Negotiating Collaboration: Engaging and Extending Youth and Digital Practices

• In Event: Humanizing Literacy Research: Mapping Exchanges in Adolescent Reading and Writing Spaces

Abstract

The rhetoric of new or 21st century literacies calls for learners to work collaboratively to become, critical, innovative and responsible consumers, users and creators of media across multiple contexts (New London Group, 1996). Yet researchers (Boyd, 2008; Ito et al., 2008; Lenhart et al., 2007) show that students engage in the use of participatory, interactive technologies in much greater frequency and diversity out of school than within classrooms. This paper emerges out of a study with English teachers and predominately Latino youth in high schools in the US-Mexico borderlands region. I share how the use of two digital tools, social networks and wikis, were collaboratively negotiated by participants to appropriate and extend youth and digital practices across contexts for new literacies development. The research addresses the disconnect between school and youth practices and challenges deficit discourses for Latino youth by enlisting diversity in technology access, forms of participation and youth interests as resources for literacy development.

The participatory approach combines interventionist research, in the cultural historical tradition of expansive learning (Engeström, 1987) with ethnographic methods for informing curricular practice (González, Moll, & Amanti, 2005; Lee, 2007) and new literacies pedagogy stressing collaborative, critical, and multimodal semiosis infused with Freirian praxis (Coiro et al., 2008; Freire, 1999; Lemke, 2003). Research involved co-developing, co-teaching and daily participant observation within the multiple online and offline spaces of a high school writing course, and a weekly after school club begun with students from the class. A variety of data were sampled to illustrate tensions and synergies of migrating practices and objectives across systems of activity represented by teacher, researcher and student standpoints. Video data of key classroom pedagogical events were analyzed in relation to subsequent and prior online and offline participation across individuals and groups. Following participants’ evolving flows of practice and ideologies of literacy, technology and identity was accomplished through creating and analyzing participant trajectories by combining video data, field notes, social network profiles and communication, participation in wikis, self-assessments, and multimodal texts produced by students in digital classroom and popular media sites. Conversation and discourse analytic methods were used to hone in on broad discourses moving through everyday interaction and multimodal representation.

The afterschool group's participation in a wiki provided an avenue for students to extend their oral and visual literacies into written expression and gave other participants a model of collaborative practice to guide classroom interaction. Engaging familiar and new tools for inquiries based on youth interests and complementary analytical concepts emphasized the primacy of the social and pedagogical aspects of technology. Overall students’ agency in theorizing identity and developing representational spaces (Lefebvre, 1991) across personal and academic contexts emerged as a key mediator for expanding their literacies across personal and academic contexts. In the collaborative process, participants forged new, hybrid genres, audiences and identities for distributing and developing their literacy practices across false dichotomies of home/school and online/offline spaces, and for reconfiguring normative school literacy regimes.

Author

• Lisa Hope Schwartz, University of Colorado, Boulder