Shirin Vossoughi

Northwestern University | NU · School of Education and Social Policy

This chapter explores how learning to be in relation is core to human learning. Reductive views of cultural variation and individualized conceptualizations of thriving overlook the processes through which human beings learn to live relationally in ways that support systems transformation and collective well-being. Synthesizing literature on learnin...

The maker movement propagated throughout educational spaces alongside promises that technological and design literacies could be harnessed to shape equitable social futures. However, researchers have highlighted the ways makerspaces can reinforce hierarchies of race, gender, and class. This paper builds on research that seeks to support girls' maki...

This paper arises out of a need to take seriously interventions on anti-Black racism in the computing education space. We extend the framework of Politicized Care to an out of school space to explore how Black femme mentors’ pedagogy opens up alternative experiences of computing education. We offer another frame for computing teaching and learning...

The ISLS has long been focusing on innovative learning that supports inclusive socio-emotional and collaborative practices, and more recent research has taken up political and ethical dimensions of human learning as central to design, practice, partnership and research. The society is also taking concrete steps towards structural changes in its own...

This paper traces intergenerational learning through a series of dialogues on race, parenting, and identity held with Iranian parents, grandparents and youth at a Persian language school located in the US. Drawing on ethnographic, interactional, and participatory design research methodologies, the analysis focuses on the forms of intergenerational...

We examine how individuals from non-dominant communities and very young children engage with others in ways that affirm their educational dignity—"the multifaceted sense of a person’s value generated via meaningful participation in substantive intra- and inter- personal learning experiences that recognize and cultivate one’s mind, humanity, and pot...

Drawing from a range of ethnographic information gathered within a participatory design project on after‐school learning and educational justice, this paper describes the new ways of seeing and relating that emerged when researchers and educators “examined the obvious” (Erickson 1973/84) and closely analyzed the embodied—physical, gestural, artifac...

As colleges and universities expand the socioeconomic diversity of their student populations, many policies and practices require reconceptualization to better serve all students. Recent social psychology and learning sciences research directly informs how to support the achievement and well-being of students from lower socioeconomic status backgro...

This paper argues that the terms through which we interpret and work to develop expansive pedagogical practices are overly constrained by the binary of adult-centered versus child-centered education. Analyzing ethnographic data developed over three years in a making/tinkering afterschool program serving Black, Latinx, and Asian American students (K...

Meaningful participation (i.e., substantive involvement in socially vital activities) and educational dignity (i.e., the multifaceted sense of a person’s value generated via substantive intra- and inter-personal learning experiences that recognize and cultivate one’s mind, humanity, and potential) are vital and interrelated social phenomena. Concep...

The culture of poverty thesis did not emerge from the conservative shadows of American intellectual life, but from its most liberal hopes for the future. Most of its earliest champions were committed to the cause of Black uplift, but never escaped the shame and judgment of the culture of poverty thesis. We look to the life and writings of W.E.B. Du...

This introduction to the special issue offers a selective account of two efforts, across a half century, to describe and alleviate the plight of poor people and their children in school: a specific train of thought called the “culture of poverty” from its origin in 1959, through its express track to prominence across the 1960s, to its research-led...

This paper argues for an amplification of the everyday intellectual and political gestures of children as valuable indices and movers of learning. We identify and focus on microacts of self-determination, defined here as, “as contestations and moves to elsewhere that shift activity and dictate future status”. In particular, we consider if and how s...

Studies of embodied cognition offer powerful accounts of the semiotic resources people use as they think together within different domains. Yet this research does not typically foreground the history of relationships within focal interactions—a history we have found to be consequential to the ways embodied actions unfold. Through ethnographic and i...

This paper problematizes the enduring conscription of STEM learning in discourses of U.S. global ascendancy, neoliberalism and militarism. Drawing on ethnographic data, we explore how girls of color make meaning of their everyday experiences in two settings: a racially tracked mathematics class in a suburban high school and a STEAM based after-scho...

In this commentary, we wrestle with key ideas presented in Schenkel, Calabrese Barton, Tan, Nazar, and Flores’ Framing Equity through a Closer Examination of Critical Science Agency and offer a series of theoretical and methodological attunements we view as germane to the visions of educational justice discussed therein. We begin by discussing the...

Eleanor Leacock (1922–1987) was a cultural anthropologist and prominent critic of the “culture of poverty” framework. This paper analyzes Leacock’s writings on the culture of poverty with the following questions in mind: How did Leacock’s critique of the culture of poverty framework evolve over time? What was her dissatisfaction with the available...

Moving beyond the study of learning as a strictly school-based phenomenon, recent decades have seen a significant rise in research on learning in everyday and out-of-school settings often referred to as out-of-school time (OST). Within this field, there is a growing focus on access and equity. Research animated by an access framework often consider...

In this essay, Shirin Vossoughi, Paula Hooper, and Meg Escudé advance a critique of branded, culturally normative definitions of making and caution against their uncritical adoption into the educational sphere. The authors argue that the ways making and equity are conceptualized can either restrict or expand the possibility that the growing maker m...

This piece explores the politics and possibilities of video research on learning in educational settings. The authors (a research–practice team) argue that changing the stance of inquiry from surveillance to relationship is an ongoing and contingent practice that involves pedagogical, political, and ethical choices on the part of researchers and ed...

This book provides a broad, historically informed, methodologically sophisticated argument for diversity in the conduct of psychological and anthropological research that seeks to under- stand the relationship between culture and thought. The authors’ focus is on the role of culture in human development, particularly contrasting orientations to nat...

This chapter brings together cultural-historical approaches to human development with interpretive and multi-sited ethnography in order to: (1) develop ethnographic tools that attend to the ways young people learn within and across multiple contexts; (2) draw from and contrast the methodological insights of single and multi-sited ethnography; and (...

In an educational setting designed for high-school-aged migrant students, social analytic artifacts—tools that deepen the collective analysis of social problems—were examined in relation to two questions: What kinds of artifacts were developed and emphasized in this setting? How and toward what ends did students use these artifacts? This article de...

What are the origins of educational rights? In this essay, Espinoza and Vossoughi assert that educational rights are "produced," "affirmed," and "negated" not only through legislative and legal channels but also through an evolving spectrum of educational activities embedded in everyday life. Thus, they argue that the "heart" of educational rights...

How can the learning sciences engage more directly with the political dimensions of defining and studying learning? What might this engagement offer for democratizing learning? This paper delineates a tension between deep studies of learning and explicit attention to issues of power, inequality and human dignity. We frame this as a productive tensi...

In this paper, we attempt to bring equity to the fore within discussions of learning in tinkering and making. Drawing on ethnographic data collected over the last year and a half, we argue that equity lies in the how of teaching and learning: specific ways of designing making environments, using pedagogical language, integrating students' cultural...

This article examines a praxis model of teacher education and advances a new method for engaging novice teachers in reflective practice and robust teacher learning. Social design experiments—cultural historical formations designed to promote transformative learning for adults and children—are organized around expansive notions of learning and media...