2011 AERA Presidential Address: Designing Resilient Ecologies

This article is about designing for educational possibilities—designs that in their inception, social organization, and implementation squarely address issues of cultural diversity, social inequality, and robust learning. I discuss an approach to design-based research, social design experiments, that privileges a social scientific inquiry organized around a new sociocultural imagination, with an expansive understanding of how people can learn resonantly, as they live together productively and interculturally. I present a case of a postindustrial mining town to illustrate what can be learned from ecological approaches to help us design, sustain, and re-mediate vulnerable ecologies. I also present an educational case from my work and one from architecture as arguments for consequential design interventions for nondominant communities.