Abstract
This chapter theorizes the notion of relational equity in the context of new media-supported learning environments. Drawing upon examples from multiyear investigations into the social organization of learning activity in an elementary afterschool program in Colorado and an adolescent music and journalism production program in California, we outline an emerging framework for how to organize learning ecologies in ways that encourage more symmetrical relations among adults and youth across various lines of difference. In articulating design principles at the level of the technology tool, the social interaction, and the broader learning environment, this chapter offers empirically grounded insight for those interested in organizing learning opportunities with new digital media in expansive and equitable ways. Further, it makes visible how attention to (in)equity must not constrain itself to one place, space, or time – cognizant of the ways in which power operates through a multiplicity of relations and processes that serve largely to reproduce inequality in society. It is with this understanding of power that we foreground the ways that new educational technologies might reorganize social relations in educational practices in schools and the community, with careful attention to how such technologies might change the normative yet deeply entrenched relations of power and privilege that exist in contemporary societies.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsReferences
Barron, B., Gomez, K., Martin, C. K., & Pinkard, N. (2014). The digital youth network: Cultivating digital media citizenship in urban communities. MIT Press.
Beach, K. (1999). Consequential transitions: A sociocultural expedition beyond transfer in education. Review of Research in Education, 24, 124–149.
Brennan, K., & Resnick, M. (2012). New frameworks for studying and assessing the development of computational thinking. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Vancouver.
Britt, M. A., & Aglinskas, C. (2002). Improving students’ ability to identify and use source information. Cognition and Instruction, 20(4), 485–522.
Carter, P., & Welner, K. G. (2013). Closing the opportunity gap: What America must do to give every child an even chance. New York: Oxford University Press.
Chang, H. J. (2012). 23 things they don’t tell you about capitalism. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Ching, D., Santo, R., Hoadley, C., & Peppler, K. A. (2015). On-ramps, lane changes, detours and destinations: Building connected learning pathways in Hive NYC through brokering future learning opportunities. New York: Hive Research Lab.
Deitrick, E., Shapiro, R. B., & Gravel, B. (2016). How do we assess equity in programming pairs? In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (pp. 370–377). Singapore: International Society of the Learning Sciences.
DiGiacomo, D.K. (2017). Not everything that counts can be counted: The perplexing viability of a non-instrumental youth program. American Educational Research Association Conference Proceedings, San Antonio.
DiGiacomo, D. K., & Gutiérrez, K. D. (2015). Relational equity as a design tool within making and tinkering activities. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 23(2), 141–153.
Edwards, A. (2011). Building common knowledge at the boundaries between professional practices: Relational agency and relational expertise in systems of distributed expertise. International Journal of Educational Research, 50(1), 33–39.
Foucault, M. (1978/1990). The history of sexuality: An introduction, volume I (trans: R. Hurley). New York: Vintage.
Garcia, A., Seglem, R., & Share, J. (2013). Transforming teaching and learning through critical media literacy pedagogy. LEARNing Landscapes, 6(2), 109–124.
Goodman, S. (2003). Teaching youth media: A critical guide to literacy, video production, and social change. New York: Teachers College Press.
Goldman, S., Booker, A., & McDermott, M. (2008). Mixing the digital, social, and cultural: Learning, identity, and agency in youth participation. Youth, identity, and digital media, 216.
Gutiérrez, K. D., & Jurow, A. S. (2016). Social design experiments: Toward equity by design. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 25(4), 565–598.
Gutiérrez, K., & Vossoughi, S. (2010). “Lifting off the ground to return anew”: Documenting and designing for equity and transformation through social design experiments. Journal of Teacher Education, 61(1–2), 100–117.
Gutiérrez, K., Rymes, B., & Larson, J. (1995). Script, counterscript, and underlife in the classroom: James Brown versus Brown v. Board of Education. Harvard Educational Review, 65(3), 445–472.
Her Many Horses, I. (2016). From lived experiences to game creation: How scaffolding supports elementary school students learning computer science principles in an after school setting. Unpublished dissertation, University of Colorado at Boulder.
Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York: NYU Press.
Johnson, S., & Thomas, A. P. (2010, April). Squishy circuits: a tangible medium for electronics education. In CHI’10 extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems (pp. 4099–4104). ACM.
Jurow, A. S., Tracy, R., Hotchkiss, J. S., & Kirshner, B. (2012). Designing for the future: How the learning sciences can inform the trajectories of preservice teachers. Journal of Teacher Education, 63(2), 147–160.
Kensing, F., & Greenbaum, J. (2013). Heritage: Having a say. In J. Simonsen & T. Robertson (Eds.), Routledge international handbook of participatory design (pp. 21–36). London: Routledge.
Kirshner, B. (2009). “Power in numbers:” Youth organizing as a context for exploring civic identity. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 19(3), 414–440.
