Place-Based Media Production and Collaborative Inquiry in Career and Technical Education

• In Event: Challenging Neoliberal Reforms Through Collaborative, Community-Engaged Research

Abstract

Objectives: The purpose of the study is to examine how place as relational shapes learning opportunities and the ways in which place-based media production can engage students in and out of the classroom.
Theoretical framework: This study draws on theoretical perspectives that view place as lived space (Lefebvre (1974/1991; Soja (1999), place as a constellation or “meeting place” (Massey, 2005), and place as constructed (Nespor, 2008). The notion of place as relational through the creation of translocal networks is vital for understanding how education and schooling practices are organized. The circuits of exchange between human and more-than-human worlds, including new forms of technology, can also be generative for understanding how the material is mutually producing or enacting (Barad, 2007). Thus, this study also draws on a new materialist approach to place in considering the changing dynamics of space, time, and matter as central to place-making.
Methods and data: In this year-long ethnographic study situated within career and technical education (CTE), data were drawn from several sources including student and teacher interviews, field notes from participant observations, videotaping of class episodes (photographs when videotaping was impossible), student literacy artifacts, and teacher curricular materials. Content and visual analysis yielded emerging patterns in the learning and production process. What surfaced in the analysis over time is the notion of place as relational. It became apparent how place was shaping students’ participation in the learning ecology and simultaneously how students’ participation was shaping the place while making it their own.
Results and conclusions: A close look at a particular class project demonstrated the ways in which students assembled and constructed relational experiences as racialized, gendered, and minoritized youth in order to enter, alter, and disrupt dominant discourses of educational and social issues affecting their lives. In large part, what students produced was shaped by neoliberal reforms in redefining public education, except here it was students’ tacit knowledge at the center of discourse. The study’s findings suggest the value of placebased media production in CTE to develop students’ literate repertoires and to position students not as passive consumers but as active producers of knowledge.
Significance: The collaborative inquiry conducted by students and a learning ecology involving partners in education bring forth new questions about future designs of school-university partnerships with an eye toward critical place inquiry (Tuck & McKenzie, 2014). Such pedagogical possibilities of place are worthwhile for connecting partners in education to innovate practices in and beyond the classroom.

Author

• Korina Jocson, University of Massachusetts - Amherst