2011 AERA Presidential Address: Designing Resilient Ecologies

Resilient Ecologies: A Case of a Small Postindustrial Mining Town

To present this case, I leverage Walker and Salt’s (2006) approach to preserving natural ecologies and earth’s precious resources. In their book Resilience Thinking, they advance the notion of resilient ecologies to refer to a community’s ability to cope with, shape, and adapt to social, political, and environmental changes (Adger, 2000; Brand & Jax, 2007; Folke, 2003, 2006), communities that have some capacity to transform without diminishing their resource base or the social welfare of participants. In this work, I use resilience primarily, not to talk of individuals but to talk about larger sociocultural systems, such as towns, communities, and several activity systems that have been the focus of my research in recent years.

The study of resilience is not new; there has been considerable work on resiliency that foregrounds individual variables and factors and relationships that help people build capacity against the odds (e.g., Rutter, 1987, 1990; Garmezy, 1991; Werner, 1990, 1993). My interest in the notion of resilience, however, lies in its potential as a design principle for creating and sustaining learning environments where mind in action is privileged rather than mind as simply bounded in the individual. My interest in resilient ecologies has been shaped by my long-term work designing learning environments for youth from nondominant communities, my research collaborations, and my own biography. ¹

My own personal history, for example, has helped me understand that resilience is about risk and complexity as well as the possibility for people to re-mediate dysfunctional and inequitable systems. I begin by sharing an example that illustrates why understanding a community across multiple time scales helps us understand what confers resilience to ecologies. I also chose this case, that of a mining town, because I believe it illustrates a period of local resilience amid considerable constraint. As I will detail, on one hand this town’s toxicity seriously affected people’s health, while on the other, it also cultivated seeds of hope educationally, with experienced teachers, well-funded schools, a stable economy, and sociocultural supports. Thus, as I will discuss, while the noxious social and physical environments mediated everyday life, people marshaled resources to negotiate the constraints of this unique ecology, and thrived.

Before I delve into this case, allow me to insert a methodological and conceptual note. I use the term ecology, mindful of the debate about and the limitations of existing theorizations of the concept of “ecology” (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Cole & Gajjamaschko, 2010; Packer, 2010a, 2010b; Rogoff, 2003; Rogoff & Chavajay, 1995) and its problematic bounded concentric circles and nested-Russian-dolls metaphor. Instead, as Packer (2010a) notes, the ever-changing forms of life and the different positions and practices that people occupy blur life’s boundaries, so that rather than concentric circles, “its linkages will be more like tangled roots” (p. 24). Culture, then, is a “dispersed, dynamic, and contested form of life” (Faubion, 2001, as cited in Packer, 2010a, p. 24), a central point in the example of Miami, Arizona.

By most accounts, Miami, Arizona, was a typical 20th-century mining town in the Southwest. Just 90 miles east of Phoenix, the small community was populated by third- and fourth-generation Mexican Americans as well as Northern and Eastern European Americans (mostly from the former Republic of Yugoslavia), Native Americans, and a few African Americans. As would be expected, growing up in this copper-mining community meant living in a toxic environment, as the by-products of mining have significant environmental and health consequences. Crystalline silica—a known human lung carcinogen unearthed by the blasting in mines in which respirable silica dust enters the lungs—caused silicosis in many of the miners, including my grandfather (Donoghue, 2004; Holman, 1947; U.S. Department of Labor, 2002). On a typical day, one also could see and feel the effects of the sulphur smoke emitted from the mine’s many smokestacks (Figure 1). As a child I recall gasping for air and rubbing my irritated eyes and nose regularly when I was on the school playground. It turns out that the smelting of sulphide ores produces sulphur dioxide gas, which can cause acute bronchospasms and a range of irritant-related reactions (Center for Research Information, 2004; U.S. Department of Labor, 2002).

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Figure 1.