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Matias, C. E., & Zembylas, M. (2014). ‘When saying you care is not really caring’: Emotions of disgust, whiteness ideology, and teacher education. Critical Studies in Education, 55(3), 319–337.
McDermott, R., & Raley, J. (2011). Looking closely: Toward a natural history of human ingenuity. In E. Margolis & L. Pauwels (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of visual research methods (pp. 372–391). Thousand Oaks: SAGE.
McDermott, M., Schweidler, C., Basilio, T., & Lo, P. (2015). Media in action: A field scan of media and youth organizing in the United States. New York: Global Action Project, Research Action Design, Data Center.
Moll, L. C. (1998). Turning to the world: Bilingual schooling, literacy, and the cultural mediation of thinking. In National Reading Conference Yearbook (Vol. 47, pp. 59–75). Chicago: National Reading Conference.
Nacu, D., Martin, C. K., Pinkard, N., & Gray, T. (2014). Analyzing educators’ online interactions: A framework of online learning support roles. Learning, Media and Technology, 41(2), 283–305.
Nasir, N. I. (2012). Racialized identities: Race and achievement among African American youth. Stanford University Press.
O’Connor, K. (2003). Communicative practice, cultural production, and situated learning: Constructing and contesting identities of expertise in a heterogeneous learning con- text. In S. Wortham & B. Rymes (Eds.), Linguistic anthropology of education (pp. 63–91). London: Praeger.
Penuel, W. R., & Means, B. (2004). Implementation variation and fidelity in an inquiry science program: Analysis of GLOBE data reporting patterns. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 41(3), 294–315.
Philip, T., Jurow, S.A., Vossoughi, S., Bang, M., & M. Zavala. (2017). The Learning Sciences in a New Era of US Nationalism. Cognition and Instruction, 35(2), 91–102.
Pinkard, N., Penuel, W. R., Dibi, O., Sultan, M. A., Quigley, D., Sumner, T., & Van Horne, K. (2016). Mapping and modeling the abundance, diversity, and accessibility of summer learning opportunities at the scale of a city. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Washington, DC.
Repenning, A., Webb, D. C., Koh, K. H., Nickerson, H., Miller, S. B., Brand, C., ... & Gutiérrez, K. (2015). Scalable game design: A strategy to bring systemic computer science education to schools through game design and simulation creation. ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE), 15(2), 11.
Resnick, M., & Rosenbaum, E. (2013). Designing for tinkerability. In M. Honey & D. E. Kanter (Eds.), Design, make, play: Growing the next generation of STEM innovators (pp. 163–181). New York: Routledge.
Rogoff, B. (2014). Learning by observing and pitching in to family and community endeavors: An orientation. Human Development, 57(1), 69–81.
Salleh, N., Mendes, E., & Grundy, J. (2010). Empirical studies of pair programming for CS/SE teaching in higher education: A systematic literature review. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 37(4), 509–525.
Schwartz, L. H., DiGiacomo, D. K., & Gutiérrez, K. D. (2015). Designing “contexts for tinkerability” with undergraduates and children within the El Pueblo Mágico social design experiment. IJREE-International Journal for Research on Extended Education, 3(1), 94–113.
Shapiro, R. B., Kelly, A., Ahrens, M., & Fiebrink, R. (2016). BlockyTalky: A physical and distributed computer music toolkit for kids. In NIME, Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. Brisbane.
Soep, E. (2006). Critique: Assessment and the production of learning. Teachers College Record, 108(4), 748–777.
Soep, E. (2014). Participatory politics: Next-generation tactics to remake public spheres. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Soep, E., & Chávez, V. (2010). Drop that knowledge: Youth Radio stories. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Stone, L. D., & Gutiérrez, K. D. (2007). Problem articulation and the processes of assistance: An activity theoretic view of mediation in game play. International Journal of Educational Research, 46(1), 43–56.
The New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60–93.
The Politics of Learning Writing Collective. (2017). The role of the learning sciences in an era of U.S. nationalism. Cognition and Instruction, 35(2), 91–102.
Toffler, A. (1980). The third wave. New York: William Morrow.
Varnelis, K. (2008). Networked publics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Vossoughi, S., & Bevan, B. (2014). Making and tinkering: A review of the literature. National Research Council Committee on Out of School Time STEM, 1–55.
Vossoughi, S., Hooper, P. K., & Escudé, M. (2016). Making through the lens of culture and power: Toward transformative visions for educational equity. Harvard Educational Review, 86(2), 206–232.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature
About this entry
Cite this entry
Penuel, W.R., DiGiacomo, D.K. (2018). Organizing Learning Environments for Relational Equity in New Digital Media. In: Voogt, J., Knezek, G., Christensen, R., Lai, KW. (eds) Second Handbook of Information Technology in Primary and Secondary Education . Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71054-9_75
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71054-9_75
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-71053-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-71054-9
eBook Packages: EducationReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Education