Supporting Student Inquiry Across Contexts of Learning

• In Event: 43.010 - Connected Learning and Equitable Participation for Youth: Bridging the Home-School Participation Gap

Abstract

Purpose
This study traces the learning trajectories of secondary students who conducted inquiry projects based on their personal interests. The purpose of the study is to understand the divergent and agentive ways students co-navigated the learning trajectories related to an inquiry project. Our objective is to represent the participants’ learning in the ways they agentively wove together learning opportunities and resources across activity in the classroom, the library, the hallways in between, and various locales in the community, including their homes.

Theoretical Framework
This study intentionally disrupts classroom-as-container discourse and constructs (Leander et al., 2010) to consider how students weave different contexts together (and break them apart) to chart a learning trajectory within their learning lives (Erstad, 2012). Youth are engaged in complex mobilities and trajectories that establish relationships between the different physical places and virtual spaces they navigate when learning and establishing/maintaining social relationships. We share with other researchers the goal of tracing learning across multiple contexts “as a means to generate new knowledge about the borders and edges of different practices and the boundary crossings these entail in the learning lives of young people” (Erstad, et al., 2016, p. 1). We argue that learning opportunities can be designed to connect multiple places and spaces of learning (e.g., Ito, et al., 2013).

Methods
We used a hybrid methodology that we refer to as co-navigation, as we attempt to reconstruct and represent the learning trajectories that we navigated alongside the students in the study. The metaphor and particular analytical methods of navigation are derived from nexus analysis (Scollon & Scollon, 2004) and the transliteracies framework proposed by Stornaiuolo and colleagues (2016).

Data Sources
The multi-sited study was conducted concurrently in two different high schools (one urban, one suburban) during an academic semester. Collected data included observation of the students across contexts, artifacts created by the students and the two teachers, and multiple retrospective interviews for each student throughout the inquiry project.

Results
Findings for six focal students (three from each high school) demonstrate the divergent and unexpected learning trajectories related to the inquiry project. Each student wove together contexts of learning in ways that were shaped by their histories and social relationships, but also in ways that were informed by their needs in the moment for moving the inquiry project forward.

Scholarly Significance
The focal students in this study demonstrate the agentive and unpredictable ways that young people weave together contexts of learning. The focal students wove together learning opportunities afforded by instructional time in the classroom, online resources and social interaction, conversations with peers in official and unofficial places and spaces, and social interactions that accompanied the online survey data collection and semi-structured interviews. These examples expand our imagined geographies of learning to include moments and conversations that otherwise may be overlooked or dismissed in the learning lives of youth.

Authors

• Ryan M. Rish, University at Buffalo - SUNY

• Aijuan Cun, The University of New Mexico