Paper Summary
Share...

Direct link:

Learning Brokers as Sociocultural and Sociohistorical Mediators

Tue, April 12, 8:15 to 9:45am, Convention Center, Floor: Level One, Room 103 A

Abstract

Despite much talk about the value and importance of new and digital literacies, educators and parents are often challenged by how to organize youths’ participation with new media, such as the use of social networks, instant messaging, digital games, wikis and mobile devices. A critical issue is that to take up new media for learning, participants must mobilize learning across widely different contexts and actors, often with divergent goals for activity. A funds of knowledge (FoK) approach (Gonzalez, Moll & Amanti, 2005) to the use of new media supports the development of both educators and youth as learning brokers. FoK is 1) a conceptualization of individuals’ and group’s life experiences, interests and evolving knowledge situated in sociocultural contexts as valid resources for learning, and 2) a methodological approach that uses ethnography as a tool to learn about and activate these FoK for learning. Critical to a FoK approach is the development of reciprocal relationships of trust that reorient participants towards the value of youths’ FoK. Importantly, FoK are understood not only as youths’ interests, but the concerns and practices of the networks of social relationships from which those interests emerge, take shape and evolve over time and space. From this sociocultural perspective (Vygotsky, 1978) learning brokers might be conceptualized as what Díaz and Flores (2001) call sociocultural and sociohistorical mediators. In other words, learning brokers work to make visible and mobile, youths’ FoK in order to mediate their learning in and across multiple contexts.

This poster draws from two design-based research studies utilizing a FoK approach to the use of new media that worked to position teachers and students as learning brokers. Both studies 1) involved primarily Latino, Mexican-descent youth, 2) utilized ethnographic methods for data collection and curriculum development, and 3) engaged participants as ethnographers of their own and their communities’ experiences. Study one involved a high school writing classroom. New media use supported the instructors in learning about students’ out-of-school practices and subsequent shaping of curriculum to collaboratively draw from these practices and interests. Subsequently students’ work demonstrated how the teacher, author and youth collaborated to broker learning across school-based goals for literacy development and youths’ concerns with racism, future opportunities and self-expression. Study two involved a video documentary after school club for elementary school-aged children who worked with the author and undergraduate facilitators. Children’s documentary videos on digital game play, health, and their communities’ views of the intersection of these areas depicted a convergence of their own practices and their families’ concerns. In both studies educators utilized ethnographic research on participants’ FoK to shape curricular approaches that in turn supported youth as researchers of their own practices and communities. Participants brokered learning across the multiple spaces of their lives to create multimodal artifacts that demonstrated growth in the use of new media in order to develop and voice perspectives representative of personal, academic and social issues and interests. This work supports conceptualizing and developing students and teachers as learning brokers.

Author