Educational Designer

This design autoethnography explores the intersection of social justice and education through the lens of caring design, as enacted by a teacher working with undocumented students. This autoethnography analyzes the re/design of an argumentative writing unit – not only does it address the linguistic and socioemotional needs of recently-arrived multilingual learners, it also integrates a critical examination of laws that affect them. Consideration is given to design questions (design for compliance vs. curiosity), design processes (dogfooding, focal students), and design principles (relevant ethical issues, pluralistic questions, multi-modality), all within the larger lens of caring design. The autoethnographic study contributes to this special issue by illustrating how critical and caring pedagogies can be effectively merged to challenge and transform the existing educational paradigms, promoting a more equitable learning experience for marginalized students.

Through the artistry of curricular re/design, teachers enact their faculty to cultivate in students “a powerful purpose to learn and contribute to the world” (Muhammad, 2023, back cover). Through a teacher’s literary voice, this design autoethnography highlights how curricular design is an inspiring but messy process, showing how a teacher enacts caring design by responding to the assets and needs of an undocumented student while drawing from their pedagogical repertoire.

This design autoethnography retrospectively makes sense of an experimental process. Through inductive reasoning, Figure 1 presents a summary of the design heuristics applied in an argumentative essay unit for recently-arrived multilingual learners. While these design heuristics also serve as a table of contents when navigating the rest of this paper, this section is not meant to impose a lock-step way to design an argumentative writing unit for all multilingual students. Rather, these design heuristics emerge from the promising practices of a teacher who is finding ways to pedagogically adapt to the complexities that emerge in the classroom (micro), school (meso), and society at large (macro), which could be reiterated and remixed to better respond to one’s own context and student population.

Designing for Compliance: Othering in the Teaching of English

Sociohistorically, the US public schooling system has largely been designed for a particular population in mind – which has led to the othering of speakers of “other” languages. Through power-knowledge structures (Foucault, 2012) that naturalize English, White Supremacy, and standardized testing, US public education has constructed academic pathways of “equality” – a discourse that extends from the compliance of civic norms into the policing of “correct” academic usage of the English language. Through this design discourse, English language curriculum enacted in US classrooms often fails to respond to the diversity and alterity of recently-arrived immigrant youth. This myth of educational equality not only fails to respond to the needs of “others,” but also obfuscates the technocratic hypercorrection of speakers of “other” languages (Bourdieu, 1991). Language education scholars have named this phenomenon linguicism (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2012), which is the systemic othering of Englishes which have not been privileged in the hegemony of US public schooling (Cantor et al., 2021). However, educators have the power to disrupt this inequitable system. By using the terms available design, design tools, and redesign (New London Group, 1996), educators can begin to harness an explicit metalanguage of design to denaturalize (Foucault, 2012) the sociohistorical power-knowledge structures embedded in the design of US public schooling.

The available design of educational “equality” is a structural engine of social reproduction that continues to marginalize the “other” (Cantor et al, 2021; Duncan-Andrade, 2022; Fine, 1991; Fine et al., 2007; MacLeod, 1987/2018; Rose, 1989). When these available designs fail to work for a certain population of students, blame is often attributed to the users that need to be “fixed,” diverting attention away from the systems-level designers-at-large. By blaming the end-user rather than the available design, the attention to “learning loss” continues to ignore the fact that our available designs for compliance will continue to fail to respond to the “increasing cultural and linguistic diversity in the world today” (New London Group, 1996, p. 60). Duncan-Andrade & Morrell (2008) argue that our educational system, born out of White Supremacist ideology, continues to do exactly what it was designed to do: create a technocratic “equality” that exacerbates the schooling challenges of marginalized youth as they encounter the norms of performance in US public schools. In resisting these “politics of failure,” they argue that we need to critically redesign education in ways that are “ideologically, culturally, and locally relevant” (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008, p. 2).

