Documenting and Expanding Latino Children’s New Media Repertoires at Home and at El Pueblo Mágico

• In Event: Digital Literacies and Mobility in Migrant Communities: Studying Youth Practices and Learning Across Spaces

Abstract

In this paper, we draw on a multi-sited ethnographic approach (Vossoughi & Gutiérrez, in press) to document how youth develop “new media repertoires” as they move across various spaces and spheres of interest. From this perspective, we argue that there is rich and consequential learning that takes place in this “movement.” Our empirical work follows youth from non-dominant communities across a range of practices in a designed learning environment, El Pueblo Mágico (EPM) afterschool program, and home media practices to detail the ways youth, ideas, tools, and artifacts, move and become reconstituted across the boundaries of school, home, and community spaces (Vossoughi & Gutiérrez, in press). In this study, we introduced the iRemix social learning platform (Gomez et al., 2008), undergraduates with expertise in new media, and a range of digitally mediated activities in the home and after school context to examine how new forms of social and artifactual mediation could serve to support the mobility of resources and new media practices across both physical locations and discourse communities. We examined the affordances of the different tools introduced, and what roles and social arrangements (e.g. joint activity) emerged, as well as the learning that occurred among children and adults in the different research settings. We studied the ways these artifacts can become boundary objects (Star, 1989) that connect, mobilize, and extend new media repertoires within and across ecologies.

Our paper focuses on the trajectories of focal Latino and predominately bilingual Spanish-English speaking children in the 2nd through 5th grades. We share their activity with adults, children and digital tools at home and at EPM to show how these students expanded their new media repertoires. For two girls in second grade whose mothers were avid Facebook users, participation in iRemix and digital video documentation at home and at EPM became practices that linked these two locations and extended the girls literacy practices. Both girls used these tools to connect their literacy practices to science activities they documented through multimodal means. For fifth grader Miguel, participation with popular videogame Minecraft moved beyond his individual, home-based use and became a tool for dialogue and activity with others around engineering topics. In these cases adults’ and children’s perspectives on the possibilities of new media for learning transformed as these tools were used for new purposes.

We will also share the development of “ecologically valid experiments” we are implementing to test the hypotheses that have emerged from our larger data set. These experiments inform the design of new learning activities, and are created through the examination of artifacts produced by participants, interviews with fifteen focal families, and extensive video footage of children’s everyday lives in homes and at EPM (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Cole, Hood & McDermott, 1982; Gutierrez, 2013). These research efforts inform the growing interest among researchers and educators to foment “connected learning” (Ito et al., 2013)—learning that occurs at the intersection of academic, interest-based and peer and mentor supported domains—and examine the ways new media both deepens and extends learning across ecologies.

Authors

• Lisa Hope Schwartz, University of Colorado, Boulder

• Kris D. Gutiérrez, University of California - Berkeley