Reflections on the International Society of Learning Sciences Conference held in Montreal
Thoughts on Henry Giroux's keynote, concerns of virtual attendees, the future of conferences, spontaneous learning, and some of the tensions in the Learning Sciences discipline
Like many of us, this was my first time at ICLS (International Society of the Learning Sciences) in a long while. For me personally, it felt a little different and special, and also a bit weird but in a really good kind, after successfully getting through the tenure process only a few months ago. I figured I’d mark the moment by writing up a short(ish), honest and hopefully useful reflection. And hopefully also a little interesting. A couple of disclaimers. This was mostly written on a plane trip home to Chicago. Not to be confused for any kind of formal, comprehensive conference review. Moreso this will be a highly subjective, incomplete, and selective memo that will no doubt reflect my personal interests and set of concerns, as well as my biases and blindspots. An unstructured stream of consciousness, that I like to think of as a kind of autoethnographic reflection. If it turns out to be useful or interesting to you, I would be humbled and delighted.
First, I have to come clean. My approach to conferences is very particular. I try to attend a few sessions of interest, then spend the rest of the time socializing and exploring, especially if I’m in an interesting new city like Montreal that I’ve never been to before.
In fact, this is how I first experienced ICLS. My first conference was ICLS 2014 in Boulder, CO, when I was still a graduate student at Berkeley. I think I attended one or two panels before driving up to the mountains with my then girlfriend and now wife, kihana miraya ross. A couple years later we got married, so I’d say it was hands down the best conference I ever went to!
But alas, this year I did get a chance to attend a few really good sessions. I'm returning to Chicago with a full heart, full stomach (damn the food in Montreal!!), and also really intellectually energized and stimulated. I want to unpack a few interesting moments and draw out some themes that stood out to me.
It was a relatively light conference for me in terms of an active role. I mainly supported two of my doctoral students who were presenting on our work in the TREE lab. PhD student Shai Moore presented a poster on how youth in the Young Peoples Race Power and Tech (YPRPT) project learned to engage in moral reasoning about tech, emphasizing the importance of recognizing and grounding discussions in students’ funds of knowledge on ethics. In YPRPT this has meant beginning with how students reason on issues of race and racism as a way to bridge into discourse on ethics and tech. PhD student Charles Logan presented a paper on this idea of critical platform literacy, and how students develop it through engaging with reaction videos. This was in turn based on PhD student Natalie Melo’s design of an activity where high school students create reaction videos as a way to creatively and critically share their emotional responses upon discovering the extent and scope of digital surveillance. And finally I was a discussant for a structured poster session organized by Yasmin Kafai and her PhD student Luis Morales-Navarro, titled, "Making Sense of Machine Learning: Integrating Youth’s Conceptual, Creative, and Critical Understandings of AI." I was reminded how much I appreciate the dialogue and interaction that are uniquely possible within structured poster sessions. My favorite thing about this session was that it featured work by younger scholars and grad students, as well as those I think of as OGs like Lissa Soep, Cliff Lee, and Yasmin Kafai. Folks who have been at the cutting edges of innovative CS ed work and who I have been learning from since grad school.
