(Re)Framing Educational Possibility: Attending to Power and Equity in Shaping Access to and within Learning Opportunities

Abstract

Accounts of how culture constitutes the learning activities we accomplish with others are flourishing. These accounts illustrate how participants draw upon, adapt, and contest historically situated social practices, tools, and relations to accomplish their learning goals [Vygotsky: Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1978]. Yet, they often lack attention to the ways that these social features reify and are reified by broader power structures and hierarchies. One way that power plays out in everyday social interaction is through the stories, narratives and ideologies that serve as resources for interpreting and organizing ongoing activity. Individuals become attuned to, coordinate and mobilize around these broader narratives through the frames they engage in moments of interaction. We offer frame analysis as a means of investigating both access to learning environments and opportunities to learn within them. To situate learning opportunities within and across different components of multilevel systems, a distinction is proposed between framing within a classroom or learning environment and framing access to educational processes and institutions. This paper recommends that researchers analyze, and design for, framing that disrupts predominant power structures and expands the possibilities for learning within more equitable social practices.

Desettling Expectations in Science Education

“…He and Ashley, a second community teacher, reframed the prescribed orientation [see Hand, Penuel, & Gutiérrez, 2012] to help students view these relationships within the 'hives of activity' and 'circulatory flows' of life [Ingold, 2011, p. 29;see also Wilson, 2009] at the oxbow. Ashley explicitly connected students' knowledge of and experiences with local forms of life (e.g., harvesting edible and medicinal plants) and the life forms in the oxbow (plants and animals in the ecosystem) to the activity: 'So one of the reasons that this is important is that we've harvested medicine from this place, right?…”

Understanding Student Collaboration in Interdisciplinary Computing Activities

“…Understanding student positioning during collaborative work is especially critical for understanding equity and access in computing education as it unfolds alongside other contextual factors (e.g. [15,19]). Such an approach is especially useful given the interdisciplinary expectations of computing-infused curricula.…”

“…Framing a ects what knowledge (e.g., pieces of knowledge and connected knowledge structures; [10]) people believe will be relevant in a given situation [14]. It also a ects how notions of competence are constructed in learning environments and beyond, with implications for equity and access to learning opportunity [15].…”

“…Cameron's comments suggest he is most concerned with ge ing the R code to work quickly. He comments on to syntactical errors in the code, and when prompted to explain the purpose of di erent functions he either ignores them or responds noncommitally in ways that suggest he does not think such explanations are important (lines 4,10,15,26). Although Ann does not speak much, when she does she is asking questions about the R code Cameron is writing that is most related to the statistical content that is the focus of the lesson (lines 3,14,20,22).…”

Commentary on Conceptualizing Cultural and Racialized Process in Learning

“…This urge to expand the field of investigation is evident in the insistence of Hand, Penuel, and Gutiérrez [2012] that we need to study how 'race and power play out [both] in moment-to-moment activity and across scales of time and space' (p. 251) by attending to 'multilevel and cross-level' scales of educational activity (p. 264).…”