Tinkering Through Transmedia Activity: Developing Critical Digital Literacies With Youth From Nondominant Communities

• In Event: Moscone Center West Roundtable Session 6
  In Roundtable Session: Living and Learning in the Digital Age: Exploring the Tensions and Possibilities of Transmedia Activity

Abstract

Objectives
This study explored how a tinkering after-school program’s learning ecology mediated the development of critical digital literacies for youth from non-dominant communities. Specifically, the study focuses on the digital and analogue tools that children and teachers in the tinkering space appropriated to design animated films. The research is part of a year-long study at a tinkering after-school space that examined the type of digital literacies that children aged 7-9 developed at an after-school tinkering program. The study’s analyses of the transmedia activity aim to expand how researchers study the development of digital literacies with children from non-dominant communities

Theoretical Framework
A Cultural Historical Activity Theory (C.H.A.T.) theoretical framework allowed the researcher to focus on how youth appropriated and repurposed tools to expand how they participated in the tinkering after-school space. The C.H.A.T approach also focused on the cultural making activities that youth from non-dominant communities engaged in everyday settings.

Methods
A participatory design approach (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016) entailed being a central part of designing the curriculum, activities, and objectives of the learning ecology at the tinkering after school program. Moreover, a multi-sited ethnographic approach (Marcus, 1995; Gutierréz & Vossoughi, 2010) allowed the researcher to examine how youth’s activity developed across both physical and virtual spaces over the course of the study. The study paid special attention to how youth drew on their everyday media practices to repurpose and develop ingenious animated projects. As such, the goal to position youth from non-dominant communities as designers and inventors of media was informed by the transformative agency (Sannino & Engeström, 2014) of these youth. In order to better understand these processes, the study drew on researcher observations, children and adult interviews, two “technology use” surveys, artifact analyses, audio recordings, and video recordings.

Data
Data for this study is drawn from field observations made by the researcher as well as a collection of artifacts that were developed by children in the tinkering space.

Results
The study found that the development of critical digital literacies for children at the tinkering after school program occurred across analogue and digital spaces. Children in the tinkering program engaged in transmedia activity that blended video game narratives, fictional characters, and virtual imaginaries with everyday reality. Moreover, the study found that youth from non-dominant communities rearticulated techno-determinist ideologies that fetishize the latest technologies in teaching and learning process. Rather, the study revealed how teacher pedagogy and analogue technologies continue to play a central role in the development of critical digital literacies for youth from non-dominant communities.

Significance
The development of critical digital literacies is becoming increasingly crucial for youth from non-dominant as they engage multimodal texts in their everyday lives. This study found that youth from non-dominant communities engaged in transmedia activity to develop these literacies. As such, more attention needs to be paid to what counts as technologies in tinkering spaces as well as how youth from non-dominant communities travel across digital and analogue spaces to make sense of their everyday lives.

Author

• Edward Rivero, University of California - Berkeley