Currently, teachers are expected to comply with set curriculum designs in US public schooling, which overwhelmingly focus on the acquisition of disciplinary skills. Through this technocratic and transmissive “skills only” model of teaching and learning, educators who comply with a one-size-fits-all curriculum fail to recognize the assets of marginalized youth (Muhammad, 2020, 2022, 2023). Comparing curriculum to a ball gown, Muhammad (2023) compares teachers to fashion designers who take the measurements of their clients and lean into their client’s desires before designing. As artists designing curriculum, educators must also respond to their clients’ assets and voices. While existing disciplinary standards are effective in helping define what teachers should teach and what students should learn, these design tools, when applied uncritically, often result in the othering of those who may not fit well into a curriculum that was not tailored for them. Rather than trying to fix their clients, educators, as curricular re/designers, must begin to notice who their clients are and begin to care-fully listen.

Designing With Curiosity: Caring Design as Belonging

Since the available design in US public schooling requires major revision in order to support multilingual learners, it is crucial to integrate design tools that sustain redesigns that care-fully responds to the “other.” The embedded available designs that center the acquisition of disciplinary skills rarely attend to the educational pursuits of identity, intellect, criticality, and joy (Muhammad, 2020, 2022, 2023). In order to envision an equitable curriculum that goes beyond the myopia of designing for compliance, we teachers first need to consider how we are responding to the diversity of students and Englishes that are in our learning environments. In agitating towards designing with curiosity, we educators are also forging relationships with our students by noticing, listening, and connecting. This allows us to become better equipped to include our students in our design thinking, a crucial step towards designing learning environments as more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable socioecological systems (Bang, 2020; Funes, 2021).

In attending to our ability to respond, educators also attend to the recursive and reiterative process of caring design. Initially applied to business and urban design, caring design is an integration of design and care ethics (Hamington, 2019; Imrie & Kullman, 2017). Care is an embodied, relational, sociopolitical, and ecological experience. It shapes and is shaped by our lived experiences (our relational selves) and our sociohistorical ecosystems (our world). In the field of care ethics, care is most popularly defined as:

…a species of activity that includes everything we do to maintain, contain, and repair our 'world' so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment (Fisher & Tronto, 1990).

In the field of education, design is “a process of deciding what onto-epistemic actions [learners] can/should engage in and develop and what axiological horizons and social futures are made possible" (Bang, quoted in UMD INFO College, 2021, 6:52). In other words, design is grounded in the educational philosophies of the curriculum designers. By deciding what learners should and could be doing, curriculum designers also get to decide what ways of being and becoming matter.

As educators, we have the power to shape what we care about and who we care for through our curricular enactment. When we are designing for compliance, we are centering a linear acquisition of disciplinary skills. When we do this, we are often referring to available designs that are “disciplining” and controlling students “by forcing students to achieve the skills and acquire the knowledge that has been prescribed for them” (Noddings, 2005, p. xiv). While a curriculum should consider skill acquisition, a skills-only approach often leads to the othering of bodies and voices that “fail” to comply. When re/designing curriculum, we need to look beyond test scores and “look for the development of democratic character, critical thinking, and caring [emphasis added]” (Noddings, 2005, p. xx). In other words, we should look beyond the myopia of top-down mandates and agitate towards designing for belonging. While teachers are often expected to follow a set curriculum mandated by their nation-state or their school, we might begin to consider how our enactment of curriculum designs could “provide a climate in which caring relationships might flourish” (Noddings, 2005, p. xv).

By centering our students’ ways of being and becoming in our teaching philosophies, educators, as designers, have the power to relationally reconstruct learning environments. By relating to students and other stakeholders through caring design, educators perform their right to organically transform the education of marginalized students whose languages, cultures, and experiences are often stigmatized in the U.S (Lamont, 2018).

As a former English Language Arts teacher serving at one of the 31 schools in the Internationals Network for Public Schools, I was blessed with a learning opportunity: innovating, reiterating, and helping co-design what García and Sylvan (2011) call “dynamic plurilingual education”—an educational approach that centers multilingual learners who have recently arrived in the United States. The 9^th/10^th grade students I taught came from 33 countries, bringing with them 14 named languages (Otheguy, García, & Reid, 2015). Since a majority of my 9^th/10^th grade students have been living in the US for less than two years, my students’ transnational and translingual lifeworlds played an increasingly important role in my design of learning environments.

This design autoethnography is inspired by an interaction with an undocumented youth in my classroom. This was a critical moment, one that “increases our sense of agency when we realize that we have choices in how we respond” (Fisher-Yoshida, 2015). In confronting the injustices that this focal undocumented student faces both inside and outside my classroom, this critical moment inspired me to redesign an argumentative writing unit as a space for belonging. By sharing this reiterative reimagining of argumentative writing, I demonstrate how a classroom environment can be redesigned as a democratic forum that is inclusive of populations that are marginalized by the law.

