Learning as Alternative Infrastructuring

We report on how one community builds capacity for disrupting injustice and supporting each other during the COVID-19 crisis. We engaged long-term community partners (parents, their youth, and local community center leaders) in on-going conversation on their experiences with the pandemic. We learned with and from community partners about how and what people in communities most vulnerable in this crisis learn about and respond to COVID-19 in highly contextualized ways, individually and through extended family groups and trusted social networks. We report on how they put understandings towards educated, organized, urgent community infrastructuring actions within informal coalition networks. We explore these actions as necessary localized responses to systemic neglect from dominant institutional infrastructures during a global pandemic.

Read more in our paper in Educational Researcher.

Rapid Learning for Justice is a collaboration between academic researchers at the University of Michigan and community partners two long-term partnerships in the Midwest and West Coast to how people learn science during the COVID-19 pandemic, and its intersections with justice, in real time in everyday living, and how they activate this scientific knowledge, alongside other powerful forms of knowledge and practice, towards decision-making and action-taking. We center how youths’ and adults’ critical consciousness around racial, educational, and economic justice shapes their learning about COVID-19.