Social Design Experiments: Toward Equity by Design

Abstract

It seems to me that American researchers are constantly seeking to explain how the child came to be what he is; we in the USSR are striving to discover not how the child came to be what he is, but how he can become what he not yet is. -A. N. Leontiev (cited in Cole, 1979) In this paper, we advance an approach to design research that is organized around a commitment to transforming the educational and social circumstances of members of non-dominant communities as a means of promoting social equity and learning. We refer to this approach as "social design experimentation" (Gutiérrez, 2008). This methodology developed over three decades in response to systems of education and learning that were failing immigrant youth, dual language learners, and youth from under-resourced schools and communities (Gutiérrez, Hunter, & Arzubiaga, 2009).

Immediations and rhythms of speculative design: Implications for value in design‐based research

“…Mediation, as a structuralist, cultural psychological concept, must be defined a priori , as a tool to effect experience to come. For example, the organizers of the Migrant Student Leadership Institute at UCLA, an access summer programme bringing youth with migrant farmer backgrounds to the university, sought to “reframe education so that students could begin to reconceive their identities as learners and historical actors in the academy and beyond” (Gutiérrez & Jurow, , p. 10). This reframing or reorganization of the university learning environment included the development of a curriculum that “syncretized” historically valued community practices such as testimonio with more traditional academic writing genre.…”

“…Although DBR does not adhere to any one theory of learning and change, in equity‐oriented research across educational technology, and the learning sciences more broadly, cultural‐historical activity theory (CHAT) and Frierien traditions have played key roles in the research and design of opportunities to learn for youth in non‐dominant communities (Bang & Vossoughi, ). These traditions highlight the re‐mediating potentials of knowledge co‐creation alongside these communities (Gutiérrez, ), wherein researchers’ use of re‐mediation thus stresses the hyphen both to avoid the deficit connotations of “remedial” education and to signal the development of new mediating practices that “re”‐mediate “a history of inferior education by reframing what counts as education generally” for youth in non‐dominant communities (Gutiérrez & Jurow, ).…”

The Marginal Syllabus: Educator Learning and Web Annotation Across Sociopolitical Texts and Contexts

“…The broader OWA effort described in this chapter, and our case study of educators' intertextual activity in OWA conversation, draws upon the first year of a burgeoning social design experiment (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016). According to Gutiérrez and Vossoughi (2010), social design experiments are a "democratizing form of inquiry" which aim to create open and expansive learning systems demonstrating "transformative potential."…”

Learning as Movement in Social Design-Based Experiments: Play as a Leading Activity

“…Social design research shares important theoretical and methodological aspects and aspirations with sociocultural approaches to design, including formative interventions (Bronfenbrenner, 1979;Engeström, 2008Engeström, , 2011 and ecologically valid experimentation (Cole, Hood, & McDermott, 1982;Scribner & Cole, 1981). As we have written elsewhere (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016), social design research shares aspects of contextsensitive, problem-focused, and iterative approaches to design research (Brown, 1992;Sandoval & Bell, 2004) and with the goals of the design-based research community as advanced by Collins, Joseph, and Bielaczyc (2004), Cobb, Confrey, diSessa, Lehrer, and Schauble (2003), and Anderson and Shattuck (2012). As elaborated in this work, design research focuses on issues related to the study of learning and instruction, such as the following: 1.…”

“…The need to study learning in the real-world settings rather than the laboratory 4. The need to go beyond narrow measures of learning and understand how complex learning ecologies support learning (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016) Design-based research in general seeks to develop new visions, theories, and technologies for teaching and learning that might help support change in existing institutions, often creating new environments to implement new practices. While social design-based experiments share the aims of more traditional design experiments of creating theoretically grounded and practical educational interventions, they are distinguished in important ways from design experiments employed in education research (Brown, 1992;Collins, 1992), bringing equity and learning together to design for consequential learning and transformational change.…”