Our commitment at this time of continuing struggle against oppression and structural inequalities

To “the fierce urgency of now”

(Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., ‘I Have a Dream’ speech at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963)

As we continue to confront crises, turmoil, and struggles for justice around the globe, the editors of Mind, Culture, and Activity (MCA) share the following statement. This statement is motivated by an acknowledgment of the depth of the global crises we face, a realization that now is not the time for “business as usual,” and a commitment to radical changes required at all levels of our current practices, including on the editorial collective of MCA, and on affiliated forums such as XMCA and the Cultural Praxis website (http://culturalpraxis.net/). This realization is the fruit of our engagement with a larger community of scholars, including colleagues involved in the Re-generating CHAT collective, whose insights, work, and activism have inspired us.¹

MCA stands in opposition to racial terror, systemic, state-sanctioned violence, and the devastations of economic imperialism. Although this journal and its affiliates were launched with a commitment to scholarship in the interests of social justice and equity, we want to reignite and regenerate this commitment with a strong focus on the need to fight against all forms of oppression including structural racism, classism, sexism, fascism, ableism, imperialism, and legacies of colonialism. Inspired by progressive social movements around the globe, such as Black Lives Matter, La Via Campesina, democratic movements in Hong Kong, youth-led climate strikes, and teacher strikes, we acknowledge that scholarship and associated practices and discourse are not politically neutral and that a generative movement forward is only possible with explicit attention to structural inequalities. This generative movement requires the participation of members and activists of historically oppressed groups. We hold ourselves accountable for redressing existing imbalances and injustices in our own disciplines and institutional practices.

As the first order of the day, we acknowledge that our current collective of editors does not have enough diversity of expertise or experience to fulfill these commitments. We recognize that we have not yet contributed enough to dismantling the practices of privilege that mediate individual and collective development and shape our journal and forums. We have, therefore, adopted the following action items:

1. We will create an editorial collective that is diverse in the ways that the current challenges we face, and our commitments, require, by engaging with scholars and activists participating in a wide range of social movements against oppression globally.

2. We anticipate that the newly composed editorial collective will then develop and adopt positive principles to counteract paternalizing, tokenizing, and other practices that make this diversity unsustainable.

3. We will encourage papers and pieces that reflect and promote these commitments.

In a recent editorial (Ferholt et al., 2020), we announced the expansion of our MCA work through the Cultural Praxis website (CP) as a means to enhance the journal’s potential to effect the changes called for above. With the integral work of MCA and CP, we aim to engage an explicitly activist praxis of scholarship by curating and promoting work that seeks societal impact. CP and MCA will provide publishing platforms operating at a range of time scales, together allowing for both immediate publications about ongoing issues and peer-reviewed articles, which take more time to publish. CP was also created with the explicit aim of developing more equitable communication and publishing practices not always rigorously promoted through the years, including on the discussion board connected to the journal, XMCA. Moreover, we strive to address this aim by diversifying and expanding established norms of scholarly writing/editing to foster dialogue between researchers from Global North/West and Global South/East, as well as to create spaces for communicating in other-than written forms and in other languages than in English.²

Our hope is that we will be able to address all three of the above action items, without delay. This statement affirms our pledge to use our knowledge and resources to advance the production of transformative, liberatory scholarship for social justice and against oppression around the globe.

The Articles in this Issue

In “From Mediated Actions To Heterogenous Coalitions: Four Generations of Activity-Theoretical Studies of Work and Learning,” Yrjö Engeström and Annalisa Sannino propose a fourth generation of activity theory centered on heterogeneous coalitions in intertwined learning cycles. The authors suggest that change laboratory interventions can be useful within these coalitions. Two commentaries accompany the paper. Clay Spinuzzi questions whether change labs scale to the policy level needed for coalitions, or if they remain better suited to workgroups and organizations. Anna Stetsenko’s commentary also pushes on the potential for bigger results, indicating that the historical “revolutionary, emancipatory, and egalitarian ethos” of change labs is somewhat backgrounded, and should be brought to the fore, with the approach firmly rooted in political analysis.

