Designing for Joy: Constructing Equity Trails in Fandom-Centered Classrooms.

This article traces how multiple equity-focused goals were negotiated in collectively designing a classroom that centered joyful fandom literacy practices, considering how teacher-researchers and youth use expanded conceptions of equity trails in a social design experiment to reset harmful but normalized classroom, disciplinary, and fandom practices. Using methods of collaboratively aligning equity-focused questions, subsequent instructional designs, and the perception of consequences by various participants to audit the commitment to equity across the design, action, analysis, and reflection, the findings follow the consequences of design choices as conceptualized by both teacher-researchers and focal BIPOC youth. We found that some equity trails—particularly ones that privileged shorter timespans linked with institutional assessments—conflicted with equity trails restructuring larger ecological systems aiming to transform fandoms or disciplines. We suggest that design researchers must center conceptions of power when telling research stories making visible the various and divergent ways participants chase after equity together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]