Special Issue: Designing Learning Environments for Equitable Disciplinary Identification

This special issue is focused on investigating the role of learners’ self-identification with disciplinary endeavors (e.g., science-related investigations, interpretations of historical events) in relation to the design of and their participation in learning environments. Over the past decade there has been a growing body of research focused on how learners’ ideas about themselves as social actors in activities mediate participation within and across learning environments and how the development of learners’ disciplinary identities can be a productive goal of educational interventions. In this work, the disciplinary identities of learners help explain how and why individuals engage within and across the learning environments they frequent. They also provide a window onto how learners and their compatriots locate and leverage resources for the ongoing pursuit of subject matter learning—in which youth attempt to engage in ongoing learning. It is important to note that this theoretical lens highlights how learning environments always have implicit or explicit goals with respect to disciplinary identification—and how learners take up, resist, transform, or are marginalized by those goals.

IDENTITY AND LEARNING

All disciplinary learning experiences make assumptions about past, present, and future (possible) selves for learners; they signal to learners the qualities and social relevance of disciplinary pursuits relative to learners’ personal- or community-related learning goals and interests (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Nasir, Roseberry, Warren, & Lee, 2006; Wortham, 2005). In other words, there are no learning environments or experiences that are neutral to identification, although some may have a more profound effect on youths’ identification processes than others—in expansive or constricting ways. All disciplinary learning experiences communicate images of epistemic practices and their social uses, kinds of celebrated persons and ways of becoming, and uses for subject matter knowledge and practices in relation to various social endeavors. A history lesson may communicate the relevance and power of considering historical events from multiple perspectives—or it may send an image of historical sense making that is exclusively premised on the factual recall of historical detail. A math lesson may provide insight into forms of problem solving that meaningfully relate to categories of complex problems in the world—or it may signal routinized, quick problem solving as being central to the epistemic practices of mathematics. A science investigation may highlight new roles for citizens in exploring and informing a science-related problem facing their community—or it may communicate the image that investigations straightforwardly unfold without creative engagement or the need for problem solving to manage endemic failures, uncertainties, or ambiguities in the work.

Issues of educational equity in relation to our cultural diversity are deeply connected to the institutions, systems, and structures that youth interact with in their everyday lives in terms of how they are set up to support—or restrict—the just development of youth identities. The work presented in this special issue is centrally involved with understanding how learning environments can operate as sites of epistemic injury, educational tracking, and social marginalization—and how they can be transformed through a focus on positive disciplinary identification to be more inclusive, expansive, and equitable. This overarching educational design goal necessitates the study of how race, gender, class, and other important dimensions of human difference are historically rooted and influence how learners may or may not identify with disciplinary endeavors. As summarized by Banks and colleagues (2007),

Being born into a racial majority group with high levels of economic and social resources—or into a group that has historically been marginalized with low levels of economic and social resources—results in very different lived experiences that include unequal learning opportunities, challenges, and potential risks for learning and development. Although the levels of economic and social resources are critical to the kinds of experiences students have and the challenges they face, structural inequalities are not deterministic. Structural inequalities are mediated in important ways by local cultural and community practices and in families. (p. 15)

Therefore, as a basic scientific agenda, we need to develop theoretical knowledge about how we can design learning environments to support youth from nondominant communities—who learn and develop along racialized, gendered, and class-influenced learning pathways—in their disciplinary identity development and their navigation of the social worlds in which they currently participate and those they desire to join. The studies in this special issue contribute to this research agenda.

As exemplified in this special issue, research related to disciplinary identification has been pursued using a range of theoretical perspectives, methodological approaches, and analytical techniques and has resulted in a range of findings and design knowledge related to disciplinary identification. This special issue presents a range of exemplars of this work in order to showcase emerging lines of scholarship while also highlighting areas for future theorizing and synthesis, empirical investigation, and methodological innovation. We hope that this special issue can help cultivate a deeper focus on designing learning experiences that intentionally support disciplinary identification in just ways, yielding fundamental knowledge of learning and design that will hasten the equitable transformation of learning environments by orienting more holistically to learners, their histories, and ways of supporting their possible futures.

