New Media, New Practices, and New Communities in Youth Organizing

• In Event: New Media as a Resource for Transforming Civic Learning Contexts

Abstract

Objective

This paper examines how new media supports and sustains a community of practice and facilitates civic learning within the context of youth organizing. Although a growing body of research highlights the civic skills, knowledge, and commitments that young people develop as a result of participation in youth organizing (Anyon, 2005; Ginwright, 2003; Larson & Wood, 2006), little work has explored the role and implications of new media as a vehicle for promoting this kind of learning within these spaces.

Theoretical Framework

Etienne Wenger’s (1998) theory of a “community of practice” guides this analysis. The community of practice rests on three pillars: joint work, mutual engagement, and shared repertoires of practice. Joint work and mutual engagement illuminate how youth work in partnership with one another and with adults towards a common goal. The repertoires of practice they create as they engage in this work include their routines, rituals, norms, and values. This research seeks to identify the new media-based repertoires of practice that have emerged in a particular youth organizing group, to examine how its practices have changed over time as a result of the introduction of new media, and to explore the porous boundary between the online and the real world “communities of youth organizing practice” to which the members and alumni of this youth organizing group belong.

Method & Data Sources

This paper uses a qualitative case study approach, a useful strategy for examining “how” questions and looking closely at phenomena of interest (Yin, 1984). The case study site was selected because it is widely regarded as one of the most effective and technologically sophisticated youth organizing groups in the country. To build understanding of the role of new media in this context, I relied on individual interviews, field notes, and artifact analysis of youth produced blogs, Facebook posts, and YouTube segments. All transcripts and records were rigorously coded, using both open and axial coding procedures.

Results

Preliminary findings suggest that new media serves as an important mechanism for engaging youth in work they see as fun and relevant; it supports the traditional and constitutes the new joint work of the community of practice; and it instantiates long-standing practices, while giving rise to new practices, which help promote a sense of institutional belonging. Findings also underscore how new media functions in both formal and informal ways, generating both intentional and serendipitous learning and allowing for youth-led as well as adult-scaffolded instruction.

Scholarly Significance

By exposing the new-media based repertoires of practice of a highly effective youth organizing group, this research helps not only to inform practice, but also to deepen our understanding of the role of new media in creating engaging civic learning contexts, particularly for low-income youth of color, who have been traditionally marginalized within school settings and denied access to powerful new technologies. This research also extends theory by applying Wenger’s idea of “border crossing” to the online/offline boundary and by illustrating the trajectories of participation new media affords within a youth organizing community of practice.

Author

• Jerusha Osberg Conner, Villanova University