Engaged Scholarship in the Digital Age: Undergraduates Enacting Expertise Across Virtual and In-Person Terrains

• In Event: 35.077 - MTCC Roundtable Session 13
  In Roundtable Session: 35.077-1 - Co-Designing (Analog and Digital) Social Futures: Leveraging Multimodality to Foster Educational Justice Locally and Globally

Abstract

This paper examines how undergraduates enact expertise in digital and in-person environments. Through a social design-based experiment (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016), I mapped the development of textual (Kress 1993) and embodied (Gee, 2005) socio-critical literacies (Gutiérrez, 2008) of undergraduates from diverse majors as they engaged with each other in an iteratively-designed education course, and with youth in a field work practicum. This study was concerned with the pedagogical stances that emerged as undergraduates built expertise--seen as a set of cultural practices (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003)--in their work as engaged scholars within and across the boundaries of the digital and analog space of the classroom.

This work builds upon efforts to reframe service learning and engaged scholarship (Calleson, Jordan, & Seifer, 2005; Van de Ven, 2007) at the university by scholars who have sought to explore university-community links through critical socio-cultural approaches (Cole, 2006) and are attuned to the learning by undergraduates that travels in dynamic multi-directional ways across university boundaries (Gutiérrez, Hunter & Arzubiaga, 2009). I aim to address a dearth in scholarship at the intersection of engaged scholarship and new media, where we move beyond using digital tools for course management (Dahlstrom, Walker, & Dziuban, 2013). Through a multi-sited (Vossoughi & Gutiérrez, 2014) approach and the use of Cultural Historical Activity Theory (Engeström, 2001), I aim to uncover how a engaged scholarship course, that is saturated with digital and analog tools, can be designed to foster the development of expertise as a social accomplishment that is then used towards transformative ends in field work practicum.

This study draws from over 60 hours of classroom video data, 15 hours of interviews, and 400 student-produced digital artifacts produced by fifteen students. Four focal participants were selected because of the nature of their contributions to the class. Video and audio were logged on a variety of metadata, interviews were transcribed, and digital artifacts were analyzed using multimodal analysis (Hull & Nelson, 2005). Codes were developed inductively during systematic data coding (Bogdan & Biklen, 1997).

Emergent findings reveal that when this undergraduate course was saturated with various meaning-making tools and opportunities for expansive collaborative inquiry, learners from diverse cultural, linguistic, and disciplinary backgrounds developed a corpi of knowledge and memory composed of remixed digital, analog, multimodal, translingual and “transmodal” (Author, 2015) archives and spatialities. These archives and spaces were activated with ease and served as sites for developing and sharing expertise relating to best pedagogical practices, as well as sites for undergraduates to further articulate their roles as engaged scholars and educators in their communities.

This study has implications for how the enactment of expertise and socio-critical literacies (Gutiérrez, 2008) can be integrated into the design of coursework. From an ecological perspective, I argue that undergraduate engaged scholarship must attend to how learning for students is an act of movement between multiple sites of inquiry and knowledge production, both digital and analog.

Author

• José Ramón Lizárraga, University of Colorado - Boulder