Equity-Oriented Learning Design: An Entangled Future

Abstract

There is growing interest in the literature towards a more distributed, collaborative view of learning design that focuses on relationships and connection. In this paper, we propose a vision of learning design that is entangled and crosses boundaries, framed by an equity-oriented mindset that blurs and resists boundaries, and merges learning design with facilitation, external with internal communities, and academia with activism. Based on interviews with learning design practitioners across the world, and framed by theories of posthumanism and postdigital education, we share eight orientations that form a future and equity-oriented learning design pattern: awareness of context, matter matters, co-creating with humans and non-humans, relationality and connection, modelling vulnerability, the entanglement of the personal and political, and creating transformative spaces. We then use one of our responses to the advent of ChatGPT to show how these orientations have helped us in times of uncertainty and disruption, an agential cut that highlights the value of acknowledging the material-discursive relationships emerging in and through our work. As such, rather than focusing on conventional, static definitions and models, we are interested in knowledge-making processes that come into existence when we practise learning design and engage with each other and the world around us, and who we become in our relationships with others, both human and non-human, and the patterns that we form in this entanglement.