Joint Activity Within Everyday Practices: Sites for Investigation That Attend to Expansive Notions of Learning

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

Abstract

Objectives:
This poster will share our investigation into the ways in which routine family activity is constituted by negotiated and shared practices within and across family members. Taking a social practice approach to learning, we see joint activity in the home as indexing both historical and contemporary artifacts and tools toward the support of family well-being and everyday meaning making.

Perspectives:
Bringing together perspectives from the learning sciences and cultural historical activity theory (Gutiérrez & Stone, 1998), the cases presented in this poster examine the dynamic movement of expertise and activity that structures the routine practices of three households (Gutiérrez, 2012b). As scholars who come together around the investigation of learning as it relates to equity, we take care in espousing an interdisciplinary, yet humanizing approach to human activity, learning, and development.

Methods, Participants & Data:
The larger study from which this poster is a part includes a variety of data such as home video footage, audio interviews from all family members, and surveys about family member perceptions of issues around health, education, energy, and social media. However, the data that supports this particular analysis is from case studies of three families within the larger set of fourteen families. The size and scope of the individual families range, however at least one of the children in each family attended the afterschool connected learning program in a suburb of a major city in the state of Colorado. Because of the researchers’ connections to the afterschool program, the families were recruited to be a part of the cross-setting study into new media practices at home and in school.

Results:
Our collaborative analysis of the triangulated data from three family cases reveals that indeed joint activity is a rich site of investigation for learning, because it accounts for learning as a fluid practice across time, space, and peoples. In several cases, youth emerge as mediators of joint media engagement (Takeuchi & Stevens, 2011) with the use digital tools, specifically smartphones and tablets. In these instances, youth leverage their expertise with digital image curation and gaming to connect with other family members and researchers. Parents also played an important role orchestrating more analog joint engagement by privileging and encouraging family time in the form of physical activities and other kinds of play.

Significance:
We see incredible potential in this research because it offers insights into how educational practitioners and policymakers might organize for more expansive learning environments both in and out of school. Significant research has been done around the importance of leveraging “repertoires of practice” and “funds of knowledge” toward the betterment of educational opportunities for all, yet there remains a dearth of empirical research into the actual everyday practices of children and their families in out-of-school contexts. Accordingly, this research attends to this problem of practice. Together with the other posters in this session, we offer multiple vantage points from which to begin to better understand how learning moves across settings.

Authors

• Daniela Kruel DiGiacomo, University of Colorado - Boulder

• José Ramón Lizárraga, University of California - Berkeley

• Samuel Martinez, University of California - Berkeley

• Kris D. Gutiérrez, University of California - Berkeley