A couple thoughts on Henry Giroux's keynote (the full text for his talk is available here). My basic takeaway can be summed up like this: “Yeah, it was alright.” I mean I don't have to give Giroux his flowers - his name is practically synonymous with a social justice ethic. A white leftist scholar and activist firmly rooted in traditions of democratic socialism and critical theory and pedagogy. I read a lot of Giroux in grad school. I probably should return to some of his work. But if I’m being honest I found the talk a bit underwhelming, and sort of predictable. The significance of someone like him giving the opening keynote to a conference like ICLS (y’all know what Im talking about) is not lost on me, and his central message around education’s critical role in resisting fascism globally is extremely timely. And as I reflect on it, it's the exact kind of political clarity around education’s purpose that the Learning Sciences has frankly lacked until recently, thanks to groups like the Politics of Learning Collective and the Virtual Lab, and individual scholars like Shirin Vossoughi, Megan Bang, Angela Booker, Paula Hooper, Thomas Philip, Susan Jurow, Tesha Sengupta-Irving, Maxine McKinney de Royston, Joe Curnow, and several others. So, kudos to Giroux on that. Having said that, I was hoping for more. His talk felt a little disconnected from the specific themes and interests of the Learning Sciences field, and also I think I just wanted him to challenge us a little more. For instance, he could have reminded us that our field's origins are rooted (partially) in funding from the Department of Defense. Have we confronted that history as a field? I'll leave that question there for us to ponder. Or the relative inability of our field to engage deeply in the public dialogue. As my colleague Nichole Pinkard has commented, during the pandemic “our phones weren’t ringing!” For me, that means as a field we haven’t communicated effectively to the public, to policymakers, to decision makers, etc., what the central objectives and contributions of our discipline are to society. I don’t think we really own that problem, which is a problem in and of itself. Another example. For a field that defines itself in relation to learning, we are relatively quiet on the raging debate on artificial intelligence. Our field's roots are literally in psychology and AI (you can read more about this history in Victor Lee’s short history of the field, and Roy Pea has a recent chapter on this as well), yet our impact on the global dialogue around AI is relatively minimal. Ultimately, he let us off the hook too easily, I think. No love lost for Giroux but just saying…
Switching gears. Let me back up a minute. I’m thinking of Tanner Vea’s critically important and super interesting work on emotions and how they mediate learning. ISLS 2023, for me, felt really good. Probably why I felt inspired to write this reflection in the first place. There was just this really smooth interplay and energy going on between intellectual ideas and new research, and the deepening and broadening of our social relations. And beautiful, diverse, dynamic Montreal as the backdrop. For me, this was all made possible because of the spontaneity that in-person real-time interaction affords. Who is doing research on spontaneous learning? Anyways, I'm going to say a little something about the tensions that came up from challenges related to accessibility for virtual attendees, but first I feel compelled to share some of my own best spontaneous moments that made the conference so dope and memorable for me.
Spontaneous moment #1. I have to start with my colleague, friend, and mentor Nichole Pinkard, who generously brought me into her extensive professional network tracing back to the very beginning of the Learning Sciences as a field. A highlight was having dinner and drinks with Roy Pea (Founder and first director of the learning sciences Ph.D. program at Northwestern) and Brigid Barron, both faculty at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education. It's hard to describe how much I’ve learned from these pathbreaking scholars, and I definitely wasn't anticipating an evening out with them as part of my ICLS experience. Still processing all that I learned there…Moment 2. Having dinner with Jasmine Ma (who was inducted as an ISLS fellow and will also be the society's president next year) and Noel Enyedy, two phenomenal scholars I know and admire a lot but didn't really know on a personal level. We talked shop and life over Japanese tapas and saki. We had fun for sure, and planted seeds for more dialogue in the future. Moment 3. Finally got to connect with mathematics and teacher education scholar Elham Kazemi, who like me is of Iranian descent. On the very first night in Montreal, we bumped into each other at Kazu, this little Japanese gem that I think anyone who visits the city should absolutely go to. Then we made plans and met up for lunch at the ridiculously cute, chique Persian cafe Aunja. Just two Iranian-born scholars meeting at an Iranian cafe in Montreal. Having kuku sabzi sandwiches and chai while talking about kids, research, as well as our families’ trajectories and varied experiences with immigration from Iran. It was an honor and special pleasure for me to connect with a senior scholar who shares my cultural identity. More seeds sown. Moment 4. Had another completely unexpected and lovely dinner outing (told you stomach full!). This time with several of my favorite people from my graduate school days, including our gracious convenor Hillary Swanson (now at Utah State University), and my good friends Mallika Scott (now at Cal State Fullerton) and José Gutierrez (now at the University of Utah). Couple days later, José and I spent the better part of the day together, sharing breakfast, coffee, and a fantastic Iced Matcha Latte. We meandered through neighborhoods of the city discussing new directions in our research, the role of (and need for more) archival research in learning and education research, and also exchanged honest reflections on masculinity, relationships, and intimacy. The kinds of conversations that to me, are only possible between old friends, sharing physical space together, preferably in a vibrant setting. The last spontaneous moment that, as poet Nasir Jones would say, put me in a good mood and good groove, was the night out at a Jazz Club, the Upstairs Lounge, with graduate students and colleagues from my department. My recollection of graduate school is filled with memories like this. Being in a relaxed and joyful environment without a doubt deepened our relations and sense of community in ways that will carry over to our lives back in Chicago and Evanston. Watering seeds.
