(Re)Framing Educational Possibility: Attending to Power and Equity in Shaping Access to and within Learning Opportunities

Abstract

Accounts of how culture constitutes the learning activities we accomplish with others are flourishing. These accounts illustrate how participants draw upon, adapt, and contest historically situated social practices, tools, and relations to accomplish their learning goals [Vygotsky: Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1978]. Yet, they often lack attention to the ways that these social features reify and are reified by broader power structures and hierarchies. One way that power plays out in everyday social interaction is through the stories, narratives and ideologies that serve as resources for interpreting and organizing ongoing activity. Individuals become attuned to, coordinate and mobilize around these broader narratives through the <i>frames</i> they engage in moments of interaction. We offer frame analysis as a means of investigating both access <i>to</i> learning environments and opportunities to learn <i>within</i> them. To situate learning opportunities within and across different components of multilevel systems, a distinction is proposed between <i>framing within</i> a classroom or learning environment and <i>framing access to</i> educational processes and institutions. This paper recommends that researchers analyze, and design for, framing that disrupts predominant power structures and expands the possibilities for learning within more equitable social practices.