Learning-in-Relation: Implementing and Analyzing Assets Based Pedagogies in a Higher Education Classroom

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the assets-based pedagogical theories used in one higher education classroom while analyzing the ways the co-authors, instructor, and students’ learning process and identities were impacted by such pedagogies, lessons, and structures. We examine the ways members of the classroom community were impacted and impacting one another as a result of trialogic interactions—with one another, with multiple scholars whose pieces were read and discussed, and with/in themselves. We then offer pedagogical implications while discussing main themes that emerged from reflective discussions: grappling, citationality, and incompleteness. We frame this work as a community of learners who came to understand their own incomplete and in process growth as learners. This article details a case study for the ways projects in humanization, culturally sustaining pedagogies, and storying can be operationalized in classroom spaces to center moments of tension, grappling, and awakening.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Since co-authors of three or more are often graduate students, community members, and/or junior scholars, we feel it is important to include their names in first reference for in-text citations. This runs counter to the APA Style Guide (7^th ed.).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Timothy San Pedro

Timothy San Pedro is an associate professor of Multicultural and Equity Studies in Education at The Ohio State University. San Pedro’s scholarship focuses on the intricate links among motivation, engagement, and identity construction to curricula and pedagogical practices that re-center content and conversations upon Indigenous histories, knowledges, and literacies.

Kaitlyn Murray

Kaitlyn Murray is a PhD student of Science and Agricultural Education at the University of California, Davis. She is broadly interested in how diverse participants interact with agricultural and environmental learning spaces: How they create them, experience them, resist them, transform them, and are transformed by them. Her work is organized around social change and focuses on LGBTQ youth and girls.

Shannon C. Gonzales-Miller

Shannon C. Gonzales-Miller is a PhD candidate in the College of Education and Human Ecology’s Department of Teaching and Learning, Multicultural and Equity Studies Program at The Ohio State University. Her research interest centers on distinguishing the experiences of Urban Indian/Native college-going students (the generations born in the city) from the educational discourse that favors research with a tribal-centric focus.

Wendy Reed

Wendy Reed is a PhD candidate in the College of Education and Human Ecology’s Department of Teaching and Learning and a Literacy Collaborative trainer at The Ohio State University. Her research interests focus on literate identity construction and the way literacy, and what it means to be literate, is contextually defined and taken up within classroom interactions that center humanizing pedagogies.

Binta Bah

Binta Bah is a PhD candidate in the College of Education and Human Ecology’s Department of Teaching and Learning. Her research focuses on the manifestations of anti-blackness in educational policy, interrogating the liberatory capacity of educational reform legislation.

Crystal Gerrard

Crystal Gerrard is assistant professor of Music Education at the University of North Texas where she teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses in instrumental music education. Her research interests include music teacher education, asset-based pedagogies, and social justice in music education.

Andrew Whalen

Andrew Whalen is a lecturer with the Department of Teaching and Learning at The Ohio State University. His work focuses on culturally relevant pedagogy, teacher preparation, and teaching for social justice.