My most research research project for my dissertation explored CUNY undergraduate students’ learning ecologies and how these resource networks produce student learning.
My dissertation is available in CUNY Academic Works: Mapping Learning Ecologies: A Diffractive Exploration of the Emergence of Learning
Drawing on Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism (2007), I explore the learning ecology as a “specific material configuration” that produces learning, an emergent, “onto-epistemological” phenomenon of entangled being-knowing. I offer a new materialist approach to the learning ecology to better define the concept, taking seriously the material nature of the ecology and acknowledging that learning and knowing is a material practice of being in the world.
To explore learning ecologies, I conducted qualitative interview and mapping sessions with 26 undergraduate students at the City University of New York. To analyze the narrative and visual data, I utilized a diffractive reading methodology to explore patterns of difference in the materialization of ecologies and examine how these differences support or hinder the emergence of learning.