Participatory Ed Tech: Collaborative Design of Education Technology for Translocal Non-hierarchical Social Movement Learning

Abstract

This presentation shares the experience of collaboratively designing a knowledge exchange and restorying platform with a network of social movements and activist scholars from Ghana, South Africa, Canada and Guatemala. These movements focus on the natural resource extraction, homelessness, the climate crisis, and dispossession of indigenous livelihoods. The network follows a social movement learning approach, based in critical adult education concepts of learning in struggle, as well as participatory translocal knowledge-sharing that avoids knowledge hierarchies through mutual meaning-making processes. Fundamental to this knowledge sharing are stories of movement learning, and how those stories are revisited through engagement with other movements as well as through struggle, leading them to become restoried. Given the current geopolitics of our world, where the mobility of those at the frontline of movements of the poor and disenfranchised are often curtailed (entry visa refusals, criminalization of activism, etc.), it has made the importance of online meeting spaces for mutual meaning-making a key feature of this partnership project. In addition to meeting spaces, a platform that allows for collective sharing of stories, the ability to give feedback on them, and to then publish these stories through social media platforms, was part of the research design. The presentation shares how this platform came into existence, and the challenges and collaborative learnings that occurred along the way. It will be useful for anyone engaging in educational technology design in an international, multilingual context, where the users of the technology are on the front line of our world’s current crises.

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Author Information
Jonathan Langdon, St. Francis Xavier University, Canada
Daren Okafo, University of Bristol, United Kingdom