In this design autoethnography, I weave in my past, present, and future-oriented positionings (Harré & Van Langenhove, 1998)—a consequential reflexivity that is crucial to teacher action research (Souto-Manning, 2012). In writing this design autoethnograpy as intersectional praxis (Freire, 1968/2018, 1985; Alexander, 2016), I harness discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1992, 2009; Gee, 1998, 2014; Rymes 2015) through a social semiotic frame (Bezemer & Kress, 2015) to systematically analyze the “water” (Wallace, 2009) of my classroom’s language and literacy practices. Through the intentional use of “I” (Oeur, 2018; Rose, 1989; Valenzuela, 1999), I show how my own life experiences are entangled in my design choices and processes (Munro, 2011) as a teacher working with immigrant-origin teenagers.

After almost a decade of teaching the English language to speakers of “other” languages, I have come to resist the binaristic thinking of what is “correct” or “incorrect” in my students’ English language use. While grammar and forms-based instruction is a part language instruction, this skills-only approach (Muhammad, 2020, 2023) will only reinforce the norms, rules, and values of our cultural hegemony (Gramsci). This skills-only approach reifies the myth of a “Standard English” (Lippi-Green, 2012), forcing speakers of “other” languages to comply with the rules of the English language without creativity or criticality. This strict adherence to the myth of Standard English fails to attend to the differences in our Englishes.

To resist the hurt-pain-harm (Muhammad, 2020, 2023) of linguicism, it is crucial for teachers of English to attend to their students’ diversity of languaging, which emerges as a consequential form of their multiple ways of knowing, being, and becoming (Qin & Beauchemin, 2022; Rosa, 2019; Warren et al., 2020). Languaging refers to the idea “that language is not a noun or a system of codes to be learned and used, but a verb or an action – we do things through language, and languaging acts constitute relations, knowledge, identities, social norms, and institutions” (Qin & Beauchemin, 2022, p. 2). In other words, the role of English teachers goes beyond imposing the rules of English grammar and composition and policing our students’ use of the English language. By care-fully attending to our students’ languaging, we have the opportunity to forge learning partnerships in the classroom through English—becoming more equipped to respond to our students’ expressive ways of relating to themselves, to others, and to the world. Through the goggles of languaging and social justice, educators can begin to understand their students’ diversity and alterity (Alexander & Rhodes, 2014) in ways that disrupt the injustices of a linguistic hierarchy (Canagarajah, 2006).

Through caring design, I step up to my response-ability as a teacher. Through analysis of design artifacts, I demonstrate how a caring design approach responds to the dynamism of language, identity, and power. By describing and systematically analyzing how my own design processes and personal experiences shift the culture of power in our classroom learning community, this design autoethnography (Ellis et al., 2011; Salvador, Bell & Anderson, 1999) shows how the caring design of a classroom environment affirms the languaging of a focal undocumented student.

In “The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children” (Delpit, 1988, there is a problematic aspect of power that is enumerated as a maxim: “If you are not already a participant in the culture of power, being told explicitly the rules of that culture makes acquiring power easier” (p. 282). In sharing my own continual struggle in participating within dominant cultures of power in this design autoethnography, I show how this maxim becomes a pernicious presumption that further edifies the dominant narratives that continue to oppress our marginalized student populations.

Growing up as a gay teen in the K-12 school system in the 1990s and early 2000s, explicitly knowing the rules of the culture of power did not make it easier for me to acquire power. While my teachers did not explicitly state the rules of the culture of power, it was still clear to me that any expression of my sexuality would be interpreted as abnormal by the culture of power. I did learn about these rules explicitly, however, in church—another culture of power that silenced me with shame. In time, I learned how to navigate the culture of power by feigning normative behavior, learning how to act straight while trying to avoid the existential dread of going to hell.

Later in Delpit’s article, she writes: “I prefer to be honest with my students. Tell them that their language and cultural style is unique and wonderful but that there is a political power game that is also being played, and if they want to be in on that game there are certain games that they too must play” (p. 292). In re-reading this passage, I see Delpit’s ethico-onto-epistemological understanding of power as rooted in the following questions: “How should one live?” and “How should one act?”

