Designing Disruptions for Productive Hybridity: The Case of Walking Scale Geometry

This article explores an alternative strategy for designing hybrid instructional environments. Rather than bridging home or community funds of knowledge with school learning, I propose designing disruptions to typical school practices to invite students to recruit out-of-school resources meaningful and sensible to them in order to grapple with school-valued concepts. I examine this design strategy first conceptually, then through a case called walking scale geometry, designed to disrupt the scale of typical classroom geometry. This major disruption has 4 interrelated consequences in that students must invent new tools and strategies for constructing geometry figures, spaces of activity and learning shift, students are positioned with new visual perspectives, and the division of labor is redistributed. I analyze how these 4 consequences played out in an episode of walking scale geometry, in relation to the deployment of student-recruited resources and conceptual agency, then comment on some implications for designing disruptions and hybrid learning settings.