Ideologically Informed Orchestration: Perceptions of Technology, Family Life, and Mediation of Digital Practices

• In Event: Ingenuity and the Shaping of New Participation Trajectories: Examining Connected Learning Through Joint Mediated Practices in the Home

Abstract

Objectives:
This poster presents our initial findings on how ideologies and perceptions of the role of technology in family life inform the ways parents orchestrate the everyday use of digital media tools for their children. We examine how parental concerns for family safety, health and education manifest through the mediation and hyper-mediation of digital practices in the home. We present cases highlighting the practices of four working-class families where at least one parent managed digital media consumption and hardware use for the children.

Perspectives:
Utilizing perspectives from sociocultural theories of learning and cultural historical activity theory (Gutiérrez & Stone, 1998), our analyses are grounded in the understanding that parent perceptions around technology, and technology’s purpose in the everyday, are co-constructed between the families and the local, social, and historical contexts (Cole, 1998). With this view, we interrogate how parents’ perceptions and ideologies regarding technologies influence the use of technology in the home for both the development of the child, as well as the need to stay informed in ways that support positive trajectories towards health and education.

Methods, Participants & Data:
This analysis was developed within the context of a larger research project seeking to understand learning across contexts, including school and home practices. Data from the larger study includes fourteen families all of which have at least one child enrolled in a connected learning after school program. Data sources include home video footage, audio interviews from all family members, and surveys about family member perceptions of issues around health, education, energy, and social media. This poster focuses on four families in the larger data set. Data reduction and analysis included content logs and analytic memos as well as group meetings to triangulate data across all of the families involved.

Results:
Our initial findings show that mothers played an important role in orchestrating how digital technologies are used by the children of the household. Of the four families, three of the primarily responsible parents were mothers. Often, mothers encouraged use of digital tools for educational purposes primarily when learning outcomes were clear and were aligned with traditional notions of what “schoolwork” looks like, or the activity was directly related to school. Interestingly, digital media activities that were perceived as encouraging family time, or that allowed families to learn together around a set of tools (labeled joint media engagement by Takeuchi & Stevens, 2011), were often privileged over solitary types of gaming activity.

Significance:
Our study extends multi-sited ethnographic orientations (Marcus, 1995; Vossoughi & Gutiérrez, 2014) that call for in-depth exploration of the learning that occurs for youth across contexts. Specifically, we elucidate how families’ perceptions of technology and home pedagogies influence the ways in which they conceptualize what constitutes ‘good learning’ and ‘productive family time’--perceptions that may occasionally be at odds with those of the school context. This work speaks to these tensions, making visible the multiple ways in which families perceive of, use, and negotiate technology use in the home.

Authors

• José Ramón Lizárraga, University of California - Berkeley

• Daniela Kruel DiGiacomo, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Jennifer Higgs, University of California - Berkeley

• Elizabeth Mendoza, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Arturo Cortez, University of California - Berkeley

• Kris D. Gutiérrez, University of California - Berkeley