ch6 Changing social spaces of learning
ch6: Changing social spaces of learning. Leander, Phillips, Taylor
QUOTATIONS
This section is organized around three expansive metaphors of learning in space–time: learning-in-place, learning trajectories, and learning net- works.
An entire category of inquiry concerns the constitution of places for learning. How do people (on the move) build qualitatively distinct relations with different learning “environments.” What does it mean to recast the notion of the “learning environment” to “learning-in-place”?
Massey’s (2005) definition of social space—as the “simultaneity of stories-so-far” (p. 9)
Container-like visions of social spaces of learning—perspectives emphasizing categories, stasis, structures, and located rep- resentations over the mobilities of practices—are often recreated, despite attempts to disrupt them.
Scollon (2008) expressed the desire to develop the “concep- tual software,” which he imagined would be geographic information systems (GIS)- like or GIS-enabled, which would “allow us to see directly how someone can go from action to action to get from here to there in this discursive world” (p. 14).
Nespor (1997) considers how schooling is involved in the process of abstracting children from social space and from their own bodies. Drawing from Lefebvre (1991), he traces how “people’s actual ways of moving through the world” (Lefebvre’s “spaces of the body”) are replaced through schooling with “the body rendered as a visual display or text read- able to an outsider’s gaze” (Lefebvre’s “body in space”; p. 121)
The typical classroom economy, which Sheehy terms, after Sack (1997), a “thick place,” involves teacher–student–teacher (e.g., initiation–response–evaluation) flows of information and texts, and docile, subdued, and disengaged student bodies. The thick place was defined by stasis and an inward-focus of both bodies and ideas, along narrow pathways. In a “thin place,” on the other hand, students were more actively involved in determining the direction of their study as well as the distribution of texts, ideas, and bodies.
Objects in new space followed numerous paths. Students situated objects with actual towns and an actual school board . . . the boundary made in their typical school practices thinned out; the membrane between their bodies and ideas became permeable, because ideas moved into networks of relations that mattered to them. (Sheehy, 2004, p. 102)
Drawing on work on “affective filters” (Dulay, Burt, & Krashen, 1982), Gee (2008) notes that learners whose “affective filters” (e.g., a negative response to perceived threat) are high do not have the same opportunity to learn as those whose filters have not been raised, even though, technically speaking, both groups of learning might be said to be in the “same” environment. How discursive affective “filters” and embodied affective engagements are articu- lated, and may be understood through new research methodologies, is a complex and pressing concern in education research.
As an alternative, such studies build up histories of identification and/or learning processes over multiple events. Stanton Wortham’s (2004) research perhaps best represents this type of case development of tracing, for example, the production of “Tyisha’s” social identity as a “disruptive student.” Wortham’s cases show the effort and ingenuity that go into the identification process on the parts of all classroom participants, and not just the student who is successfully positioned. The way in which repetition works to stabilize identity over time is perhaps best captured at what Wortham terms an intermediate timescale of development (months-long development of categories and identities within a classroom).
Erstad, Øystein, Sefton-Green, and Vasbø (2009) also feature cross-site identity processes prominently in their emerging work in the TransActions research group at the University of Oslo. They currently focus on key resources for identity work that travel across contexts, including “personal histories” and “future orientations,” used to create “narratives of the self.” The Oslo group argues that such narratives are “cen- tral to productive learning” (Erstad et al., 2009, p. 100).
Zacher (2009) reads the interactions between Christina and social spaces as a type of dialectic— she is both shaped by these spaces and uses them to shape herself.
The extension of agency across humans and nonhumans is central to Brandt and Clinton’s (2002) theoretical critique of social practice theories of literacy, where the authors address, among other issues, the ways in which material objects “act,” along with humans, to carry literacy into social spaces. The notion of agency distributed among humans and nonhuman actors is related to a larger body of work developing the idea of “sponsors” of literacy—“agents who enable or induce literacy and gain advantage by it in some way” (p. 349). The idea of sponsorship, further developed elsewhere for literacy studies (Brandt, 2001), could potentially be a rich lens through which to conceive of access to a broad range of social practice associated with schooling (e.g., mathemat- ics), particularly were this distributed yet personalized account of agency expanded through an explicit analysis of sponsorship and mobility.
Mobility studies inspired by ANT are directed toward describing and understand- ing the specific qualities of circulation among participants, including orientation, directionality, proximity, and others (Bingham & Thrift, 2000, p. 290).
For example, in a research study that analyzed one youth’s engagement across school contexts and contrasted it with his engagement in a massively multiplayer online game (Leander & Lovvorn, 2006), ANT was marshaled as a conceptual resource to contrast types of activity in schooling and gaming. In contrast to schooling, gaming rhythms for “Brian” were highly regular, and were partially structured by circulations of the game environment that required his ongoing engagement—movements that effectively inserted him as hav- ing a purpose for returning to play. A further contrast, which also indexes the specific relationships between networked entities as paramount, was that in the game, Brian was provided representations of his own activity that afforded him both local and more global (larger scale) perspectives on his own activity, in rapid circulation with one another. Yet, in his school practices Brian seemed often unaware of a perspective on his activity beyond the immediate and more-or-less pressing task.
Jones (2001) argues that these movements across virtual space are “really more like navigation than ‘communication,’ more like ‘walking’ than ‘talking’.” He also points out that “the interface [for their online communications] is not the screen; it’s the world.” Virtual mobilities, then, must be seen as movements across and through physical and virtual spaces made possible by Internet and other technologies (e.g., cell phones and video game systems).