Copper mining in Miami, Arizona

The people living in this ecology, however, faced a more serious but invisible threat, one that would not be uncovered for generations and only after many fatalities. From 1945 through 1962, the United States conducted nearly 200 atmospheric nuclear weapons tests as part of its Cold War security strategy (https://www.justice.gov/civil/common/reca). The combination of the nuclear fallout traveling downwind from Nevada to Arizona and the mining and processing of uranium ore necessary for the development of nuclear weapons posed a double threat to the health of the town’s residents. Figure 2 locates Miami, Arizona (Gila County), in the green shaded area, identifying it both as a uranium-worker and a radiation-exposed county. Back then, no one understood why so many people died from cancer, young children from leukemia, and the like. After numerous failed lawsuits, Congress enacted the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act in 1990 and again in 2000, which officially classified cancer victims as “downwinders” (Brugge & Goble, 2003; Preston, 2005; Vastag, 2005). My mother and I are downwinders. ²

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Figure 2.

Areas covered by the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act

If, however, we understood only the environmental toxicity of this community, without examining the cumulative effects of historical practices and events, including its pernicious racial history, as well as its available and rich resources (material and cultural), we would miss the interplay and mediation of other activity systems at work. For example, with its complicated history of racial segregation, the social ecology of that community posed threats to the well-being of its people. From 1923 to 1951, the segregation of African American students was lawful under the state’s mandated school segregation policy; school boards implemented locally defined segregation practices for Mexican Americans and Native Americans. When the segregation of African Americans was outlawed in 1951 to 1952, the desegregation of Miami’s schools was also enforced (C. Marin, personal communication, March 18, 2011). My family, who had lived in the town for generations, was required to attend a special school (Bullion Plaza), the Mexican school, a beautiful vocational school built for children who were “slow” or who had so-called intellectual disabilities. The productivity of the mines provided rich resources to build and equip district schools, like Bullion Plaza, even as the children within such schools were disparaged as “slow.” Figure 3 shows the original school building that has now become a cultural center.

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Figure 3.

Bullion Plaza School, Miami, Arizona

In 1921, Charles Tupper began the reform of education in Miami to address the “Mexican problem” (Tupper, 1923). Appointed by the first Miami School Board, Tupper “convinced the school board to establish a segregated elementary school for the Mexican children solely on the basis of intelligence tests (Marin, 2005, p. 41). As a former student of Stanford’s Lewis Terman (see Terman et al., 1922), Tupper approached reform by introducing intelligence testing to reform schools in Miami. In the case of Bullion Plaza, Tupper (1922) used students’ test scores as the basis for segregating students and immersing some in a vocational curriculum: what he called “practical industrial and home-making training” (p. 98). As Tupper designed it, students were grouped “by homogenous mental development” to address the “retardation problem in Miami schools on a scientific and fact basis” (Tupper, 1922, p. 101). Of course, “mental retardation” was not the norm; it was common, however, for second- and third-generation Mexican American children to enter school Spanish dominant, with little English language experience. Yet, most were balanced bilinguals and biliterates throughout their lives, and many excelled academically. My mom, for example, won the English-speaking contest in second grade and was also advanced two grades subsequently based on her test scores and performance. By the time she enrolled in high school, it was an integrated setting that allowed access to high-status courses for some, although tracking and the vocational educational track remained.

Indeed, despite the segregation, and institutional attempts to transform difference into deficit, the community, its people, and practices were resilient in ways that would not be evident from focusing solely on the actions of those in power. The high rate of academic and athletic success, college matriculation, and graduation among Chicanos/as was quite remarkable, especially after the post–World War II era when the GI Bill benefits took hold. That era produced a whole new generation of teachers and engineers, facilitated in part by the college scholarships awarded by the mines for those interested in pursuing a career in engineering. The mines also provided high-wage summer jobs for sons of employees of the mines—funds that were used to help pay for the subsequent year of college. Until the collapse of the mines in the late ’80s and ’90s, this small town produced a number of Chicano/a professors, lawyers, engineers, a MacArthur Fellow, several U.S. congressmen, an ambassador, a U.S. secretary of the treasury, doctors, political activists, and generations of teachers, for example.

