Mobility Matters: Developing a "Critical Pedagogy of Place" With Mobile and Geospatial Technologies

• In Event: Connecting Learners to Place, Space, and Personal Experience With Technology and New Media

Abstract

Objective: This work leads with Gruenewald’s (2003) provocation that “place-based pedagogies are needed so that the education of citizens might have some direct bearing on the well-being of the social and ecological places people actually inhabit” (p. 4). The purpose of this presentation is to describe a new socio-technical system called a critically mobile pedagogy of place (CMPP) in which young people “on the move,” mobile and geospatial technologies, and maps of the city were organized around an objective to change the on the ground conditions of a “mobility desert” (a geographic area intentionally isolated from other areas of the city during processes of urban renewal). By socio-technical system, I mean a learning arrangement whereby people, technologies, and representations are collaboratively organized around social action (Hutchins, 1995). CMPP emerged from a community-based design study (Taylor & Hall, 2013) and future iterations will examine how this socio-technical system looks in and adjusts to different communities.

Perspective: I take a distributed, spatio-temporal perspective on learning (Leander, Phillips, & Taylor, 2011; Jurow & Shea, 2015) to interrogate aspects of a CMPP. Specifically, I ask how are mobile and geospatial technologies organized within a CMPP to help move learning across scales of engagement so that experiences at the scale of the body (i.e., physical mobility) have legitimacy in processes at the community-scale (i.e., mapping and discursive practices used in urban planning)?

Methods and Results: Data are case materials (i.e., video recordings, artifacts) from the first iteration of a design study in which youth used GPS data loggers and head-mounted cameras to collect data on their physical mobility (as pedestrians and as bicyclists) within their neighborhood, which was a mobility desert. Youth then collaboratively analyzed their geospatial data in an open source geographic information system (GIS) and produced representations, “counter-maps,” of their neighborhood that they later shared with local stakeholders and urban planners. Many of their recommendations were realized within the subsequent year (Taylor & Hall, 2013).

Using interaction and multi-modal analyses, I identified video and GPS traces of youth mobility that they leveraged in conversations with each other, producing counter-maps, and talking with stakeholders and planners to argue for changes to their neighborhood. Traces allowed learners to see and show themselves as authoritative bodies on the map of the city; these data displays gave them power over terrain in which they previously felt isolated. Analyses show that stakeholders and planners read traces of young people’s bodies as such, too, incorporating youth perspectives in infrastructural changes and subsequent planning processes in which they were previously left out.

Scholarly Significance: Geospatial and mobile tools mediated the making of durable artifacts that moved from the scale of the body to the scale of the map in ways that were taken-up in urban planning practices. A CMPP is significant because it provides a way of organizing mobile and geospatial technologies for connecting critical, place-based pedagogies to STEM concepts that are viewed as essential for taking place in processes of community development and resource management.

Author

• Katherine Headrick Taylor, University of Washington - Seattle