"Trump Would Just Get Sucked Into a Black Hole": Youthful Digital Imaginings of New Futures

• In Event: Learning From Learners: Power, Resistance, and Learners' Voices in an Era of Uncertainty

Abstract

This paper examines how young people use digital storytelling and the scifi genre to imagine and voice new social futures for themselves and their communities. Through a social design-based approach (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016) we pay close attention to the ways that youth leverage cultural repertoires of practice (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003) and socio-spatial repertoires (Author, 2019) to document, push against, envision, and transform the sociopolitical landscapes that they navigate in their everyday lives. Through this research, we aim to extend the powerful work of the theatre of the oppressed (Boal, 2013) to explore how youth use editing software and embodiments in the face-to-face and virtual spaces to create a stage on which they can enact new realities that counter oppression. In this regard, we advance a theory of digital teatro.

We build upon previous work that explores how youth use digital tools to document and take action in their everyday lives (Author, 2019) and to author digital stories that voice their development of agentive narratives of self (Hull & Katz, 2006). e are informed by teatro del oprimido (Boal, 2013) which offers rich design considerations for fostering. In this regard, we build upon scholarship that has explored how teatro, can serve as a mediator for organizing for new social futures (Gutiérrez, 2008).

Study participants included fifteen fifth, sixth, and seventh graders at a school located in an urban, low-income neighborhood and two undergraduate students at a university in the San Francisco Bay area. We triangulated multiple data sources, collected over a semester, and engaged in the following types of data analysis: (1) fieldnotes and semi-structured interviews that were inductively coded; (2) discourse analysis of key events; (3) multimodal analysis of digital artifacts; and (5) tabulations on online activities. Through these analyses we examined the micro-moments through which relationships were built across differences, and skills and knowledge were forged through the mediation of online and face-to-face spaces.

Through an analysis of weekly field notes and our observations in the afterschool program, we found that our program fostered an environment where youth created and voiced an imagined world of their design–one that was fantastical but that dealt with everyday dilemmas relating to a very real antagonist who was doing harm to their communities. Young people, in collaboration with undergraduate novice teachers, made use of cutting-edge film editing and special effects software to create digital stages whereupon they enacted agentic narratives of empowerment and liberation, specifically against the tyranny of Donald Trump. In this respect, the designed environment mediated the development of critical digital literacies as well as sociopolitical literacies.

This study has implications for exploring civic engagement at the intersection of face-to-face and digital interactions. Moreover, we offer considerations for the design of learning environments that amplify learners’ voices to leverage the everyday digital and analog repertoires of practice of young people.

Authors

• José Ramón Lizárraga, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Arturo Cortez, University of Colorado - Boulder