There are a number of ways to explain the stability and the local resilience of the Mexican American community, in particular. From an ecocultural theoretical perspective, for example, families developed routines that organized practices with tools for imagining and working toward a more hopeful future. Community members enacted new dispositions and leveraged tools appropriated from their participation in strong labor unions—International Union Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, the AFL-CIO—and notably, Mexican American sociopolitical clubs, such as Alianza Hispano Americana, the League of Latin American Citizens, the Latin American League, La Liga Protectora, and the Comisíon Honorifica Mexicana (C. Marin, personal communication, March 17, 2011). And the niche provided sustainable work and basic health and educational needs for its residents. Thus, despite its environmental and racial toxicity, in some important respects, it also was a resilient ecology in which people could still develop—and in many cases realize—strong identities and imagined futures, key principles of what I term social design experiments, a methodology I will describe shortly.

Seeing Historically to Organize for Sustainability

Learning to “see” historically across multiple time scales is fundamental to understanding how ecologies come to be, how people come to see who they are and what they might become as part of those ecologies as well as what mediates their trajectories. Seeing historically is especially important for understanding how we might imagine the design, cultivation, and sustainability of resilient learning ecologies. Like all ecologies, Miami’s was an open system, allowing for major shifts in all aspects of the activity system. For example, the collapse of the price of copper and the closing of the mines disrupted its equilibrium, making Miami’s story emblematic of the vulnerability of so many towns and cities in the United States today, and although there was some resilience possible in ecologies like Miami’s, there was little planning about how to support and sustain such resilience over cultural historical time.

A question for the learning sciences: How do we learn to develop a historical perception of ecologies that might help us imagine and develop more sustainable interventions? I turn to the work of Marx Wartofsky (1979) to understand the importance of a historical epistemology replacing traditional philosophical characterizations of epistemology (e.g., realist, empiricist) as ahistorical and universal. “The structures of perception are a historical variant”—Wartofsky argues—“they change in relation to historical changes in the modes of human action” (Wartofsky, 1979, p. 189). Our eyes, for example, are a product of biological evolution, a “genetic inheritance” of our changing historical praxis. For Wartofsky, “perception has a history” (Wartofsky, 1979, p. 191), and objects of perception (e.g., a building, a child, or a community, like Miami) are transformed by human thought and action, that is, mediated by culture. Following Wartofsky, then, is not the Mexican school and the vocational track for the “slow” Mexican American children of Miami the objectification of a mode of perception? Are not failing ecologies also the same objectification? (M. Espinoza, personal communication, November 10, 2010). These questions resonate with the cultural historical activity theoretical orientation I bring to my design work.

In this article, I argue that such understandings are critical to learning to see historically, to imagine new futures for people and their communities. Toward this end, Wartofsky (1979) directs us to replace “representation” with “imagination,” relating this process to the activities of “picturing and modeling” a future (p. 189). I locate my work in this tradition and engage in design interventions that are historicized and future oriented, while they remain embedded and contextualized in the participants’ meaningful life activity (Engeström, 2008).

These same questions about the objectification of people and communities also resonate with a socioecological view of managing the environment. Walker and Salt’s (2006) ideas of adaptive management—a strategy developed in response to management for “optimization” or “efficiency” that dominated environmental management for most of the 20th century—parallels orientations to education research and policy today. The emphasis in both domains has been on optimization instead of resilience and sustainability. The paradox of efficiency and optimization from this perspective is that “optimization (in the sense of maximizing efficiency through tight control) is a large part of the problem, not the solution” (Walker & Salt, 2006, p. 141). This certainly characterizes current educational reform in which schools, teachers, and students increasingly operate in tight-tight cultures, that is, cultures with top-down control and few degrees of freedom for teachers and students (Gutiérrez, 2004), cultures that undermine resilience and sustainability.

