ECT Brownbag: ANANDA MARIN
“What do you believe in? Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot?”: The Role of Place and Stories in the Co-Creation of Learning/Teaching Contexts
When: Tuesday, April 5, 12:00 pm -1:00 pm EST
Zoom Link: https://nyu.zoom.us/j/98187593671
How are human societies, plant societies, and animal societies connected? How do we as humans understand these connections? Sociocultural theories of development center cultural practices and between-person activity as a primary context for learning. In this talk, I build with these orientations, to ask how learning can be further conceptualized as a cultural process that includes re-making nature-culture relationships. To do so, I share findings from a video-ethnographic study of Indigenous family’s forest walks and narrate the story of my methodological decision-making. I describe how pairing the tools of interaction analysis and Indigenous research paradigms led to the theorization of ambulatory sequences as a unit of analysis and walking, reading, and storying land as a framework that explains the ambulatory methodologies that people use for the purposes of learning about, with, and from the natural world. Then, providing an account one family’s forest walks, I describe how analytically attending to the boundaries of question-asking and story-telling led to new inquiries about how sensemaking is contextualized within the micro-geographies of place (e.g., the forest canopy, cross roads, pond).
About the speaker
Ananda Marin is an Assistant Professor of Social Research Methodology in UCLA’s Department of Education and faculty in American Indian Studies. As a learning scientist, she uses video-ethnographic methods and participatory design research to explore questions about the cultural nature of teaching, learning, and development. A primary goal of her work is to desettle and broaden conceptualizations of cognition and learning in ways that are consequential to the communities she partners with and the field of education. To do this, she draws upon Indigenous ways of knowing and sociocultural theories to: (1) develop research on learning across a variety of activities including the everyday (i.e., forest walks) and the professional (e.g., teaching, ensemble performances) and (2) co-design learning contexts with communities that are in right relations with Indigenous lands/waters. Within both of these strands of research she examines the multiple ways that multigenerational groups of people coordinate attention and observation in order to participate in joint activity, collaborate, and improvise. She also engages in micro-ethnographic analyses of the moment-to-moment unfolding of interaction, accounting for the role of relationality, embodied movement, and place in science-related education and teaching/learning more generally. She has widespread experience designing and learning with Indigenous communities and organizations to cultivate educational contexts that center Indigenous futures. She also applies her expertise to participatory and collaborative evaluation projects.