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As colleges and universities expand the socioeconomic diversity of their student populations, many policies and practices require reconceptualization to better serve all students. Recent social psychology and learning sciences research directly informs how to support the achievement and well-being of students from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds, with attention to intersecting minoritized identities. These approaches challenge assimilationist and deficit-based views of student identities in addressing factors at multiple levels of their sociocultural contexts. Building from the evidence, recommendations emphasize committing financial resources to allow for full access and participation in higher education. Also, specific faculty practices and development opportunities can enhance teaching. Finally, community emerges as a central theme; recommendations enhance student connections within and beyond the college environment.

This paper argues that the terms through which we interpret and work to develop expansive pedagogical practices are overly constrained by the binary of adult-centered versus child-centered educatio...

Meaningful participation (i.e., substantive involvement in socially vital activities) and educational dignity (i.e., the multifaceted sense of a person’s value generated via substantive intra- and ...

This introduction to the special issue offers a selective account of two efforts, across a half century, to describe and alleviate the plight of poor people and their children in school: a specific...

The culture of poverty thesis did not emerge from the conservative shadows of American intellectual life, but from its most liberal hopes for the future. Most of its earliest champions were committ...

Studies of embodied cognition offer powerful accounts of the semiotic resources people use as they think together within different domains. Yet this research does not typically foreground the histo...

In this commentary, we wrestle with key ideas presented in Schenkel, Calabrese Barton, Tan, Nazar, and Flores’ Framing Equity through a Closer Examination of Critical Science Agency and offer a series of theoretical and methodological attunements we view as germane to the visions of educational justice discussed therein. We begin by discussing the promising theoretical framework presented in the article, particularly the authors’ call for the field to engage more directly with issues of power and political consciousness in science education. We then turn to their empirical analysis of critical science agency, highlighting interactional moments and student reflections on learning that offer important insights into this concept. We then trace a series of theoretical and methodological tensions that raise questions about the ways researchers conceptualize and study the development of agency and political consciousness among youth, particularly those from minoritized and non-dominant communities, as well as the ways terms like community, consequentiality, and scales of justice/injustice are defined analytically. This discussion is interwoven with our efforts to name dispositions and lines of inquiry we view as imperative for research on the learning experiences of others that moves from a place of criticality and humility. We write as scholars and educators who share many of the authors’ concerns and are invested in research on science education that supports expansive learning and transformative praxis across researchers, educators, young people, and communities (Engestrom in Theory Psychol 21(5):598–628, 2011. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354311419252 ).

In this chapter we explore what is required of us, as researchers and educators, to disentangle settled disciplinary knowledge and ways of knowing from colonial matrices of power, and to enable insurgent ways of learning, being, and acting in, with, and across disciplines. We posit three sensibilities that are critical to liberatory forms of disciplinary learning animated by onto-epistemic heterogeneity: multiplicity, horizontality, and dialogicality. Grounded in extended examples, we define these sensibilities, illustrate how they shift both the content and the terms of disciplinary ways of knowing in literacy, science, and mathematics, and articulate key implications for the design of learning and the practice of teaching.

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 follo...

This paper problematizes the enduring conscription of STEM learning in discourses of U.S. global ascendancy, neoliberalism and militarism. Drawing on ethnographic data, we explore how girls of color make meaning of their everyday experiences in two settings: a racially tracked mathematics class in a suburban high school and a STEAM based after-school program in a working class urban community. The stories of these girls–separated by time, place, age, and social histories but bound by sensibilities grown in their Immigrant families and learning contexts–contest U.S. hegemony as the primary rationale for STEM learning; challenge individual gain at the expense of another; problematize what counts as science while insisting on its creative convergence with joy; and honor their ingenuity and humanity. Challenging representational and respectability politics, we consider how dignity may better account for the complexity of their experiences and serve as a resource for research, pedagogy and design.

In this essay, Shirin Vossoughi, Paula Hooper, and Meg Escudé 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 Program as well as in the insights and questions raised by critical voices both inside and outside the maker movement.

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 “socia...

This paper argues for an amplification of the everyday intellectual and political gestures of children as valuable indices and movers of learning. We identify and focus on microacts of self-determination, defined here as, “as contestations and moves to elsewhere that shift activity and dictate future status”. In particular, we consider if and how such microacts that could be cast as idiosyncratic build and shape new possibilities for learning and social interaction, what we refer to here as learning from below. Learning from below reflects an effort to move beyond the binary of individual versus collective activity and to situate scholarship on social and historical movements and forms of decolonial insurgency as germane to sociocultural and interactional studies of learning. Drawing from an extensive data set which included ethnographic fieldnotes, semi-structured interviews, and over 70 hours of video data collected from an after-school community tinkering program, we found that children's everyday forms of self-determination were much more than individual acts; they emerge from social histories and carried future potentialities that shaped learning and intellectual life within the setting. This central finding is anchored in an analysis of over 600 examples, as well as two cases that look more closely at individual children's participation.

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 re...

This chapter brings together cultural-historical approaches to human development with interpretive and multi-sited ethnography in order to: (1) develop ethnographic tools that attend to the ways young people learn within and across multiple contexts; (2) draw from and contrast the methodological insights of single and multi-sited ethnography; and (3) glean principles that help constitute a “multi-sited sensibility” appropriate for taking a more expansive approach to learning that advances conceptions of learning as movement.

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.

What are the origins of educational rights? In this essay, Espinoza and Vossoughi assert that educational rights are “produced,” “affirmed,” and “negated” not only through legislative and legal channels but also through an evolving spectrum of educational activities embedded in everyday life. Thus, they argue that the “heart” of educational rights—the very idea that positive educative experiences resulting in learning are a human entitlement irrespective of social or legal status—has come to inhere in the educational experiences of persons subjected to social degradation and humiliation. After examining key moments in the African American educational rights experience as composite historical products, the authors determine that learning is “dignity-conferring” and “rights-generative.” They revisit African slave narratives, testimony from landmark desegregation cases, and foundational texts in the history of African American education where they find luminous first-person accounts of intellectual activity in the shadow of sanction, suppression, discouragement, and punishment. They conclude by outlining an empirical framework for studying the nexus of learning, dignity, and educational rights from a social interactional perspective.

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.