Leveraging Youths’ Repertories of Practice: Toward Connected and Consequential Learning

• In Event: Pathways, Trajectories, Ecologies, Oh My! Bridging Theories and Methods for Studying Youth Learning Lives

Abstract

This paper elaborates a set of Connected Learning design principles that help to connect school, home, and youth culture. Organized around a range of media practices and a robust framework for disciplinary learning, the object of this work is to support the development of toolkits that have utility across tasks, purposes, disciplinary boundaries, and learning environments. Undergirded by conceptions of learning as the organization of possible futures (author, 2008; O’Connor & Allen, 2010), and future-oriented trajectories and identities. The purpose is to advance an approach to learning that leverages youths’ repertoires toward consequential learning and productive pathways that have resonance for youths’ life trajectories. Designing for connected and consequential learning requires a new imagination about what kinds of tools and practices provide the context and supports for new forms of learning. This paper argues that new media technologies can help open up opportunities for connecting learning across range of ecologies.

Specifically, this work elaborates a new model of connected learning, known as syncretic approaches to learning (Author 1, 2012). Connected and syncretic learning models seek to address, if not rupture the gap between in-school and out-of-school learning by leveraging youths’ interests and repertoires of practice across nodes of interests and influence, including peer culture and academic domains of inquiry. This inquiry focuses, then, on building new media literacies and syncretic learning in science, literacy, and computational thinking to exemplify how syncretic learning—learning in which the everyday and scientific or school-based are reorganized and leveraged toward more relevant and powerful learning across ecologies and boundaries, both disciplinary and the everyday.

The growing interest in the ways new media technologies can open up new opportunities for youth, especially youth from nondominant communities, has contributed to discussions about interest-driven learning (Ito, et al., 2013). In the Learning Sciences new conceptions of learning draw on metaphors of pathways and trajectories in the learning sciences (Bell, et al., 2012). These new domains of work are poised to help education researchers and partners rethink ways we conceive of, study, and design learning. This paper includes conceptual and methodological cautionary notes about the limitations of these new metaphors and orients us toward complexity, nuance, and more ecologically valid ways of accounting for youths’ learning and the affordances of the tools they leverage across practices. In particular, this work argues the limitations of linear models of learning, a straightforward movement of learning and development. Cultural historical activity theoretical approaches to learning and development help us understand the importance of studying learning across a minimum of several activity systems (Engeström, 2005), as well as the need to attend to the vertical and horizontal dimensions of learning (author, in press; Engeström,1996). Learning is complex, with lots of fits and starts, and must be understood across ecologies, timescales, and practices. This paper is concerned with how to convey this complexity in ways that metaphors of pathways and trajectories can miss. Similarly, this paper also addresses how to examine everyday practices more fully and as situated locally and historically.

Author

• Kris D. Gutiérrez, University of California - Berkeley