If education were to exclusively operate within this ethico-onto-epistemology, we would continue to funnel a certain population of students towards acquiring power while leaving other students behind. Making the rules of the culture of power explicit, while empowering for some students, can force already-marginalized students to lose a vital part of themselves. Within this ethico-onto-epistemology, the relationship between language education and power leads to the following question: “How can language be used to maintain, reinforce, and perpetuate existing power relations?” (Alim, 2005, p. 424).

I am interested in how we use language as an expression of a power inherent in every human. By tapping into this capillary power (Foucault, 2012), social justice educators must also ask: “How can language be used to resist, redefine, and possibly reverse these relations?” (Alim, 2005, p. 424). So, while Delpit’s perception of the culture of power resides in the questions “How should one live?” and “How should one act?”, it fails to reach the critical questions of “How might one live?” and “How might we live?” These latter questions are especially pertinent for my undocumented students, who face explicit laws that define their existence as illegal.

So, while I agree with Delpit (1988) that “pretending that gatekeeping points don’t exist is to ensure that many students will not pass through them” (p. 292), I believe that this power can be reconstructed in our educational system to serve every student. While a gate-keeping culture of power still shapes today’s academic discourse, looking at power through the ethico-onto-epistemology of “How should one live” further reinforces the punitive political processes that exist for my undocumented students.

As a survivor of historically pernicious laws that belie the culture of power in the United States, I’ve learned to resist by asking, “What are the types of power that have deeply affected my life?” While I’ve benefited from the historical and recent shifts in our culture of power when it comes to immigrant and LGBTQIA rights, I’ve learned how important it is to question dominant cultures of power. Through this thinking-with-theories of power, I find liberation and healing in Foucault’s (2012) idea that power is capillary. This is a power that is innate in every human as a social body, relationally interconnected in a dynamic network of power. While we have the normalizing "shoulds" codified into existing power structures, the capillary power that exists in our social bodies could help us care-fully reshape our world.

While my teaching philosophy is rooted in the pedagogy of radical humanists (Burrell & Morgan, 1979/2017) agitating for social transformation, I have also been responsible for supporting students in reaching the Common Core State Standards. During my first year of teaching at International High School (pseudonym), I struggled with teaching newcomer students how to write argumentative essays. The handed-down curriculum that I was working with did not seem to go beyond lockstep approaches to language teaching (Bartolomé, 2010), and I was often unsatisfied with the level of student engagement. After an especially grueling day of teaching argumentative writing skills, I wrote the following question in my 2015 teaching journal: “How the hell do I get my newcomer students, most of whom have been in the US for less than two years, to write a five-paragraph essay in English?”

This frustrated inquiry was part of my teacher action research. After identifying this argumentative essay writing unit as something I wanted to redesign, I also analyzed the data from previous semesters. Looking over student work, I noticed that I failed to engage my struggling students—many of whom are undocumented. My students’ writing felt forced through an academic form, often lacking critical engagement and what felt like an authentic voice. In hearing my frustrations, my instructional coach suggested that I enroll in a professional development series of three intensive classes preparing teachers from a variety of disciplines to integrate art into their curriculum.

By integrating art into my teaching practice, I saw students becoming more actively engaged through their multiple modes of communication. My understanding of teaching language and literacy shifted and expanded to ask: “How do I facilitate both content and English language learning through our students’ home language, visual language, gestural language, and agency in language?” (Teaching Journal, August 2017).

However, I found that many of my struggling students still failed to turn in their academic writing assignments. Therefore, I embarked on a curricular redesign for my last unit. I was given creative liberty with the condition that my students write an argumentative five-paragraph essay in response to a document-based question (DBQ). Straddling between what I could be teaching and what I should be teaching, I began to explore how “dominant English academic discourses [could] be viewed as a necessary instructional tool in the struggle for cultural and linguistic democracy” (Bartolomé, 2010, p. 508).

