"Doubting Themselves": The Disembedding Effects of Platform Pedagogies for "At-Risk" Youth

• In Event: Platform Pedagogies: Examining the Public Good in Learning, Schooling, and Educating Across Emerging Platforms

Abstract

Objectives
This paper explores the role of a credit recovery program (the Pinnacle Learning Platform) in a secondary-level “second-chance” alternative program in a primarily Mexican-American small city. Specifically, this paper details the relationships between distant and local linguistic practices and the ways these are mediated via the Pinnacle platform. Through comparative analysis of the learning practices of the in-person credit-earning opportunities and the ‘accelerated’ platform-based program, this work builds knowledge on the different pedagogies-in-use of in-person alternative education practices and the increasingly-used content and skill-delivery digital platforms designed for “at-risk” populations of secondary-level learners.

Theoretical Framework
Local literacies and linguistic practices can be ‘disembedded’ by distant interests through a dialectical process that is more complex than “external imposition or local resistance” (Street, 2004, p.328). Understanding how these distant interests seemingly travel across networks is illuminated through a scalar analysis (Stornaiuolo & LeBlanc, 2016; Pandya, 2012). Literacy events in multimodal digital realms cannot be understood as ‘bounded’ in space and time (Kell, 2011), but instead as linkages across networks. Scale is a tool useful for exploring these linkages and complex spatial and temporal relationships, existing within “categories [that] are not pre-formed but locally contingent…[and] interactionally produced” (Stornaiuolo, Smith, & Phillips, 2017, p.17). Activity at one scale of activity can have the power to disembed activity elsewhere. Distant language ideologies (Hornberger and Johnson, 2007; Shohamy, 2006) also play a role in this platform-mediated disembedding process by shaping or potentially disrupting local linguistic practices and literacies, thus furthering marginalized students’ enforced divestment of their linguistic resources and cultural capital (del Carmen Salazar, 2013).

Methods and Data Sources
This study is guided by the question “How do teaching and learning relationships shift when comparing in-person instruction and the Pinnacle Learning Platform learning opportunities?” This research question emerged from two years of participant observation and after-school focus groups at the Dolores Huerta Alternative Learning Complex (DHALC) in San Sebastián, California. Data sources include field-notes taken during instructional activities and student narratives (collected during after-school focus groups) about these learning experiences. Initial analysis of field-notes was done through an open-coding process (Strauss & Corbin, 1998; Maxwell, 2005) employing Nvivo software. Emergent codes were added to enable a subsequent focused thematic coding protocol (Charmaz, 2006). Narrative analysis (Gee, 2011; Riessman, 2008) of focus group data was also employed to build knowledge on how learners interpret their learning experiences.

Results and significance
Findings include differing notions of what constitutes a ‘smart’ student, with active participation valued in in-person learning activities, and diligence, speed, and credit-earning prized on Pinnacle. Further, the three focal participants described the Spanish credit-earning program on Pinnacle as “a white version of Spanish” distinct from the Spanish they speak in their communities. Without the space for nuance offered in (some) of the in-person learning activities, the participants and their parents began “doubting themselves” with regard to their Spanish skills when on the Pinnacle platform. Findings inform ongoing research on the potential disembedding effects of platform pedagogies, and contribute to conversations on learning processes and relationships with the public good.

Author

• Noah Asher Golden, California State University - Long Beach