This idea of resilience thinking (Walker & Salt, 2006) from which I draw is one response to re-mediating failing ecologies like Miami, as it helps us understand what supports resilience generally, socioecologically, and educationally (Levin, 1999; Walker & Salt, 2006, p. 121). For the purposes of this article, I will not fully elaborate Walker and Salt’s (2006) model here but refer you to their robust discussion; instead, I will focus briefly on three of their key concepts: sustainability, transformability, and the role of diversity in ecological resilience as they resonate in important ways with the design approach I advance here. These concepts also are central to a cultural historical approach to learning and social design experiments in my work.

To illustrate these concepts and their relevance to understanding the complexity of and change in ecologies across time scales, I return to the story of Miami and its shift from a viable and dynamic ecology to one that is struggling. Within this framework, Miami is an ecology that seems to lack transformability, that is, the “capacity to create a fundamentally new system when ecological, social, economic, and political conditions make the existing system untenable” (Walker & Salt, 2006, p. 62). Without significant economic, environmental, educational, and social support, ecologies like Miami are simply not viable. In my own work, transformability relates to the capacity to re-mediate the functional system—a “social systems reorganization” (Cole & Griffin, 1983, p. 73)—that is, a reorganization of the entire ecology for learning. Of significance to my work, transformability necessarily depends on diversity, which contributes variability in number and kinds of people and institutions present in an ecological system. As Walker and Salt argue, greater variability creates “space for safe changes in the ecosystem because the system can absorb more shocks and disturbances . . . [thereby] offsetting and complementing the existing trend toward homogenizing the world” (Walker & Salt, 2006, pp. 144–146).

Diversity here is not a deficit but an essential resource of any resilient and sustainable ecology. Thinking about resilience, transformability, and the maintenance of diversity across longer time scales is fundamental to sustaining towns like Miami, public school systems across the country, and robust forms of educational intervention. And yet, our response thus far to the diminishing capacity of our communities, schools, and ecosystems to sustain themselves lacks imagination, commitment to equity and diversity, and expansive views about how people and institutions learn. Rather than seeing risk as essential in creating sustainable options for underresourced communities, their institutions, and people, our responses thus far have largely exacerbated the problem. And this includes the response of learning scientists and education researchers. As McDermott (2010) notes, there is a “poverty of imagination that characterizes much of the research on how youth in ‘tight circumstances’ learn” (p. 144). My interest here, vis-à-vis education, lies in what can be learned from ecological models to help us design, sustain, and re-mediate ecologies—to design learning ecologies with a new social imagination that is both historicized and future oriented. McDermott elaborates,

Mainstream theories of learning have captured economic constraints only statistically and symptomatically (as if being short on money means being short on ingenuity). A focus on the demands of necessity promises a more grounded view of educational possibilities. It can deliver portraits of what people in trouble can do, rather than what they cannot do, and it promises research better tuned to the work of democracy. (McDermott, 2010, p. 144)

How then do we focus on the “demands of necessity” to imagine different futures for youth and their communities? I have presented a theoretical model of resilience that helps us bring a new social imagination to our work. I present another approach to designing for long-term sustainability developed in my work, namely, social design experiments.

Social Design Experiments

Social design experiments are cultural historical formations concerned with academic and social consequences, transformative potential, and new trajectories for historically vulnerable people, especially people from nondominant communities. Grounded in the learning sciences and a cultural historical approach to learning and development (Cole, 1996; Cole & Engeström, 1993; Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010), this interventionist research maintains that change in the individual involves change in the social situation itself (Engeström, 2008). By understanding the individual and her cultural means in relation to her contexts of development, this approach contests the tendency to invoke the divide between the individual and the social. In this way, social design experiments are highly aligned with Engeström’s (2008) methods of formative interventions.

Social design methodology combines traditions of design-based research (Design-Based Research Collective, 2003), formative experiments (Engeström, 2008), and equity-oriented forms of inquiry to develop an approach that seeks to transform social institutions and their practices through mutual relations of exchange with constituent people as valued stakeholders and partners. This approach utilizes mixed methods but privileges multisited ethnography to develop an historicized understanding of the ecology, its resources, and constraints—an understanding that is essential to addressing the complexity and diversity, as well as the contradictions and tensions, in activity systems. From this perspective, social transformation shifts the focus on “fixing” people and their communities to a focus on the reorganization of systems of activity in which participants can become designers of their own futures. As I have written elsewhere, the object of social design experiments is the development of “historical actors” who, in the Wartofskian sense, learn to see historically so that they can begin the process of reframing their own sociohistorical circumstance and futures as learners and agents of social change (Gutiérrez, 2008a).