The handed-down curriculum centered on the essential question “Should people break the law to do what they think is right?” In redesigning this argumentative writing unit, I became much more aware of the ethico-onto-epistemological force of questions. By rewording the DBQ question from “Should people break the law to do what they think is right?” to “When is it right to break the law?” I noticed how the framing of these questions elicited different answers. While the handed-down version of the question evokes binaristic and polarizing answers, the redesigned questions evoked more nuanced responses. The should question funnels students towards interpreting the law as the natural order of things. By shifting towards the when question, I was asking my students to consider a diversity of voices in a variety of sociohistorical contexts in the US.

In reflecting on the multitudes of questions that guided me towards the redesign of this argumentative writing unit (see Figure 2), I became increasingly aware of the ethical and philosophical force of the questions that guided my design processes. By systematically analyzing the questions that emerged in my design process, I began to notice the strategic balance that teachers must maintain when designing a learning environment. On the one hand, I have should questions framed by the constraining compliance of a status quo. On the other hand, I have might questions framed by an expansive curiosity agitating towards social change. These different modes of questioning reflect different philosophical approaches to understanding our social world (Burrell & Morgan, 1979/2017). Struck by this insight, I realized that the design of the question “When is it right to break the law?” spanned both ends of the spectrum. While I positioned the law (the status quo) as the topic of this question, the “When is it right” welcomed students to speculate on the ethical dimensions of the law and explore how the status quo unfolds in a variety of situations. By concurrently considering the should and the might, I designed what I call a pluralistic question for argumentative writing.

In the movie La Misma Luna (Under the Same Moon), an unaccompanied minor named Carlitos crosses the US-Mexico border to join his mother in California. After this film viewing, one of my students came up after class and said, “Mx. __________, I’m like Carlitos.” While embarking on this redesign for the argumentative essay unit, I chose this student, a 10^th Grader, as my focal student, who I will hereafter refer to as Carlos (a pseudonym).

At the time, Carlos was a 17-year-old undocumented immigrant from Mexico who wanted to become an electrician. He wanted to graduate so that he could attend classes at a nearby community college with an extensive Career and Technical Education program. When Carlos first attended my class in 2016 as a ninth grader, I remembered how quiet and shy he was. During a meeting with Carlos’ guardian, I learned that his parents were still in Mexico and that he was living with his uncle. During Carlos’ first academic year in my class, he was a B- student. Despite his apparent progress in conversational English, I struggled to engage Carlos with reading, and would often find him copying from other students.

During his first semester in the tenth grade, Carlos was consistently late to my first period class. During a conversation with Carlos in December 2017, I learned that he was now living with his father, who arrived in October 2017. Carlos told me that he had started working full time with his father for a construction company. Since he often had to work nights, he would end up sleeping in, which explained why he was often late to my class. While I showed my concern, I also told Carlos that if he didn’t turn in his first-semester essay, he would fail my class. I gave him extra time during the winter break to work on his essay with a deadline of January 1st. He turned in the first draft of his essay on December 30, 2017:

How do you know if a leader is good or bad?,

Odyssey was a hero who left his family for 20 years to go in a war, during these 20 years he needs to decide to do the good think’s or the bad things. After reading the story, I think that Odysseus is a neutral leader because he resisted doing bad things but he killed many people. Odysseus was a very good person because he resisted doing bad things so that he can remember his family and return home. For example, in chapter 2, he didn’t drink the juice because he don't want to forget anything by not drinking the juice Odysseus was able to remember to continue his journey back to Ithaca. Thish shows he was a good leader because he didn’t do the bad things to forget the important things in his life. Odysseus somewhat bad leader because he hurt a lot of people. For example, in chapter 1, he went to war and he killed many Trojans. Also in chapter 3, Odysseus heard about 2 monster but he did not tell his men an 6 men died. This shows he was a bad leader because he shouldn't kill people and should warn his men about the 2 monsters.

In Conclusion, Odysseus was a neutral leader because he resisted doing bad things but he also killed many people.

After reading the story makes me think about other leaders in the world and they are good or bad person. For example Donald Trump I think he is a somewhat bad person because he wants to punish the people who kill other people which is good but he also want to make a war with other countries without reason and he wanted to deport people these are bad actions. That's why he is a somewhat bad person.

In reflecting on the design of the Fall 2016 argumentative essay question, I notice how binaristic this question is. In his writing, Carlos did what the question asked him to do by offering a claim landing in the middle of the good-bad spectrum. He offered supporting evidence through examples from The Odyssey, and he provided reasoning by using the suggested sentence frames from his essay writing packet. Overall, Carlos’ writing was a perfunctory nod to the class requirements.

