Gen Zers in Digital Worlds: Methodological Insights From Documenting Youth Experiences in Unofficial Learning Spaces

• In Event: Pop Goes the Culture: Reimagining Childhoods in Digital Spaces

Abstract

The early months of the COVID-19 pandemic was a time of both enduring uncertainty and radical change, as educators and researchers alike were charged with the task to creatively reimagine their respective practices for the online world. As adults engage more fully in digital spaces, it has become necessary for educators to learn from the digital dexterity and multimodal capacities of young people online. In this study of digital youth identities, this paper aims to 1) surface the ways youth seek out communities to make sense of their identities, values, and aspirations and 2) to outline how researchers can leverage popular culture to rethink traditional tools and approaches to exploring young people’s digital lives and identity constructions.

This study follows a group of five 17-23-year-olds across six weeks of the pandemic within a variety of social media and community messaging platforms (e.g., Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Slack, Discord, YouTube). Drawing on conversational interviews, interactive focus groups, surveys through Instagram stories, participant-led virtual tours, and fieldnotes from virtual interactions, this analysis offers an intimate glimpse into the digital practices of youth who flow seamlessly across physical and virtual worlds (Gee & Gee, 2017). Central to my inquiry is a focus on young people as narrators of their lived experiences (Holland et al., 2001) in varied playscapes (Abrams et al., 2017) and the affordances of digital platforms in facilitating and documenting experiences (Ito et al., 2013; Jenkins et al., 2016).

Notable findings include the divergent ways and varying extents to which youth engage in digital production and consumption, participate in communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and solitary engagements, showcase themselves alongside their projects or brands, and participate in activism. Yet, shared by these five participants are their savviness in employing specific tools and platforms for their unique needs; keen awareness of how to perform self on social sites; and agency in deciding what, when, and how much to reveal of their lives based on the platform and audience. From a methodological perspective, this research buttresses methods that overlap with the tools, spaces, and aspects that youth themselves find salient in their own lives. Used inflexibly, traditional methods run the risk of creating or accentuating artificial environments in which youth participants strive to please or impress the researcher (Luttrell, 2020). As alternatives, then, researchers can draw on young people’s existing virtual world practices, appropriating the ever-evolving functionalities of social media platforms to engage participants, expanding storytelling with digital space tours, and inviting multimodality into interviews and focus groups. Reworking methods to include the embodied, digital, and visual ways individuals communicate ideas decenters the researcher-dominated, verbo-centric, and non-naturalistic critiques of qualitative research.

As the coronavirus crisis stretches into 2021, it appears increasingly probable that educational research will continue to dwell in online spaces and remain restricted to virtual interactions. This is the time to experiment with social media and lean into digital worlds as legitimate sites and funds of knowledge to reimagine methods of learning about youth identity constructions, participation, and community building.

Author

• Catherine Yanan Cheng Stahl, Teachers College, Columbia University