ICLS Symposium | iY-7_POLITICAL-LEARNING | Scaling Communities of Learners: How Size, Power, and Partnerships Shape Political Learning

Drawing on critical interrogations of power and sociocultural learning theories, this symposium explores political learning oriented toward equity and justice as shaped by community scale–from organizations to dyads. First, at the organizational level, we explore the tensions and possibilities of facilitating systemic change in graduate education as organizational learning, drawing on CHAT. Second, we explore the ecology of learning and the evolution of socio-political and emotional commitments within a youth design-build organization, introducing the concept of spatial imaginary. Third, looking at a small group of teacher-leaders, we investigate how they navigated dominant ideologies, and whiteness as policy, as they organize for school integration. Fourth, we narrow to a novice teacher-mentor dyad, to analyze how their strong political commitments may constrain the dialogic engagement of students’ emergent ideas. Together, these presentations advance understanding of how inquiry, knowledge building, and transformation within equity and political learning efforts are mediated across community sizes.