I chose to keep Carlos as my focal student during my second semester of teaching since he was at the cusp between passing and failing. Anchored by the pluralistic question of “When is it right to break the law?”, I chose texts that highlighted real-life situations in which people broke the law. These texts reflected the critical social issues that affected my struggling students' everyday lives: immigration, lacking legal documentation, gun violence, and racism (see Figure 3).

The first situation summarized Carlitos’ migration journey from La Misma Luna (Under the Same Moon) before transitioning to the real-life statistics of unaccompanied children crossing the border into the US. I also integrated the number of unaccompanied students who were at International High School. The second situation addresses the conflict between national and state immigration laws. At the time, the US government was suing the state of California for their “sanctuary” laws protecting undocumented immigrants. The third situation reported on the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, where a teenager brought a gun to school and killed 17 people. The final situation provided a historical account of the Supreme Court case Loving vs. Virginia and the more recent legalization of gay marriage. While designing this unit with my focal student Carlos in mind, I wrote the following essay based on what I perceived to be his primary concerns and where his potential writing level could be (see Figure 4).

The composition and design of this essay helped me imagine the lived experiences of my undocumented students learning a new language in a new land. While the institutional expectations that required me to teach an argumentative essay positioned me as a teacher, dogfooding as a design process gave me the opportunity to position myself as a learner, which was a step towards “co-construct[ing] the dialogic spaces in the classroom in which the living word of students and teachers can emerge from the utterances in the meaning-makings that are contrary to the dominant meanings and representations in the classroom, curriculum, and society” (Chun, 2018).

To design formative assessments that would measure my students’ progress based on content-language objectives, I created three content-language objectives that would give my students the linguistic foundation to express their opinions and write strong paragraphs for their argumentative essays (see Figure 5).

In Figure 7, I summarize how the grammar of these three modal verbs transforms into ethico-onto-epistemological building blocks that could support multilingual learners to respond to a pluralistic question. This grammar can empower multilingual learners to use English as a lingua mundi to express their opinions publicly. Through this process, I learned that in order to design a pluralistic forum, one should design a pluralistic question that can cultivate responses that span multiple ways of knowing (epistemology), being (ontology), and acting (ethics).

With the language and content objectives in place, I designed our first set of classroom activities with the goal of co-constructing a “Making Learning Visible Wall” (see Figures 8 and 9) as a learning community. This “Making Learning Visible” wall served multiple purposes. While it displayed this argumentative writing unit’s guiding question and essential vocabulary, it also displayed a variety of student opinions.

In May 2018, I submitted two key performance results as part of the required portfolio submitted by new teachers: Semester 1 Results: 77 out of 103 argumentative essays completed (less than 75%); Semester 2 Results: 98 out of 105 argumentative essays completed (more than 93%). Looking back at this data, I notice how these numbers fail to capture my students’ critical engagement in a democratic forum both inside and outside of their classroom. By looking closely at Carlos’ first draft of his argumentative essay, this analysis of a focal student’s writing was at first an assessment of how well my multilingual learners were able to weave their claim, evidence, and reasoning into a cohesive argumentative essay. By returning to Carlo’s argumentative essay (see Figure 16) as a teacher-researcher through the lens of critical autoethnography, I read Carlos’ essay as an expression of capillary power (Foucault, 2012). When thinking with VeneKlasen & Miller’s (2002) “new weave of power,” I put together a coding method (see Figure 15) that can show how Carlos weaves together “power over,” “power to,” “power with,” and “power within” in the paragraphs of his argumentative essay. What is particularly striking is that when I compare Carlos’ essay with my own dogfooding essay (see Figure 4), I underestimated the capacity of my struggling students to express power through argumentative writing. Carlos’ capacity to express “power with” when asserting solidarity with the immigrant community, and his expressions of “power to” and “power within” in his conclusion, have given me a new understanding of the phrase “language is power.”

