Moving beyond linguistic bordering: Utopian designs for new futures

Abstract

ABSTRACT We examine learning as movement as a utopian methodological approach that reorients how we shape and understand literacy learning ecologies with youth who are racialized as non-white. Understanding linguistic practice as integral to learning, and to common beliefs of what it means to be human, we consider how static notions of language are deployed as border-marking tools within settler coloniality, supporting a logic that justifies pernicious racial subordination. Within education, these ideologies frame certain learners as illegitimate and deviant, with particular implications for literacy learning. The learning sciences are uniquely positioned to re-signify what it means to be a literate body and to design learning ecologies in which youth move across these borders. Aligning ourselves with decolonial scholars, we argue that utopian methodology with a learning as movement frame allows us to forefront expansive learning design as we work alongside youth from otherized backgrounds toward alternate epistemic futures.