Uncovering Ingenuity in Working-Class Families' Everyday Practices

• In Event: 56.035 - Seeing Learning Anew: Shifting the Gaze Toward Ingenuity of the Everyday

Abstract

Objectives
We explore the ways in which the everyday practices of four working class families index their ingenuity, or their resourceful reorganization of materials, time, and space, to support meaningful interactions in their social worlds. We present representative data from our analysis of families’ everyday practices that illustrate how members transformed their everyday practices and resources (including digital technologies) into opportunities for new forms of learning across contexts and tools.

Perspectives
Scholars have underscored the importance of looking with “new eyes” at the ways in which people creatively transform their environments through participation structures (e.g., Gutiérrez, 2008; McDermott & Raley, 2011; Pea, 1993). Following these scholars, and drawing on Vygotsky’s (1978) notion of the playful imagination, we view ingenuity not as an individual achievement but rather as a socially distributed phenomenon that manifests as deliberate, playful adaptation of resources at hand (McDermott & Raley, 2011). These perspectives frame our understandings of family members’ everyday practices as “playgrounds” for agentic participation in and orchestration of their social worlds.

Methods & Analysis
The analysis reported here developed within the context of a larger multi­-sited ethnography (Marcus, 1995) of 14 families. We focus here on data from four of the 14 families. Data sources included home video recordings captured by researchers and family members, family interviews, and surveys of family members’ perceptions of issues related to health, education, energy, and social media. Video and audio sources were logged in two- and 10-minute segments on a variety of metadata (e.g., tool use, main activity). Units of analysis included family home practices (Level 1) and instances of ingenuity (Level II). Subcodes (Level III) were developed inductively during systematic data coding. Data were further reduced through analytic memos and weekly research meetings that helped identify salient themes across focal families.

Results
Our emergent analysis suggests that members of the focal families actively repurposed everyday practices (e.g., video gaming, commuting to and from school with children) and resources (e.g., communal family space, internet connection) in order to: (a) “reclaim” mundane activities (e.g., snack time, instant messaging) to support formal and informal learning; (b) transcend everyday constraints (e.g., creating digitally-mediated ”imaginary situations” that enable the rewriting of institutional labels); and (c) pursue digitally-mediated, interest-based learning opportunities and communities. Our findings suggest that ingenuity is embedded in everyday moments and often manifests as youth and adults creatively respond to constraints in their environments. Additionally, we found that displays of ingenuity always involved the participation of more than one person, suggesting the socially distributed nature of ingenuity.

Significance
Ingenuity is often characterized as an individual accomplishment that is extraordinary and/or pursued for institutional validation. Our analysis of family data expands this conceptualization by redefining ingenuity as creative responses to constraints in everyday environments. Our findings also have implications for designing learning environments (e.g., new pedagogical and curricular approaches) rooted in everyday sociocultural practices of youth from non-dominant communities.

Authors

• Jennifer Higgs, University of California - Davis

• Arturo Cortez, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Kris D. Gutiérrez, University of California - Berkeley

• Bryce Larkin Chessell Becker, University of California - Berkeley

• Karen Villegas, University of California, Berkeley