By retroactively going over the play-by-play development of the design of this argumentative writing unit, I show how my presence – as a teacher-designer – embodies the complex intricacies of caring design. My choice of making my voice apparent throughout this design autoethnography demonstrates how the presence of a caring educator could transform a pre-existing available design for compliance into a new “available design” that enacts a learning environment that is rooted in curiosity rather than complicity – a caring design that strives to create a space of belonging for our most vulnerable students. While all teachers are required to teach content through disciplinary expectations and standardization, we can use our design thinking to re-interpret and re-design the “onto-epistemic actions” and what “axiological horizons and social futures are made possible” (Bang, quoted in UMD INFO College, 2021, 6:52).

In the context of a classroom, caring design is a creative and responsive process of curricular and instructional enactment that emphasizes the nurturing role of educators when responding to needs of their learning community. By integrating care with design, we, as educators, have the power to critically re-read the expectations and standardization of our disciplines. By understanding how these available disciplinary designs often impose a logic of compliance, we can then agitate towards curiosity by responding to the needs of our learning community while also centering our redesigns on the educational needs of our most marginalized students. By tapping into our capillary power as educators (Foucault, 2012), we extend the learning of our content area to those who have been sociohistorically oppressed or ignored.

This design autoethnography illustrates how caring design is a continually adaptive design process. When curating content for multilingual learners, caring design is a flexible approach rather than a one-size-fits-all solution. Further strategies include clarifying one's philosophical stance on curriculum design, integrating caring and critical teaching practices, and using multimodal methods when working with multilingual learners (refer back to the early section on Recommended Design Heuristics). Many of these strategies can be applied to other subject areas. All teaching and learning is political and ethical (Bang, 2020), and this transformative experience in redesigning an argumentative writing unit demonstrates the power that teachers have when it comes to the design of learning environments. By learning how to respond to my students’ linguistic diversity and alterity (Alexander & Rhodes, 2014), I learned to “teach [my] non-traditional students—and ultimately all students—more effectively” (Smitherman, 1999, p. 67).

In writing this design autoethnography, I was inspired by Flores and García’s (2017) metaphors of the shifting zeitgeist of bilingual education: from “the racialized basements toward the commodified boutique” (p. 25). This metaphor also pointed me to García's (2009) extended metaphor of the different modes of educating multilingual learners. By using a unicycle, a bicycle, and all-terrain vehicle to illustrate subtractive, additive, and dynamic bilingualism, García argues that teachers have the power to choose which vehicle their classroom is going to run on. When thinking my students’ languaging practices, I often return to García (2009) metaphor of the “all-terrain vehicle whose wheels extend and contract, flex and stretch, making possible, over highly uneven ground, movement forward that is bumpy and irregular but also sustained and effective” (p. 45).

In reflecting on how I learned to teach English as a lingua mundi within this context, I likened it to learning to operate an English vessel within a vast ocean of languages. My students’ languaging, like the wind, was ever shifting and changing. While I could interpret this vessel as a barge that chooses to bear towards a predetermined direction, this would fail to respond to my students’ languaging winds (see Figure 18). In interpreting this English vessel as a sailboat, I began teaching my dynamic plurilingual learning community as an inexperienced sailor, pretending to be captain while also learning ways to adjust the sails of this English vessel. While struggling to keep this English vessel afloat, I realized that I needed to remain critical while learning language teaching strategies. Learning (and often failing) to sail this English vessel forced me to expand beyond the traditional curricular maps. Rather than forcing my crew to navigate towards standard and academic English, we journeyed in the ocean of language, harnessing our imaginations and active participation when making decisions as to where we should direct this vessel’s bow. I got better at being the captain of this vessel by responding to my crew’s needs and remaining aware of the wind of languaging, reorienting the vessel’s sails when navigating this vast ocean of language. While I continued to use English instructions to let my crew know where we needed to steer, I avoided mutinies by working with the crew leaders who helped translate my instructions while also helping me keep an eye out on the languaging winds. Although I’ve confronted a few storms, I’ve also learned how to collaborate with my crew in redesigning and repairing this vessel, transforming it into a more user-friendly vessel that better responds to the winds of languaging. As captain of a transformed lingua mundi vessel aware of the shifting winds of languaging, I look at the ocean of language and realize, “Oh, this is water.”

1. dogfooding. a term that’s been used for years among software developers and it refers to the act of using your own product as a consumer in order to work out its glitches, the metaphorical equivalent of “eating your own dog food.” (Gonzalez, 2015) [ref]