“The Manifestation of Chinese Preservice Bilingual Teachers’ Relational Agency in a Change Laboratory Intervention,” by Sharon Chang, Carmen Martínz-Roldán, and María Torres-Guzmán, is an example of a change laboratory intervention put to potentially significant practical use in a field where Change Laboratory Interventions are not common. Chang et al. focus on the role of preservice teachers’ relational agency in their cooperating teachers’ classrooms as the preservice teachers work toward the goal of promoting equitable learning for bilingual children. The authors study four types of relational agency that have been provoked by double stimulation and show that the forms of participatory analysis and design tools that they have employed do support experimentation in bilingual education that can lead to tangible outcomes and change. The findings from this study should, we suspect, be applied in preservice teacher education of all sorts.

In “Design Principles as Cultural Artifacts: Pedagogical improvisation and the bridging of critical theory and teaching practice”, Ava Jackson explores and discusses “the apparent disconnect between the theoretical breadth of critical pedagogies and practice-based research creates challenges for educators wanting to implement critical pedagogy frameworks.” Despite there being a growing literature on critical pedagogies, these are far from being mainstream in actual teaching practice, and there are challenges even when teachers are eager and explicitly aim at drawing from critical perspectives. The key to successfully engaging with critical pedagogy in praxis, Jackson argues, is engaging in “reflexive design that examines the cultural, political, and ethical foundations of their pedagogical practice.” Core to Jackson’s approach is a distinction between preemptive and post-emptive analyses of design principles. In a case study of a critical arts after school program, Hip Hop Learners, the author shows how teachers’ “pedagogical improvisation,” as a form of disciplined and principled improvisation, becomes key for reengaging initial design principles in and through actual practice, connecting anew the theoretical values of those initial principles into pedagogical actuality. The study underscores the relevance of cultivating pedagogical improvisation as a core competence to be reflective, critical practice and to avoid the all too often fall back into non-critical, teacher-centered approaches.

This issue includes two book reviews that examine exciting and under-explored concepts and methodological approaches that resonate with recent efforts to develop critical perspectives in CHAT. The first book, Utopia as method: The imaginary reconstitution of society by British Sociologist Ruth Levitas, is reviewed by Antti Rajala. Rajala notes that the book offers a rich and powerful reconceptualization of utopia as reflexive, provisional, and dialogical that overcomes contradictions in the modernist conception of utopia as a rigid blueprint. The book review identifies four key tensions/dimensions that are relevant to the CHAT-inspired utopian methodology, which is currently gaining in interest among CHAT researchers.

The second book, Critical Pedagogy and Marx, Vygotsky, and Freire: Phenomenal forms and educational action research, by L. S. Villacañas de Castro, is reviewed by David Kellogg. Kellogg describes the book as an ambitious attempt to unite Marx’s critique of political economy, Vygotsky’s critique of both mechanistic and idealist psychology, and Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed. Kellogg notes that the book highlights new, unexplored potential in the work of Vygotsky, by examining the Marxist concept of phenomenal forms in the context of teaching and learning.

Recent publications in Cultural Praxis

Editorial, The fierce urgency of now: Our commitment at this time of continuing struggle against oppression and structural inequalities

http://culturalpraxis.net/wordpress1/2021/01/25/the-fierce-urgency-of-now/

The MCA/CP editorial statement in these times of continuing struggles against oppression.

Article, by André L. L. F. Sales, Taking an agentive stance toward utopian Futures

http://culturalpraxis.net/wordpress1/2021/01/28/taking-an-agentive-stance-toward-utopian-futures/

In this article, sales reflect upon how, most often, we think about honoring and respecting the past and traditions as something involving avoiding change. On the contrary, the author argues, if we want to preserve and honor something, we must be able to draw on it to build a future, which involves developing and changing it.

Article, by Mara W. Mahmood, Holding my breath

http://culturalpraxis.net/wordpress1/2021/02/03/holding-my-breath/

A dream the day before the US 2020 election.

Notes

1. See www.re-generatingchat.com

2. This point was inspired by Bagga-Gupta, Sangeeta (2019). Reflections on peer review. SIG 25 Newsletter of European Association of Research on Learning and Instruction. Available at <https://earli.org/node/133>