Developing Data Literacy With Adolescents: Supporting Youth as Authors, Architects, and Interpreters of Data

• In Event: Excellence in Education Research: Early-Career Scholars and Their Work

Abstract

In a ‘datafied’ culture (van Dijck, 2014), a central way people navigate the world involves generating, interpreting, and visualizing data. Concerns for how people develop ‘data literacy’ (Calzada Prado & Marzal, 2013) –building and communicating meaning through representations of information – have resulted in increased attention in K-12 schooling (e.g., Mandinach & Gummer, 2013). Yet theories of data literacy often position data as objective and neutral measures of the social world (see Bhargava et al., 2015), rarely addressing the ways visual representations of data are situated, ideological, and racialized (Philip et al., 2016). Similarly, data are often collected about youth, with young people themselves only rarely considered as authors, architects, or interpreters of data. Such framing of youth as the objects of data collection and interpretation – rather than agents in such activities – is even more prevalent for young people in urban schools who are subject to deficit interpretations of data that often position them as ‘at risk’ (Gadsden, Davis, & Artiles, 2009).

This paper centers such socio-cultural and socio-political considerations of how young people understand, represent, and use data by presenting findings from a year-long social design research study (Gutiérrez, 2016) into how students in a public urban high school developed data literacy. With particular attention to how young people mobilized data to challenge mainstream or deficit narratives about themselves or their communities, the study foregrounds issues of race and power often missing in design-based research (Vakil, McKinney de Royston, Nasir, & Kirshner, 2016). Situated in a nonselective public high school in Philadelphia where I have been engaged in a long-term partnership since the school’s opening in 2014, the study focused on students enrolled in a media lab with a media arts teacher using culturally-relevant pedagogy and focused on data visualizations. Extensive survey, observational, artefactual, and interview data were collected from 93 students across three design phases. This paper is guided by the following research questions: In what ways do students use data, including information that they generate and that is generated about them and their communities, for multiple purposes? How do students craft representations of information that connect their interests, identities, and knowledge with broader social, cultural, and political issues?

The three main findings that explored in this paper include 1) how students began to frame ‘data stories’ (Segel & Heer, 2010) as situated within their historical, cultural, social, and political experiences; 2) how students used data to generate knowledge about themselves, craft alternative narratives challenging mainstream discourses, interrogate what counts as data, and turn data toward civic action; and 3) how issues of racial literacy were intertwined with their development of data literacy (Philip et al., 2016). By positioning students as authors and architects of data—as agents of data collection and analysis rather than the objects of it—this paper works toward disrupting educational inequities by underscoring the importance of students’ counternarrative work, as young people generated new forms of knowledge and turned data toward their own ends.

Author

• Amy Stornaiuolo, University of Pennsylvania