Editorial Volume 29, Issue 4

Abstract

The present issue includes a Special Issue on the topic Unpacking Signs of Learning in Complex Sociopolitical Environments, guest edited by Jennifer D. Adams, Jrene Rahm, Shakhnoza Kayumova, and Carol Brandt, as well as two regular research articles. The editors of the Special Issue provide a comprehensive introduction to the themes and perspectives of the papers. Relationality is a grounding notion running through the papers in the issue. Joe Curnow’s “Restating situated learning within radicalized and colonial social relations” acknowledges the influence of Lave and Wenger’s situated learning theory while observing that within the situated learning perspective, “social relations of racialization and colonialism are largely overlooked.” Curnow notes that her work builds on large, deep literatures that examine these processes, and she is bringing them into situated learning and community of practive frameworks. These frameworks have had a vast reach, even entering corporate training curricula, so Curnow’s expansion and development of racialization and colonialism within this purview is timely and productive. Meixi’s “Toward gentle futures: Co-developing axiological commitments and alliances among humans and the greater living world at school” considers ways of “deepening human responsibilities with plant, animal, and celestial nations, lands, waters, and the spirt world” through “relational becoming.” The case study concerns a student and teacher in an urban Indigenous school in Thailand. Through dialog, student and teacher explore ethical ways to fish for food (a human need) yet not lose sight of the fishes’ being. Rather than a “rights” framework in which humans grant rights and therefore retain supremacy, the student and teacher consider alliances (emphasis added) that move toward “consensual interdependency between humans and fish.” This is a novel and important way to think about how humans can radically transform relations with non-human subjects, something we must do as we encounter planetary resource limits. Sepehr Vakil and Maxine McKinney de Royston’s “Youth as philosophers of technology” turns “computing” on its design-coding-tinkering head by exploring how youth can conduct artistic, moral, and humanistic inquiry into what technology is by considering its fundamental political, social, and economic aspects. The authors use the philosophy of pragmatism to encourage youth to become “pragmatic philosophers of technology,” in particular extending pragmatism to account for dynamics of race and power that shape learning. The authors note that technology debates have fossilized into it’s-good or it’s-bad, while the youthful philosophers were able to adopt a critical stance “embrac[ing] multiplicity, contingency, and complexity.” STEM is burdened by the belief that computing is about coding and building. It lacks sufficient attention to what is being built and for whom. This paper signposts the moral, the aesthetic, and the political as imperatives in designing and deploying technology. Two additional research articles complete the pages of this issue. Very much in line with Curnow's article in the special issue, Karlyn Adams-Wiggings and Julia S. Dancis, in their article “Marginality in inquiry-based science learning contexts: The role of exclusion cascades,” speak to the potentials and limitations of communities of practice approaches to collaborative learning. More specifically, the authors warn about the risks of uncritically applying a communities of practice approach to marginality, which may result in “dehistoricizing” the contexts it aims to study and reinforce “an adaptationist ethos in . . . accounts of power’s role in collaborative learning.” To make this risk visible, and to offer alternative ways of theorizing that better situate participants in their historical contexts, the authors present a microgenetic case study examining identity and motivation processes in a 7 grade inquiry science context. With the goal to better historicize notions of margintality, competence, and belonging, the authors draw upon the concepts of division of labor and alienation, as these apply to educational contexts. This involves, first, understanding schooling as part of capitalist social reproduction, and MIND, CULTURE, AND ACTIVITY 2022, VOL. 29, NO. 4, 293–294 https://doi.org/10.1080/10749039.2023.2188222