Keynote: “I hear your vibes”: Partnering in the Moment to Moment of Activity

From the ICLS Program Committee: We are honored to welcome Ananda Marin as an ISLS 2026 keynote speaker. Ananda’s rigorous, ethical, and community-driven scholarship reflects a deep commitment to participatory methods in the learning sciences. We look forward to her keynote address opening up valuable conversations about the relationships between movement, land, indigeneity, improvisation, and socio-ecological and cultural forms of learning. In this talk, Dr. Ananda Marin traces her own history with the methodologies of community-based design research and co-design, linking what she has learned to key organizing constructs in this domain — matters of purpose, place, scale, impact, power, and equity. She shares axioms that were surfaced and re-membered while partnering alongside Indigenous families and most recently with improvisational jazz artists to design generative contexts that move toward collective thriving. From here, Dr. Marin reflects on how partnering can extend the field’s conceptualizations of learning in consequential ways. Sociocultural theories in the learning sciences have conceptualized learning as both the acquisition of practices as well as shifts in the use of cultural and cognitive resources for the purposes of meaning making. She suggests that these theories, which have played a pivotal role in her scholarly trajectory, can be expanded when we theorize alongside scholarship in Indigenous Studies and the work of Black and Indigenous learning scientists who have foregrounded the importance of kinship, relationality, respect, responsibility, reciprocity, and reverence. Turning to questions of human maturation, the talk will invite the learning sciences community to consider the field-wide consequences of theorizing from human centrism. Building with the work of scholars who have reminded us that sociality is organized through the interconnectedness of talk and interaction, as well as four years of conversations and art making with creative musicians, Dr. Marin proposes that wondering about and with sound making can expand our understandings of human learning in ways that are necessary for meeting the challenges we face as a society. Ananda Marin is associate professor in the Department of Education and faculty in American Indian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (Tongva territory). As a learning scientist she aims to bring research on the socio-ecological and cultural nature of learning and development alongside efforts to co-design more just teaching/learning environments. Broadly speaking, her research explores the diversity of ways that multigenerational groups of people organize attention and observation to participate in joint activity, collaborate, and improvise in everyday and professional contexts. She draws on video-based methodologies to examine how people in science-related and arts-based teaching/learning contexts make meaning in the moment-to-moment unfolding of interaction while accounting for the role of relationality, embodied movement, and place. Her studies in these areas inform her collaborations with educators and practitioners. She has widespread experience partnering with Indigenous communities, community-based organizations, and small collectives to design educational environments that cultivate community well-being. A primary goal of her work is to broaden research methodologies and theories of teaching/learning in ways that are consequential to the communities she partners with and the field of education. https://seis.ucla.edu/faculty/ananda-m-marin