New Terrains for Familiar Places: Re-Conceptualizing Families Engaged in Educational Changemaking

Abstract

This dissertation seeks to expand a framework for families engaged in educational changemaking that emphasizes relational- ontological, axiological, and epistemological commitments to ‘desettling’ (Bang et al., 2012) partnership and pedagogy. This dissertation centers relationality as a core construct that knits social and ecological challenges with educational inequities, which disproportionately impact the “collective continuance” of nondominant students, families, and communities (Whyte, 2013). Binary and divisive politics undergird much of education (content and pedagogy) and educational partnerships (with families and communities) in ways that inauthentically and inequitably place burden and blame upon families, particularly nondominant families, to “solve” such challenges (Baquedano-López et al., 2013; Wilson et al., 2019). As educational reform efforts, including and especially research endeavors, seek to engage and partner with diverse students and families, it is necessary to better articulate and anticipate how our processes encounter, reflect, refuse, and revive diverse ways of being, knowing, and caring. This dissertation explores how binaries “quietly operate” (Bang et al., 2014) in and across efforts to engage families in educational changemaking, as well as how relational commitments may be cultivated to rupture and subvert binary politics for collective wellbeing and educational justice in a process of ‘desettling.’ This dissertation infuses critical family engagement research (Ishimaru et al., 2019, Ishimaru et al., in prep.) with insights from sociocultural (e.g., Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2013), situated (e.g., Lave & Wenger, 2001; Bang, 2015), and cultural-historical theories of human learning (e.g., Engeström, 2001) as connected to social changemaking. Further, I draw upon Indigenous and land-based theories to ground the concept of relationality in ways that (re)orient to places, lands, waters, and more-than-human-others as consequential to learning and socio-ecological changemaking (Bang et al., 2016; Cajete, 2000; Calderon, 2014; Simpson, 2014; Smith, 2013). This dissertation utilizes micro-ethnographic methods (Erickson, 1996), knowledge in interaction analysis (KIA) methods (diSessa et al., 2015; Jordan & Henderson, 1995) and qualitative content analysis methods (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016; Schreier, 2014) to analyze data collected through co-design activities across two larger participatory design research projects. Across three distinct empirical papers, I build out a framework for axio-onto-relationality in families engaged in educational changemaking. The first paper examines the conceptual contours of relational and divisive conceptions about families that emerged in social changemaking work across intracultural communities in a participatory design research project called Family Leadership Design Collaborative (Ishimaru & Bang, 2016). The second paper, further explores conceptions of families engaged in education as manifest in design processes and materials, and in moments of place-based co-design with educators, families, and community members in a participatory design project called Learning in Places. Finally, the third paper examines how the conceptual propositions driving the design of families engaged in science learning (described in paper 2) were concretized in “family knowledge and practice sharing tools” (i.e., homework), as well as the range of socio-ecological knowledges and practices of families’ that were elicited from use of such tools in practice. I close with a reflection on axio-onto-epistemic relationality across the papers, and synthesize key implications for co-design theory and practice.