Hyperlocal Expertise: Schoolyards as Rich and Complex Contexts for Developing Children's Data Practices

• In Event: Data Literacy in Context: Culturally Oriented and Place-Based Learning Through Data

Abstract

Contrasting two multi-year design projects centering children’s schoolyards and histories within as contexts for learning with and about data, we examine how children’s multifaceted knowledge of these everyday places become assets for data rich discussions. From existing work across varying disciplines, we already know that children’s schools and surrounding environs are complex places that can lend themselves to researcher inquiry (Goodwin, 1985; Nespor, 2013). The innovation we explore across our cases is the positioning of students as the simultaneous experts and inquirers of those already familiar spaces (Lee et al., 2015; Kanter, 2010; Rosebery et al., 1992).
While geographically and topically distinct, the two projects we discuss in this poster center children’s social, embodied and historical knowledge of their schoolyard in their learning with and about data. In the first project, we share how children’s knowledge of the schoolyard plants, animals and built structures, blended with their knowledge of school day social routines, and was central in how they conjectured and contested relationships in their data using a participatory GIS mapping platform (Van Wart et al., 2010). For instance, children knowing where the principal often ate lunch outside and what parts of the schoolyard flooded in the rainy season were integral to collective discussions about what invertebrates need to thrive in the schoolyard underfoot as they explored their aggregated data. In the second project, we share examples of how students’ knowledge of school day and playground norms shaped what interpretations they were making about student physical activity data collected with wearable activity trackers. For instance, knowing who plays in different parts of the playground and how intensely those kids play shaped how students made inferences about data about recess (Author, in press) and knowing what parts of the school day are stationary and which parts are mobile supported student interpretation of hundreds of data points.
Across the two projects, data sources include video and audio recordings of class interactions as well as teacher and student interviews. Using interactional and discourse analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995), we present detailed illustrations of how children's schoolyard knowledge emerged in data-intensive discussions. We further demonstrate that children’s schoolyard knowledge was wide ranging and inclusive of complex social worlds, regulated by adults, peers, and broader social norms. This knowledge spans across topics as diverse as routine recess games, favored places to talk, and secret hiding places. As we will discuss in the
poster, this knowledge can also be temporally expansive, across minutes, days, months, seasons, and years. Most importantly, we document how what we term as school-based hyperlocal expertise was critical for these students’ data engagements, often redistributing expertise. As discussions continue about centering meaningful work with data in places and spaces consequential to youths’ everyday lives (Wilkerson & Polman, 2020), our combined cases argue for schools and schoolyards to be recognized generative hyperlocal contexts in their own right for supporting robust conceptual understanding and for shifting social arrangements of expertise within a classroom.

Authors

• Kathryn Lanouette, College of William and Mary

• Victor R. Lee, Stanford University