Learning Sciences Lunch and Learn with Dr. Miwa Aoki Takeuchi – Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary: “Reimagining Learning Toward Social and Environmental Justice by Fostering Transdisciplinary and Transnational Collaborations”
Connect with colleagues during this online presentation at the GSE (Room 124). Pizza will be provided! Can’t attend in person? Join us remotely via Zoom!
How can our scholarships in the learning sciences nurture anti-colonial relationality, love, and friendships in learning, and connect us toward social and environmental justice? In this talk, I will question some of the underlying assumptions around learning and learners that have reinforced the geopolitics of power, inequity, and injustice in and through the siloed and exclusionary disciplinary practices. I will then invite us to collectively envision ways in which
our educational design could lead to the reimagination of learning. At the core of learning and design, I position ethical and critical mobilization of trans-disciplinary tools, while re-centering historically hidden bodies and silenced voices of humans and more-than-humans. Along with this, I will provide portraits of communities and networks that I envisage to grow, together with learners, community partners, teachers, and fellow researchers.
Dr. Miwa Aoki Takeuchi’s research is centered around equity and justice in mathematics and STEM education. Working collaboratively with learners, teachers, community activists, and “families”, I aim to co-design the learning environments that can leverage learners’ embodied and emplaced disciplinary experiences into a transdisciplinary imagination toward social and environmental justice. To challenge the deficit perspectives imposed on historically marginalized learners, my research team and I employ and mobilize various research tools and public communication medium including arts to carefully listen to these learners’ silenced voices to shine light on traditionally subjugated and hidden ways of knowing. I am currently on the Board of Directors at the International Society of the Learning Sciences (2021-2027) and Co-President of the Network of the Learning Sciences in Canada (2021-2024). I believe in fostering dynamic and porous communities that center equity and justice.