Commentary

Timothy San Pedro and Valerie Kinloch are among a powerful cohort of scholars who are pushing the ontological boundaries surrounding how we think about the conduct of educational research. A longstanding tension in the history of educational research has been conceptualizations of the goal of such work as discovering foundational principles about how people learn and impacting practice in ways that address inequalities in opportunity to learn. More recent theorizing has argued that such tensions need not be dichotomies. Stokes (1997) articulates four traditions of research—in the Western tradition—that range from what some call basic research to research that addresses a fundamental question of theory but in service of practice that enhances life outcomes. The latter he refers to as Pasteur’s Quadrant, referring to Pasteur’s research on germ theory in service of being able to produce milk that would not cause disease (e.g., through pasteurization). In many respects, the work of San Pedro, Kinloch, and others on what they are calling Projects in Humanization sits at the intersection of discoveries of foundational knowledge and improving practices that support the full and holistic development of humans.

A fundamental difference, however, between this emerging program of research and Stokes’s argument, as well as the focus of the field of the Learning Sciences (e.g., fundamental theories of how people learn in the context of everyday practices and real world settings; see Sawyer, 2008), is that both of these traditions fundamentally derive from a Western ontology of science—that is, warrants that derive from the history of Western science. We are at an interesting precipice where what had been conceived as foundational propositions is being contested from multiple intellective spaces— work in human development and the neurosciences documenting that adaptation through multiple pathways is essential to human evolution and resilience (Lee, 2010) and that the social, emotional, cognitive, relational, and phenomenological dimensions of human functioning are dynamic, interactive, and connected to participation in cultural practices (Spencer, 2006); work across diverse epistemologies evolving from different cultural and historical communities that broadens our conceptions of what it means to come to know in our complex physical and social worlds (e.g., Indigenous epistemologies, critical race theories, feminist epistemologies, African-centered philosophy) (Asante, 1988; Bang, Medin, & Altran, 2007; Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, & Tarule, 1986; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; McCarty & Lee, 2014); and work on the role of narrative (e.g., storying) in how humans make sense of experience in the world (Baquedano-López, 1997; Bruner, 1990; Champion, Seymour, & Camarata, 1995; Gee, 1989; Sugiyama, 2001). Across these quite diverse intellectual traditions are emerging questions about the meaning and significance of identities, how we understand systems (social, political, economic, natural), and the ways in which language serves as a mediator of meaning-making. And so at one level, the practices and relationship building embedded in the cases described by San Pedro and Kinloch do have traditions in anthropology (understanding that historically anthropology has also employed practices and epistemologies that reinforced colonial dehumanizing projects). Yet, what they and others are proposing is a fundamental shift in the social sciences, particularly in fields directly addressing education and opportunity to learn and develop (Paris & Winn, 2013).

As this program of research is growing, I also want to take this opportunity to raise questions with which I hope this emerging community of scholars will wrestle. I would first like to raise questions about the phrasing “humanizing” discourse and practices. There is a subtle implication that something in the kinds of interactions they describe makes people human. My logic here comes from inferences about the suffix izing, meaning a process of making something and doing something. I agree that the traditions against which they are arguing have historically explicitly sought to dehumanize. However, I know the fundamental proposition here is that we and those with whom we interact and ideally collaborate in service of struggling against colonizing ideologies are human, and our hope is to jointly come to understand how we can build relationships and practices that are sustaining to healthy human development (e.g., constructing “stories of hope and possibility, struggle and resilience, community and justice”).

A second question addresses a theme about centralizing “the concerns of the people and communities with whom we work.” The issue here is that communities are rarely homogenous (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003). Cultural communities are complex because they are both homogenous and heterogenous, stable and changing, all simultaneously. This means there are tensions within communities. The stories of both Tim (Filipino, growing up on a Native American reservation) and Elijah (interested in multitribal identities and relations between what he terms Western thinking and Indigenous thinking) embody such tensions. So how such collaborations navigate hybrid spaces and differences in points of view within communities poses dilemmas requiring much reflection. Some of this deliberation is evolving in discussions of moving from culturally responsive pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995), to culturally sustaining pedagogies (Paris & Alim, 2014), to culturally sustaining and revitalizing pedagogies (McCarty & Lee, 2014). It is important to acknowledge that pedagogy toward what ends is contested territory, even among communities that have and continue to be subject to systemic risks.

In some respects, we have many illustrations of such collaborative practices in studies of out-of-school settings (Majors, 2003; Pinkard, Barron, & Martin, 2008). The challenges of such collaborations at scale in schools are systemic and deeply political. And thus another collaboration we need is between those working in the PiH tradition and those explicitly focusing on political and economic systems.