rapid globalization, immigration, diasporic communities, and cultural communities in general, makes rethinking the ways we theorize and study communities compelling issues to address. Yet, there is an ongoing need to push on learning theories to take up a humanist science of learning that aims to understand how to make life dignified for all human beings. Such expansive views of learning should engender a social scientific, historicizing inquiry that privileges the interpretation of learning situations across a minimum of two interacting activity systems, while foregrounding social practices, dynamic notions of culture, and human agency and trajectories toward transformative ends.

This paper contributes a methodological approach to design based research that is compatible with the asset-based constructs of funds of knowledge, wealth, and capital. Specifically, this methodological approach, Social Design Experiments, is ecologically-valid, equity-oriented, and historicized—an approach organized around an argumentative grammar for which an historicized approach to learning and design is central to imagining new futures for nondominant communities (author, 2016). SDEs equity focus is distinguished by sociocultural and proleptic views of learning in which learning is understood as the “organization of possible futures” (author, 2008). Its cultural historical perspective focuses researcher’s attention to variations in individuals’ and groups’ histories of engagement in cultural practices; here variations reside not as traits of individuals or communities, but as proclivities of people with particular histories of engagement with specific cultural activities. Here repertoires of practice refer to the heterogeneous toolkits which individuals appropriate throughout their lives as participants in varied communities of practice (authors, 2003; authors, 2006). The focus is on re-mediating activity systems not fixing individuals.

Author

• Kris Gutierrez, University of California - Berkeley