LEARNING IS ALWAYS ABOUT IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT BECAUSE IT IS ALWAYS ABOUT BECOMING

It has been long established—heavily through ethnographic research—that learning is fundamentally intertwined with identity (Herrenkohl & Mertl, 2010; Lave & Wenger, 1991). In this view, learning and identification is accomplished through agentic action, as Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, and Cain (1998) explained:

Agency takes shape in what we call the space of authoring. This space is formed, both within us and outside us, by the very multiplicity of persons, who are identifiable positions in networks of social production, and of worlds of inner activity that are also scenes of consciousness … Each act is simultaneously a social dynamic, social work, a set of identifications and negations, an orchestration or arrangement of voices. (p. 111)

Learning can be fundamentally viewed as “the development of self in relation to others, through complex processes of identification with domains, and as evidenced by deepening participation in social practice” (Barron et al., 2010). In most situations, this deepening participation in social practices focuses on coordinated epistemic activities related to disciplinary pursuits—as dynamically unfolding, culturally variable, historically rooted, and socially and materially constituted activities. In important ways, education can provide opportunities to explore notions of self (i.e., opportunities for authoring) with these disciplinary epistemic practices—and support the stabilization of multifaceted disciplinary identities (Bang, Warren, Rosebery, & Medin, 2012; Carlone & Johnson, 2007; Gee, 2000; Holland et al., 1998). Designed learning environments can provide opportunities for intentional practice-linked identification: “viewing participation in the practice as an integral part of who one is” (Nasir & Cooks, 2009, p. 44). There is both a dimension of learner self-realization as well as a dimension of social recognition of learners being linked to a practice (e.g., as someone who excels at a form of mathematical problem solving, or as a natural expert at some practice). In summary, the design of learning environments and related communities of practice opens up spaces for potential social recognition and identity development in disciplinary pursuits.

LEARNERS NEGOTIATE THEIR IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT ACROSS CONTEXTS

The learning of complex subject matter knowledge inherently happens across social settings (Banks et al., 2007; Barron & Bell, 2015). Attending to the relationship between identity and context, disciplinary learning has been increasingly analyzed from the perspective of learners identifying with the subject matter or disciplinary epistemic practices—or failing to do so (Herrenkohl & Mertl, 2010; Nasir & Hand, 2008; National Research Council [NRC], 2009). This work has spanned subject matter domains and focused on learning within and across more formal and more informal environments (e.g., Bell, Tzou, Bricker, & Baines, 2012). The field has started to recognize that it is important to attend to the tensions and alignments that exist across social settings learners frequent in relation to the multiple identities held by learners (e.g., academic, racial, gender, sexual orientation, disciplinary). Cross-setting design research is starting to explore how to intentionally coordinate learning and identification across multiple settings over significant timescales (e.g., Barron, Gomez, Pinkard, & Martin, 2014; Stromholt & Bell, in press).

This growing attention to identity development and identity-related influences on learning processes across settings is primarily a result of the practice turn being taken up significantly within the learning sciences. From a learning-in-practice perspective, learning can be conceptualized as an individual’s changing participation in cultural practices or as the development of specialized repertoires of cultural practice (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003; Nasir et al., 2006). Researching learning from this perspective requires understanding individual roles and social positions available in activity, how learner participation changes from peripheral participation to more central participation over time (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, 1997), and how people differentially participate in and collectively contribute to unfolding activity systems.

IDENTIFICATION UNFOLDS ALONG EXTENDED, CONTESTED, AND RACIALIZED LEARNING PATHWAYS

Working from a critical psychological cross-context perspective, Dreier (2009) described the diversity of social practices that people engage in as a routine matter of course: “[People] live their lives by participating in many diverse contexts. These contexts are local settings which are materially and socially arranged to allow for the pursuit of particular social practices within and beyond them” (pp. 195–196). From a life-wide perspective on learning across contexts (Banks et al., 2007), scholars have similarly theorized learning as unfolding along lines of practice (Azevedo, 2013) and cultural learning pathways (Bell et al., 2012). The scientific goal has been to better account for and theorize the dynamics of learning and development across contexts and across ontogenetic timescales in relation to learners’ developing interests and identities that are cultivated, explored, and stabilized through variable social and material opportunities, engagements, and coordinations. There is some evidence that specific qualities of learning environments (e.g., lower levels of learner accountability, more volitional arrangements for participation, consequential project performances) can open up generative spaces for disciplinary identification and the renegotiation of multiple identities (NRC, 2009). The articles in this special issue contribute to better understanding how disciplinary identification unfolds along negotiated learning pathways.

THE SPECIAL ISSUE: DESIGNING FOR EQUITABLE DISCIPLINARY IDENTIFICATION ACROSS SETTINGS

In conjunction with a growing focus on how engaging learners in epistemic practices can support conceptual development, disciplinary identities themselves have increasingly been identified as important outcomes of learning environments (e.g., NRC, 2007, 2009, 2012). Disciplinary identity development is supported through continued and deepening participation in epistemic activities, the social recognition of such participation, and the coordination of multiple senses of self in relation to that participation.