Social design experiments seek to create and study change. As educational and social interventions, they design for new learning as well as unlearning stereotypic or deficit perceptions of learners and their communities. As educational experiments, like other design experiments, social design experiments are grounded in empirically derived hypotheses about learning and human development but are iterated, implemented, and continuously reflected on, refined, and repaired over the course of the experiment; in other words, these are theoretical and experientially informed models of the future that are codesigned, studied, and revised in the present.

Their cultural historical theoretical underpinning and equity focus orient researchers to seek deep understandings of the following: (a) the resources and constraints of the ecologies that constitute people’s everyday lives, (b) the full range of people’s practices understood across at least several activity systems, and (c) people’s repertoires of practice, including the genesis of those practices (Gutiérrez, 2008b). Thus, for researchers in the cultural historical tradition, research and design are focused on understanding learning in relation to participation in the cultural practices of communities in order to theorize more fully mechanisms that account for regularity, variation, and change in the learning of individuals, groups, and communities. Within this framework, repertoires of practice refers to the heterogeneous tool kits—ways of acting in the world cognitively, linguistically, physically, socially, emotionally—that individuals appropriate throughout their lives as participants in varied communities of practice, even as they navigate the contradictions and tensions, the novelty and diversity that these different communities present (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003; Lee, Gutiérrez, & Warren, 2006).

In summary, drawing on cultural historical activity theory, democratizing forms of inquiry, and a resilience thinking framework (Walker & Salt, 2006), design principles of a social design experiment include the following: (a) deep attention to history and historicity, including how they relate to resilience, sustainability, and equity; (b) a focus on re-mediating activity, that is, a focus on reorganizing the functional system rather than individuals; (c) employing a dynamic model of culture with an understanding that cultural and other forms of diversity are key resources for sustainability; (d) a persistent emphasis on equity across the design process in the theorization, design, and implementation; (e) an emphasis on resilience and change, where change implicates the individual, the collective, and the ecology; and (f) an end goal of transformation and sustainability.

To illustrate these principles, I present two very different examples of social design experiments that share important design principles that make the history, participants, resources, diversity, and possibilities of new trajectories of the ecology central to the conception of the design. In short, both of the following interventions design for resilience and sustainability across time and illustrate interventions aimed at local and institutional change. As social design experiments, they aim at broader social change through realizations of possible futures. These are critical principles and aspirations if we are to conduct research on learning, and design for the social good, in ways that have transformative and enduring consequences for people in vulnerable communities.

Social Design Experiment 2: Designing Architecture of Context and Circumstance

The second example of social design experiments comes from the field of architecture, an architecture of context and complexity that harnesses the history of the environmental and sociocultural ecology to build new houses while also building a new vision of community living in precarious environments. Although different in scale from the previous example, I argue that collectively these approaches become generative of a new imagination that conceives of resilience over cultural historical time, a resilience that encompasses ecological thinking about social and environmental systems, including educational systems.

Placing a high premium on diversity and its role in re-mediating and sustaining viable and thriving communities is also an organizing principle of a robust socio-architectural intervention in New Orleans, Louisiana, the host city of the 2011 American Education Research Association’s (AERA) annual meeting the year I was its president. This city helped to inspire my conference theme, “Inciting the Social Imagination: Education Research for the Public Good.” New Orleans is a remarkable city with an amalgam of cultural practices—practices that contribute to vibrant intercultural exchange, that retain elements of their historical character, and that remain in tension with other enduring customs and beliefs as well as its geography. Pierce Lewis once described New Orleans as the “inevitable city on an impossible site” (as cited in McNabb & Madère, 2003, p. 3), with its “thin, hydric soils and mosquito-infested swamps at or below sea level, surrounded by water and vulnerable to hurricanes and severe floods” (Campanella, Etheridge, & Meffert, 2004, p. 290).

