Decolonization of Digital Learning Spaces: It’s Not About Knowing More but Knowing Better

Abstract

Working alongside members of communities who are remote and/or marginalized from the dominant socio-economic powers, the long-term goal of the Decolonisation of Digital Learning Spaces project is to empower communities in choosing, adopting, developing, and/or appropriating culturally appropriate and sustainable digital learning technologies. Before we can co-envision useful options, however, we must first know what questions to ask and how to ask. It is necessary, therefore, to find appropriate, efficient, and innovative approaches to better understand community needs and values. This paper describes the preliminary planning of the research project in creating an international network of community members, activists, and researchers, and in identifying and testing methods for eliciting needs, values, and ways of understanding the world. Selected methods must allow the researchers to step outside their own pre-conceived understandings to avoid dominating or imposing meaning upon the participants’ understandings. In this presentation, we describe: a) the goals and concerns that were the impetus for the project, b) the nascent network, c) potential knowledge elicitation methods, and d) the repeated single-criterion card sort method as the first method that will be piloted. This deceptively simple method allows research participants to use their own words to express their conceptualizations thereby reducing the influence of the researcher upon participants’ mental model and values.