Apologies. This autoethnographic “little” note became not so little, and I want kihana to give it a read-over before sharing it, so I’m going to wrap it up. I’ll end with a little a good ol’ CHAT-inspired reflection on a few tensions in the “activity system” of this conference and more broadly perhaps in our academic community.
First I think that with any professional gathering, there are, will be, and should be tensions. I think the final presidential session raised some of these really well, with initial remarks by Joshua Danish, and talks given by Miwa Takeuchi, Areej Mawasi, Justice Toshiba, Tanner Vea, and Sakina Alhadad. Every one of those people was insightful and struck exactly the right chord, at least for me. I especially love that a Palestinian scholar (Areej) who does work with Palestinian youth was part of this closing panel. That’s so amazing, and about damn time.
Is the growth and evolution of our field scaring some people? I’m sure. In the chatter and backchanneling that exists in any social community, the intellectual as well as social tensions of our field can be palpably felt. More specifically I think there are serious tensions related to the (perceived) politicization of the field. The fact that there are tensions here I don’t actually think is necessarily a problem. What does concern me, though, is that sometimes I sense a kind of performativity, an artificial civility and intellectual over-politeness in the way we engage each other. A more cynical way to say this, which I think has some truth to it, is to name the timidness that seems to characterize the tenor of the scholarly discourse in our community - and yes I could sense it at this year's ICLS. On one level, I get it. People are afraid to be considered part of the problem. On the other hand, talking about ideas and seeking truth is the whole point of this thing, right? We should talk more, disagree more, and argue more. And clutch our pearls less, say when someone commits the crime of disagreeing with us. It's a sign of respect to take each other's ideas seriously, and it takes both courage and integrity to raise and receive critical questions with care and grace. Tension in the activity system is good, a sign of health and life.
None of this resolves the tensions named though, and we do have some fundamental questions around values of our field that we need to sort out. Tanner Vea made a really good point around the importance of embracing plurality in the field, while being stubborn in our position that we must counter fascism. I agree. I’d love to know what others think and look forward to more dialogue and debate around these issues in Buffalo.
Another tension that exists is accessibility for virtual attendees, which was the topic of some social media back and forth. I don't know what happened behind the scenes, but I did have some reactions. For starters, the question of thoughtfully designed hybrid learning environments is a matter of equity and justice. And disability justice in particular. Conference travel is also a climate justice issue. From both of these standpoints - disability and climate justice - there is a clear moral imperative to be significantly more intentional in when, where, and how often we convene in person, and how to authentically include everyone in our community. There are very serious barriers that will always prevent some in our community from attending conferences in person. Health reasons, financial and cost reasons, family obligations, as well as the question of securing visas which has huge implications for how premier venues for academic research will include persons from the Global South (I’ll leave it alone for now that it's practically unthinkable for Iranian students to attend ICLS conferences, along with so many other students from particular nations most often located in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America). We have to also name the deep irony that a conference that's all about computer-supported collaborative learning apparently wasn’t able to create an acceptable hybrid environment. Fortunately, there are some who have made it their work to lead this needed effort, my friend and UC Boulder learning scientist José Lizárraga being instrumental in these regards among many others.
Some, however, scorn the idea of in-person gatherings altogether. I'm not with that. I think we have to ask ourselves what conferences are actually about? If a conference is strictly about the transaction of new ideas and research, virtual would suffice. Yet as the spontaneous moments I described above demonstrate, the social and cognitive and intellectual benefits of in-person meetings can be beautifully intertwined, which happens to be what sociocultural and interactional perspectives in learning sciences have been arguing for decades. All in all, for many of us ISLS2023 was deeply nourishing and energizing, precisely because of the quality of interactions and sense of spontaneity and adventure afforded via real-time physical cohabitation of space, flowing naturally in unanticipated moments of learning and connection with wonderful people.
I end with thanks and gratitude to the organizers of the conference, ISLS President Joshua Danish, and many, many others. My deep respect and gratitude also go towards the Kanien'kéha Nation and other Indigenous communities that are the stewards of the lands and waters of the unceded Tiohtià:ke/ Montreal territories. It was an honor to visit the Montreal area and to walk alongside so many colleagues and students in the noble tradition of learning and reflection.