Final prosem presentation

Final prosem presentation Informal Learning Topics Situated learning (Lave & Wenger 1991)      Communities of Practice (Wenger 1998)      Participation Trajectories            Peripheral and Full (Lave & Wenger 1991)            Inbound & Outbound (Nasir & Cooks 2009) Identity and Agency (Holland et. al. 1998)      Contexts of Identities (Hull & Greeno 2006)           Epistemic Identities            Interpersonal Identities            Discoursal Identities

**In this class, we have been asking about social inequity and its causes. ** “Much of the scholarly research on the socioeconomic achievement gradient has focused largely on trying to understand the mechanisms through which socioeconomic differences among families—in income, parental educational attainment, family structure, neighborhood conditions, school quality, and parental preferences, investments, and choices— lead  to differences in children’s academic and educational success.” Specifically, the 90% kids have started doing much better. Yes, inequality has gotten worse, but the income achievement gap has gotten worse even faster. Why? (Reardon, 2011) “families may be changing how they invest in their children’s cognitive development” (Reardon, 2011) Segregation by income, highly-educated people marrying each other, fancy summer camps…

**Sociocultural Learning Theory helps us approach less explicit roots of inequity. ** school officials need to pay more attention to not only emphasizing the essential goals of equal educational opportunities and outcomes…but also to what one scholar refers to as “substantive inclusion,” having one group’s affiliation fully acknowledged and equally valued as an active member of the community.2 Both aspects are critical components of a fair and just education. (Carter, 2012, p. 4)

      For example, Lareau, “concerted cultivation,” “the deliberate organization of childhood around intellectual and socioemotional development” “key elements of family life cohere to form a cultural logic of child rearing… middle-class parents tend to adopt a cultural logic that stresses the concerted cultivation of children. Working-class and poor parents, by contrast, tend to undertake the accomplishment of natural growth.” (Lareau, 2011, p. 3)

“I look at the school itself as an organizer of sexual practices, identities, and meanings” Pascoe (2012, p. 26) “the way sexuality is constructed at the level of the institution through disciplinary practices, student-teacher relationships, and school events” (p. 27)

I will outline in this book an analytic perspective on the way that gender acts as an organizing force in everyday social relations, … situations in which people form a sense of who they are in the situation and, therefore, how they should behave, by considering themselves in relation to whom they assume others are in that situation. (Ridgeway, 2011, p. 6)

The problem was that in everyday life persons and tasks never quite stand still; the gap between subject and object, between stimulus and response, could not be filled by positing models of what was happening inside the organism, for the reason that neither subject nor object, neither stimulus nor response, was available for analysis as it was sequenced in the experience of persons in the lived world…Experimental cognitive psychology, we concluded, was condemned to a life of ecological invalidity” (McDermott, 1993, p. 270)

“The good sense of a social structural and cultural account of LC can emerge from questions about the institutional arrangements served by having so many children designated LD. By institutional arrangements, we must consider everything from the most local level of the classroom to the more inclusive level of inequities throughout the political economy.” (p. 273)

Methodological issue: Ecological Validity “Ecological invalidity has become a requirement of most available interpretations of our own children. It is part of how children are acquired by learning disabilities” (p. 299)

organized activities is used by youth development researchers to refer to settings that are primarily led by adults, invite voluntary participation, have a regular schedule, and are designed to support specific skills (Mahoney, Larson, & Eccles, 2005)

To complement theoretical motivational principles such as those described in Chapter 7 (this volume), we need grounded images of practice that can inform the design of powerful learning experiences.

Big overlap: Lareau, 2011  For example, studies that investigate extracurricular expenditures highlight the ways that dispensable income allows parents to supplement school learning with enrichment-oriented activities, materials, and a wide range of academically focused supports in out-of-school time during the school year and over the summer (324)

Some researchers suggest that only middle-class parents support their children’s interest-driven learning as part of a broader process of concerted cultivation (e.g., Lareau, 2011).

BUT: In a study of recent immigrants from Mexico and Central America, Levinson (2014) found that parents used free translator tools to better understand their child’s homework and used search engines to find content related to the interests of their children, including biographies of historical figures, transportation, and dinosaurs. Often these were topics introduced at school. In an ethnographic study of how low-income Hispanic families leverage cell phones for play, learning, and safety, Schwartz and Gutiérrez (in press) found that in the Ramirez family, both mother’s and father’s interests were shared with their children and that these interests were further developed in an out-of-school community setting. The mother’s interests in cooking and cooking shows were shared by her daughters and led to collaborative practices of looking up information, developing play scripts around cooking competitions, and the collaborative production of a home video.  

Educational efforts to combat inequity are often ineffective. (Possible response to failure of antiracist policies) Increasingly we are coming to understand the power of cultural stereotypes of both people and academic domains (Cheryan & Plaut, 2010). Racial and gender-based stereotypes appear to develop early (Cvencek, Meltzoff, & Greenwald, 2011; Cvencek, Nasir, O’Connor, Wischnia, & Meltzoff, 2014). Stereotype threat (Steele & Aronson, 1995) and the unintentional positioning of students as less capable can work together to diminish participation. The need for intentional repositioning is made clear in design experiments that start out with a social justice goal, only to find that patterns reassert themselves despite the best of intentions (see Barron et al., 2014c; Sims, 2014, for examples).