When the AERA program committee visited New Orleans in preparation for the annual meeting, we participated in a very thoughtful tour of the Lower Ninth Ward. I was moved not only by the humanitarian efforts but also by the humanity of some of the interventions that were taking hold. The Make It Right Foundation was one such example with its goal to build safe, sustainable, and affordable homes for working families who had been homeowners prior to Katrina. Many of its designers organized their efforts around diversity, resilience, and sustainability in ways that are aligned with the sociocultural history of the ward and its families; at the same time, their goal has been to build and sustain future trajectories for the families and community. Systemic change in this model of intervention is not addressed by attempts to scale up effective interventions alone but rather to imagine new interdisciplinary models and dynamic interventions toward systemic improvements across larger time scales. The project’s division of labor supports collaboration to ensure the development of green, safe, affordable, and ecologically valid structures—an orientation best exemplified by the Float House, one of the designed homes in this project (Figure 4). In response to the ecological fragility, the Float House rests on a 4-foot-high base and a chassis that is equipped with modern conveniences. Built for safety, affordability, and sustainability, this floatable home maintains some of the tradition of New Orleans homes in its essential front porch and its culture (Morphosis Architects, 2009).

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Figure 4.

Float House (Morphosis Architects), Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans, Louisiana

Designed by Thom Mayne, Distinguished Professor of Architecture at UCLA; his firm Morphosis Architects; and his graduate students, the concept of the house emerged from a study on the flooding record of the Lower Ninth Ward, the sociocultural history of the city, and a deep understanding of the ecology of the Mississippi Delta (UCLA News Week, 2010; for an overview by Mayne’s former student, see Smith, 2009). An example of what the team terms “real-world design for social impact,” Mayne’s work advocates for an architecture that, as he notes, is filled with hope, immense sense of joy of possessing and acknowledging what is possible—meaning what it means to be human. Architecture has a way of seeing, of thinking, and of questioning our world and our place in it (Mayne, 2008, minute 1:22)

Mayne’s vision harkens back to the importance of imagination, picturing, and modeling a future in the Wartofskian sense. Moreover, Mayne’s work is not an a priori conceptualization but rather historical and locally developed. As Mayne argues,

It’s a result—a manifestation of the processes that form it. Investigating, prioritizing information specific to its cultural, urban, political, and ecological content. An architecture of context regarding its place and its circumstance (Mayne, 2008, minute 1:22)

For Mayne, architecture is about asking questions and design—“a way of seeing the world not encumbered with normative rationales, explanations, and logic” (Mayne, 2008, minute 42:01). It is a way of acting responsibly in the world to solve technical, social, and political problems. For Mayne, each project like the Float House “promotes difference but there are continuities, an interest in ambiguity, ideas of inclusion, the coexistence of apparent contradictions . . . the idiosyncratic . . . [and] the imperfect as the acknowledgement of our frailties” (Mayne, 2008, minute 42:01). Architecture of complexity, then, is at once unencumbered by normative reality and attentive to it, for as Mayne sees it, “it’s an integration of those two things continually” that ultimately produces (sustainable) work. For me, the Float House and Mayne’s historical and ecological sensibilities exemplify the principles and intention and transformational end of a social design experiment.

Conclusion

At their best, then, social design experiments like Las Redes and the Float House have the potential to become lived arguments for the possible, what Wartofsky referred to as tertiary artifacts—“imaginative artifacts that color the way we see the ‘actual’ world, providing a tool for changing current practice” (Cole, 1996, p. 121). And if perception is historically and culturally mediated, as Wartofsky has argued, then we must ask ourselves, What perceptions of learning ecologies are we imagining for our children? What perceptions underlie our research and design-based interventions? And what role can education research play in advancing a more expansive social and pedagogical imagination for all youth across all schools and communities, locally, nationally, and internationally?