Looking for Learning in All the Wrong Places

• In Event: Space, Place, and Learning: The Material Conditions of Education Equity

Abstract

Objectives
We report on design studies of learning public history as learners make and follow “digital spatial story lines” (Hall et al., 2020; Lubbock et al., 2022). DSSLs are map-based, interactive digital objects delivered on smartphones to support mobile storytelling and “sound walks” (O’Rourke, 2013). Learners (or teachers) make DSSLs in classrooms and archival spaces (school or public libraries), then share these with peers, who follow DSSLs into the neighborhoods they describe (see Storyliner.org for examples).

Theoretical Framework
A “learning environment”—a container with designed activities and resources (Leander et al., 2010)—breaks open when educators adopt perspectives from critical human geography (i.e., places are assembled as people learn) to focus more closely on the role of the body and mobility in learning. Generative bodily activity has a flexible scale (Ma, 2017; Hall et al., 2020) and plays a constitutive role in furnishing the objects and relations of valued subject matter (e.g., Vogelstein et al., 2019). Activities can be designed to invite learning as people move together in places already sedimented with meaning (Marin et al., 2020; Price et al., 2016; Taylor, 2017; Taylor & Hall, 2013). When we invite learners to move between classrooms, library or museum collections, and community neighborhood, how do their sensual, bodily experiences support learning?

Modes of Inquiry
Following a DSSL, learners walk along a story line visible in a digital map, engaging with geo-located media along the line. Walking together, they experience multiple sensory layers: existing streetscapes and ambient soundscapes (traffic, conversations among persons passing by), stories about historical locations and events along this path (e.g., oral history excerpts, in which community elders tell about community life), and images and sound recordings from cultural activities that have been displaced by ongoing processes of urban development (e.g., an Interstate carved through a once vibrant Black American neighborhood). These layers form a palimpsest—a mixing together of stories and personal meanings—that are powerful for learning public history.

Data & Insights
We use interaction analyses (Jordan & Henderson, 1995; Hall & Stevens, 2015) with multi-source AV recordings of learners following DSSLs. Their talk, the media they experience, personal stories they tell, and interactions with the built environment are analyzed. As learners move through places along the story line, their experience is both here and there. Learners in motion enact a history that is interstitial (between classrooms, archives, and neighborhoods) and intertextual (tensions between official and under told stories).

We show how youth, on the move, notice and elaborate experiences of semiotic and cultural erasure (Scollon & Scollon, 2003), recognizing missing and restored human activity in the palimpsest produced by their movement. Further, youth make and inhabit (Ingold, 2011) places along story lines, using their own bodily sense-making to layer together personal stories, oral history, image, and song.

Scholarly Significance
We contribute a novel design study of learning on the move, but also advance methods for analyzing learning as an embodied, multi-modal experience of moving through neighborhoods. These concepts, study designs, and methods should be reusable by others.

Authors

• Rogers P. Hall, Vanderbilt University

• Emma Diane Reimers, Vanderbilt University

• Jenneh Kamara, Frist Art Museum

• Ben Rydal Shapiro, Georgia State University