Learning as multi-dimensional psychological and cultural ecological spaces

This symposium addresses challenges of understanding learning as multidimensional and embedded within and across multiple levels of contexts. Each paper articulates frameworks for designing and evaluating the impact of interventions in single and multiple settings that explicitly address how issues of identity, relationships, and belief systems within and across non-dominant communities can be leveraged and understood to support robust learning. Paper one presents a multi-dimensional, ecologically focused design framework for supporting literacy as identity building among a cohort of African-American urban adolescents and presents data from a longitudinal study implementing the framework. The second presents the framework for a multi-site ethnographic methodology conceptualizing learning as expansive, focusing on generative repertoires for learning in diasporic and other non-dominant communities. The third presents design principles enacted in a program for African-American adolescent male development addressing issues of identity, perceptions, and relationships as drivers for robust learning and implications for policy and practice.