Students can leverage and further develop the multiple identities they hold as they learn through their deepening participation in disciplinary practices, especially if efforts are made to broaden what counts as relevant disciplinary sense-making routines in relation to personal and community histories (McDermott & Webber, 1998; Rosebery, Ogonowski, DiSchino, & Warren, 2010). It can be argued more generally that a leading goal of curriculum development or program design centrally focused on engaging students in disciplinary practices is for students to develop disciplinary-linked identities that may lead them to extend their learning pathways; develop expertise to inform decision-making moments in their lives; learn about and pursue possible careers or vocations; share their expertise to support change in their communities; and/or engage in civic processes related to domains like science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM; NRC, 2009, 2011, 2012).

Creating learning environments in which students can learn disciplinary knowledge and practices and develop practice-linked identities is important for the purposes of educational equity and social justice. As Calabrese Barton and Brickhouse (2006) noted in their study of girls and science learning, many forms of school science often engage students in scientific practices that are irrelevant to communities outside of school or lack opportunities for girls to “form an identity with a trajectory toward new forms of participation in science and science-related communities,” such as following lab procedures or memorizing vocabulary words (p. 224). A focus on practice-linked identities in relation to the design of learning environments foregrounds how these environments can be made more inclusive, relevant, and impactful.

Educational institutions establish policies and practices that shape disciplinary identification. Using a comparative case study approach, Nasir and Vakil (2017/this issue) highlight how school-level processes of racialized and gendered storylines circulating in the setting about STEM disciplines can impact students’ disciplinary identification, sense of belonging, and forms of participation in schooling. They develop theoretical linkages between classroom-level processes of instruction and school-level racialization and gendering processes—providing crucial design knowledge that can be used to guide equity-focused school improvement.

As described by Allen and Eisenhart (2017/this issue), youth from nondominant communities frequently have to fight for specific versions of desired future selves because they are entangled in discursive and social relations that impede or imperil those desired acts of becoming. Through a comparative case study and longitudinal approach to studying the educational pathways of youth, they highlight how learners make decisions about learning experiences based on perceived or discussed identity alignments—and how they do so in relation to institutionalized, structural constraints and affordances. They also highlight how school staff understand and learn about these issues and how school cultures and policies can start to transform to make the pathways more equitable.

Van Horne and Bell (2017/this issue) highlight how project-based learning experiences in the classroom can leverage and coordinate the multiple interests and identities of learners that relate to the epistemic work of multiple disciplinary fields—and help youth identify possible futures to explore further. The study develops a theoretical model of disciplinary identification and design knowledge about how interdisciplinary problem spaces—working from an expansive learning perspective—can facilitate interest-driven engagement and disciplinary learning and identification in school in coordination with the unfolding cultural learning pathways of youth.

Using a different design strategy, Pinkard, Erete, Martin, and McKinney de Royston (2017/this issue) highlight how narrative-driven personas presented through technology-mediated learning experiences can highlight roles and identities that help youth consider and engage in novel STEM-related learning experiences and identification processes. Characters in these narratives created space for discussions about race and gender in relation to epistemic activity that helped to disrupt racial and gender disparities of interest and identity development in STEM fields. Seeing themselves within the narratives allowed the girls of color in the study to increase their STEM participation within and outside of the program.

In terms of the broader relevance and potential impact of this work and learning-in-practice approaches to disciplinary learning more generally, it is notable to highlight that recent educational standards documents—Advanced Placement courses, Common Core State Standards, and the NRC framework for science education and the Next Generation Science Standards —take the epistemic practices of literacy, mathematics, science, and engineering to be central to defining learning goals for school attainment. The vision for kindergarten–Grade 12 science education explicitly recommends coordinating learning environments with the interests and identities of learners—and the importance of centering learning experiences on the interests and goals of local communities (NRC, 2012). These features of the policy landscape should make the work of this special issue broadly relevant.

In summary, the studies in this special issue examine how designed learning environments can shape the disciplinary identification processes of youth. This work highlights how this occurs across timescales and across levels of educational systems from interactional moments in a classroom to the representation of diverse publics in school-wide programs, narratives, and enacted policies. We invite readers to think about how the work across the special issue can inform future research on the design of learning environments that move toward seeing disciplinary identification as happening across contexts, from interactional to institutional-change timescales, and through racialized and gendered learning pathways influenced by the structures and routines of school, peers, family, and community life.