Matters of Participation: Notes on the Study of Dignity and Learning
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Mind, Culture, and Activity ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hmca20 Matters of participation: notes on the study of dignity and learning Manuel Luis Espinoza , Shirin Vossoughi , Mike Rose & Luis E. Poza To cite this article: Manuel Luis Espinoza , Shirin Vossoughi , Mike Rose & Luis E. Poza (2020): Matters of participation: notes on the study of dignity and learning, Mind, Culture, and Activity, DOI: 10.1080/10749039.2020.1779304 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10749039.2020.1779304 Published online: 21 Jul 2020. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=hmca20 MIND, CULTURE, AND ACTIVITY https://doi.org/10.1080/10749039.2020.1779304 Matters of participation: notes on the study of dignity and learning Manuel Luis Espinozaa, Shirin Vossoughib, Mike Rosec, and Luis E. Poza d aUniversity of Colorado Denver; bNorthwestern University; cUniversity of California at Los Angeles; dSan Jose State University ABSTRACT Meaningful participation (i.e., substantive involvement in socially vital activ ities) 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. Conceptually, the two are salient for research related to learning and educational rights. Accordant with a cultural- historical framework, we have adopted and modified a social interactional methodological approach that allows us to set forth indicia of meaningful participation and educational dignity. To achieve these ends, we examine two information sources: 1) audio recordings of a 1962 voter registration workshop in the Southern United States; and 2) audio-video recordings of a college preparatory program for high school-age migrant students in California during the early 2000s called the Migrant Student Leadership Institute. Close examination of interactions in both spaces reveals the moment-to-moment unfolding of meaningful participation and educational dignity. Introduction If this essay outlining a method for the empirical study of dignity and learning in educational activity were a musical composition, this would be its recurrent riff: the quality of dignity may inhere in the person, but the experience and sense of dignity are wholly contingent. Decisive in its distinctions, this nineteen-word thesis is also deceptive in its simplicity. Typographically, it spans 109 characters including spaces; historically and socially, the distance it indicates cannot be precisely measured. Though continually proclaimed – e.g., Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 1789; Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948; Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 2007 – the institutions entrusted with creating environments where dignity should be inviolate face intractable obstacles. Hand-in-glove with these issues, the people that are expected to embody the imperatives of dignity are still being knit. The enactment of dignity consists of a collection of “in progress” and fragmentary global phenom ena. Yet, out of this inchoate normative fact – from the Latin norma, carpenter’s square – our species has crafted an array of dynamic cultural-historical artifacts: emancipatory political arguments, trans generational human rights languages, and a repertoire of everyday dignity-generative actions that broaden the definition of the human family. Thus, our methodological notes ask little of the phenomena of dignity, but demand much of our social imagination. Grammatically, dignity is a noun, but conceptually, we call it forth as a social verb. Conscious of the tendency to treat the meanings of dignity as self-evident, we direct our attention toward the “inter action order” (Goffman, 1967, p. 14) to describe how the experience and sense of dignity are made manifest and thwarted in educational activity. Throughout this work, we hold fast to the expectation of CONTACT Manuel Luis Espinoza [email protected] University of Colorado Denver, CO 80204 © 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC 2 M. L. ESPINOZA ET AL. new music beyond the recurrent, tension-producing riff above: despite its inherent and inalienable quality, dignity is a precarious social accomplishment. Matters of dignity are indivisible from the learning that does or does not take place within an environment (Espinoza & Vossoughi, 2014). Previously, we examined African slave narratives and first-persontestimony in landmark desegregation cases to show the ways dignity was accomplished (or negated) through intellectual activity in the shadow of sanction and suppression (Espinoza & Vossoughi, 2014). Treating that work as a cornerstone, we outline here a methodology for studying “meaningful participation” and “educational dignity.” We submit the following questions as guides: ● What does meaningful participation in educational activities look, sound, and feel like? ● What are the social consequences of meaningful participation for the individual? ● How, if at all, does meaningful participation prefigurethe social interactional accomplishment of educational dignity? This article is divided into four major sections: 1) we definemeaningful participation and dignity in relation to educational activity; 2) we outline a first-, second-, and third-person analytic approach to the study of educational dignity. We then test those perspectives by examining a pair of distinct segregation-era educational experiences; 3) we apply the same approach to two “sister spaces” – environments separated by historical era and locale but embodying parallel values – a voter education workshop in 1962 and a migrant education program in 2001 to analyze how meaningful opportunities to participate and learn are organized; 4) we consolidate our analytical approach and discuss its usefulness for educational research. Defining meaningful participation and dignity in educational activity Creating dignity-affirming educational environments requires an understanding of participation rights or fundamental democratic powers that “equate to being seen and heard” (Todres & Higinbotham, 2016, p. 33). However, without continuous opportunities to exercise those participation rights, the meanings of noble declarations may never be transformed into the felt presence of dignity and rights in the conduct of everyday life. Consider how hollow the preamble of the U.S. Constitution – “We the People . .” – can sound to those treated as second-class citizens. We define meaningful participation as unambiguously effective involvement in socially vital activities structured by dialogic social relations – e.g., having a say in government, acting as a decision- maker in health matters, exercising one’s voice across an educational career. Educational dignity is 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. Both meaningful participation and educational dignity are generated by linguistic and interactional moves that can be charted and analyzed. The sense of fuller “humanness” resulting from such encounters is in line with discussions of dignity in the human rights literature (Barak, 2015; Hunt, 2007; McCrudden, 2013; Sachs, 2009; Waldron & Dan-Cohen, 2012). Typically, the subject of dignity is treated deductively according to religious principles or tenets of formal logic while educational activity, broadly construed, is examined inductively via direct observa tion. We propose a social interactional approach that bridges those modes of inquiry by treating the face-to-face environment as a site for the social accomplishment of the grand imperatives of dignity. This approach resonates with the value cultural-historical theories of learning and development place on interpersonal social relations as a crucible for the realization of human potential (Cole, 1996; Engeström, 1990; Gutiérrez et al., 1999; Vygotskiĭ & Cole, 1978). While dignity has been a tacit concern of this tradition, it has seldom been examined empirically as a central phenomenon of interest. However, recent work has argued that attunement to the interpersonal expression of politics, power, and ethics is essential for a comprehensive understanding of learning (Bang, et al., 2016; Esmonde & Booker, 2017; Politics of Learning Writing Collective, 2017; Vossoughi et al., 2020). MIND, CULTURE, AND ACTIVITY 3 A staple concept of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), dignity is “an expression, perhaps the most prominent in the history of man’s [sic] self-reflection, of self-evaluation” (Rotenstreich, 1983, p. 9). When embodied and enacted, dignity equalizes by granting to all people the highest rank and status possible (Waldron & Dan-Cohen, 2012). In the United States, the use of dignity as a precept in constitutional interpretation is extensive (Brennan, 1977; Meyer & Parent, 1992; Paust, 1984). Socially, it is a “symbol of demand” (Paust, 1984, p. 147), a conceptual tool used to argue for the presence of certain kinds of treatment and the absence of others. Politically, dignity has been defined as “the particular cultural understandings of the inner moral worth of the human person and his or her proper political relations with society” (Howard & Donnelly, 1986,