Youth's Digital Practices and Intersectional Identities in Digital Third Spaces

• In Event: Theorizing Time and Space in Empirical Research: Potentials and Possibilities

Abstract

The historic shutdown of schools amidst the COVID-19 pandemic surfaced perennial questions around students’ experiences and teachers’ perceptions of “doing school.” Despite an expanded understanding of today’s students as wired to digital landscapes (Leander, 2007) and learning in dynamic ways outside of classrooms (Ito et al., 2013; Gee, 2003), many schools still hold myopic views of our students’ intersectional identities (Collins, 2019) and their multiple ways of making meaning across contexts. Such myopia perpetuates hegemonic structures that shape students’ school experiences and education outcomes (Ladson-Billings, 2006). In this paper, I examine youth’s digital practices as they unfold through the time-space dynamics of a digital Third Space (DTS) co-constructed with me, their previous reading teacher.

My theoretical framework draws from Collins’s critical social theory of intersectionality (2019) as a heuristic for understanding how individual’s identities like race, class, and gender are socially constructed. I use intersectionality as a frame to understand students’ digital practices as surfacing their interconnected identities situated within systems of power. This case study uses the analytic framing of Bakhtin’s (1981) chronotope (“time space”), recognizing how people’s language and identity practices produce time-space configurations. I use a chronotopic analysis to explore how students’ identities unfold through multiple time-space contexts as we co-construct a DTS, a zone of proximal development that has “transformative” potential for the learning and building of new knowledge for its participants (Gutiérrez, 2008).

Two student-participants, aged 16-18, met with me over Zoom during non-instructional time-spaces over a school year. One student identifies as Mexican American, and another identifies as “mixed” Black American. Each student determined the frequency, length, and goals (e.g., working on homework, discussing social-emotional well-being) of the Zoom sessions. Data sources included audio-recorded, student-driven Zoom sessions; student interviews; memos before and after sessions; and field notes on students’ digital practices.

Drawing from Leander’s (2004) chronotopic analysis methods that focus on how participants’ literacy activities build and evoke specific chronotopes, I identified focal moments in the data that yielded two findings. First, our DTS supported students’ digital practices as they negotiated their academic identities with their lived intersectional identities (e.g., race, gender, class). As they navigated their school chronotopes through activities like doing homework, I observed how students responded to assignments through their personal experiences with issues like immigration and police brutality, evoking ideas from their home, community, and popular culture chronotopes which surfaced their race, culture, and class identities. Secondly, I traced moments when our DTS fostered students’ developing intellectual identities as connected to their lived intersectional identities. Our DTS shifted with one youth’s intellectual interests in entrepreneurism, informed by his identity as the son of a working-class, immigrant family. Within our shared time-space, he evoked experiences in his home chronotope as we engaged in digital practices like building a business budget. This paper has implications for the study of digital learning contexts and the organization of school time-space, particularly in understanding the journey of students from nondominant communities whose experiences have been historically marginalized in the design of classrooms and schools.

Author

• Patricia Delacruz, University of Illinois at Chicago
  Presenting Author