Tensions and Possibilities for Political Work in the Learning Sciences

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. Expanding Space for Politics in the Learning Sciences? 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; Gutierrez, 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 Gutierrez & 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 distinction is in making human dignity and social equity the primary commitments. With this commitment comes a more explicit attention to the kind of future that is embodied and potentially engendered by alternative educational designs and practices. Where new social and political visions are made explicit, research on deepening conceptual understanding and expertise also takes shape differently: intellectual activity is understood as embedded in social relations; those social relations can either reproduce or reimagine and transform the hierarchies (raced, classed, gendered, aged, nationalized, etc.) and forms of competition that uphold the status quo. Thus, in addition to treating learning as a cognitive, affective and social process, understanding human learning as a fundamentally political process can lead to distinct empirical insights, designs and methods. Where we do not actively attend to political dimensions in learning, we can reproduce depoliticizing currents that weaken our analyses, making it more difficult to scale our work across settings. Building on Two Active Modes of Theorizing One way to illuminate this distinction is to consider two active modes of theorizing in the learning sciences. One approach is to theorize in ways that yield scalable designs to support learning in various disciplinary contexts: Unlike these previous generations of educational research, learning scientists spend a lot of time in schools—many of us were full time teachers before we became researchers. And learning scientists are committed to improving classroom teaching and learning—many are in schools every week, working directly with teachers and districts. Some even take time off from university duties and return to the classroom, teaching alongside teachers and learning how to make theories work in the real world. This is a new kind of science, with a goal of providing a sound scientific foundation for education (Sawyer, 2006, p. 15). When we theorize from this place, we emphasize science that is grounded in real practices and lived experiences of students, teachers, novices, experts, and professionals. We also tend to prioritize schooling, even as we draw from understandings of learning in everyday life. In and of themselves, these are not overtly political moves. Rather they allow us to reveal practices—local or disciplinary—around which knowledge can be jointly produced. Learning, then, is understood in terms of its depth and effectiveness for yielding flexible and adaptive expertise. This is the bread and butter of the field and we are making meaningful progress. Still, systems that privilege some and marginalize others persist. This is a concern the learning sciences also takes seriously. A second mode of theorizing holds tightly to local practices that are culturally mediated. With this lens, practices that support learning are somewhat freed from the disciplines and can be rooted in a wide variety of activities and cultural spaces (e.g. sports and games, shopping, organizing and activism, etc.). When our lens is focused on cultural ways of knowing and doing, politics have more freedom to emerge through processes of negotiating meaning. We are interested in extending these situated, sociocultural modes of theorizing by investigating what it would mean for the method to scale while the design itself may not. If the learning sciences is to emphasize human dignity, we need to theorize in ways that may not be scalable in a strictly scientific sense. That is, “a sound scientific foundation for education” might be upgraded to sound human-centered methods for learning where knowledge is not only co-constructed but also politically active.