"Listen to Me Talk": Examining Youth Epistemologies of Learning and Teaching in the Digital Sphere

• In Event: Reimagining Literacy Education & Research within the Context of Youth Epistemologies
  In Working Group Roundtable: Reimagining Literacy Education and Research Within the Context of Youth Epistemologies

Abstract

Adolescence is a time period during which young people explore and construct new identities for themselves (McClean, 2005). These identities are often mediated and complicated by one’s social surroundings and engagement with popular culture (Bean & Moni, 2003). In particular, adolescents’ use and consumption of social media, including platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat, reflect how young people seek out the narratives of others as a way to learn about themselves and the world as well as to construct their own narratives as self-actualizing beings. Young people’s consumption of digital and social media has significant implications for classroom teachers since these platforms are increasingly becoming individualized spaces of teaching and learning that oftentimes provide more practically and culturally relevant education for youth than do their classrooms.

In an effort to reconceptualize curriculum and pedagogy for the public school classroom that is relevant to students’ lives, cultures, and epistemologies, this study examines youth learning and development through the Hip Hop Youth Research and Activism conference, a youth-led community and conference that brings together young people from diverse communities for a day of workshops, dialogues, and interactions that revolve around ideas of Hip Hop and social justice. The conference positions young people as leaders, thinkers, and change-makers by having young people organize, facilitate, and teach workshops at the conference, including having a board of youth leaders review youth proposals for the conference and work with mentors and teaching artists to train youth presenters on teaching and facilitation.

This paper analyzes data from 20 workshop proposals submitted electronically by high school and college-aged youth to the conference organizers and 36 post-conference survey responses from presenters and attendees at the 2019 conference. This data was initially analyzed inductively and subsequently through the framework of situated learning and legitimate peripheral participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991) to discover what and how young people learn and teach each other outside of traditional school settings.

Preliminary findings from this study indicate that young people’s consumption of popular media, including how they learn through digital content, significantly impacts their individual development as well as their conceptions of teaching and learning. Many of the youth proposals submitted to the conference consisted of teaching workshop attendees about the presenters’ personal narratives in hopes that attendees will be inspired by this. This form of teaching is consistent with that which takes place through social media. Instagram celebrities, for example, post videos of themselves teaching their followers through their own personal stories of challenges and success. Young people who learn through this framework will be more engaged in learning that is presented through a similar structure.

Since young people’s engagement with digital and social media shapes their epistemologies and their engagement with learning spaces, understanding how young people learn and conceptualize learning is a necessary step in the recalibration of literacy education that is culturally relevant and supportive of youth who are undergoing the processes of sociopolitical development and self-actualization.

Author

• Lauren Leigh Kelly, Rutgers University Graduate School of Education