Kitchin (1998) carefully considers the issues and arguments surrounding the spa- tial nature of cyberspace. It can be seen as transformative space, shifting space–time relations and creating new social spaces and places. But the nature of these transforma- tions is debated. On one side, arguments exist for the compression of space–time such that cyberspace becomes spaceless and placeless, a nowhere and everywhere, where geographic and temporal boundaries no longer matter. Or, others argue that space and time maintain their significance: For example, Internet connections and bandwidth capabilities very much depend on one’s place in the world, while using information from the Internet also depends largely on where one is bodily located (Kitchin, 1998)
Lægran (2002) described such places—where human interaction and technol- ogy intersect—as “technospaces” (p. 158). She investigated two particular techno- spaces frequented by youth in two rural Norwegian villages: the petrol station and the Internet café.
FOLLOW UP ON Scollon (2008) Wortahm (2004) as introducing my analysis using the literacy diagram. Entextualization: Unfold Studio is for real stuff, for critical talk. “lamination,” Holland & Leander, 2004. I’ve had this image too. Erstad, Øystein, Sefton-Green, and Vasbø (2009); Zacher (2009) -> Useful in chapter 4, describing Audrey’s investment in goth podcasts and internet memes. Brandt, 2001 -> Goes into my introduction, where I explore how nonhuman agents participate Bingham & Thrift, 2000 -> explain significance of my literacy visualization Leander & Lovvorn, 2006 -> Use in connecting literacies, especially Audrey -> Also to justify why design which parallels affordances of computational infrastructure can be powerful. – In the section on “learning as mobility,” can I show the geographical distribution of students in their literacy event network? (Jones, 2001)
A question for Jenny and Jacob: How do digital interfaces mediate your students’ physical mobility? (Enable and constrain) How does their CS coursework change this relationship?
Kitchin (2008) sheds light on my reflections on what CS is. Especially if CS is somehow an expertise in the nature of computational infrastructure.
Lægran (2002)’s technospaces. Incorporate this into my student journalism work.
TODO Color the literacy diagram in various ways. With the race/gender of the authors, for example.
NOTES, REACTIONS, WRITING INSPIRED BY THIS READING.
ON MY METHOD Just as the classroom is not viewed as a hermetic container of learning, my research methods were not blinded at the boundary of the classroom as container. During my fieldwork, I made a daily habit of traversing the communities in which the students lived. I stayed in airbnbs around the campus, I went for long afternoon walks as I dictated fieldnotes to myself, intentionally traversing the geographies described to me by my students. I walked along the river, I spent time in the library, I ate at Lu’s deli. I explored various ways in which the school’s campus connects to downtown and crossed and recrossed nineteenth street, which everyone agreed was a major social divider of the city.
Along the way, I became curious about historicizing what I saw. How long had the big ag factories (a primary employer in town) been there, and what were the earlier employers. How was this city connected to turn-of-the-twentieth-century immigration and internal migration patterns of European immigrants? How was the city connected to Chicago as a terminus of the Great migration?
I visited the Czech and Black historical societies. I probed the memories and geographies of Lyft drivers. I read. This deepened my interactions with students in the classroom as well. Darryl, writing about his authie’s house in Chicago, described the smells of the kitchen as a central experience–smells which likely echoed cultural memory of the south.
Student authors were already there. Many of their most personal stories were about disruption of their places: families moving to Cedar Rapids for jobs, having to leave behind friendships and other possible futures. (EG one story explicitly imagines what life might have been like if they had stayed). Their stories in the Story of Cedar Rapids often involved performative inhabirtation of space which solidified their identities and socila positions. For example, several students wrote about the airport as a place where they are familiar because they travel frequentlyor because they take flying lessons. In letting the player walk familiarly around the airport, they show that this is teh kind of plave they belong.
In another story, I introduced hte idea of state through an exercise in which we wrote stories where the choices a player makes inform which futures open up and which are foreclosed. We wrote stories about coming to school, starting by waking up in the morning and preparing for school. Here, home was teh place where possibilities were set in motion and school was where they played out, with the process of coming to school as the site of trajectory development.
STRUCTURE OF THE CHAPTER LINES OF FLIGHT IN INTERACTIVE STORYTELLING: PLACING LITERACY-BASED COMPUTER SCIENCE PEDAGOGY
Introduction: - Literacy-based CS education, interactive storytelling. Background: Still grounded in figured worlds; using the transliteracies framework proposed by Stornaiuolo, Smith, & Phillips (2017)…
Methods: - context - positionality of myself as researcher.
Core argument: - Placing CS is important. Look how we did it via activity system intervention:
Tools: - interactive structure of narrative - social network construal of audience (and, via entextualization, my curation of it to make Unfold Studio a place for real, critical writing.) - INCLUDE stories - text-messaging interface Activity: - story of Cedar rapids People: - developing teacher identites in the context of CS - teachers often feel like their legitimacy is stake - want to provide “real CS”
Discussion: - CS as unplaced, abstraction as a positive value in CS. - Other resources within the field which could support placemaking.
Conclusion.
HERE-AND-THERE WRITING I might want to make this chapter centerd on the STory of Cedar Rapids, and related pedagogy. CS in place, a critique of CS as nowhere.
This is useful for teacher learning too, figuring teachers (Max, Leif, Corey, myself) as having embodied and emplaced resources relevant for CS, rather than
Comptuer science as a discipline illustrates the “paradox of mobility.” Leonard (2013) There is a geography of CS already, but it’s not one that is very helpful. Despite rhetoric of computing breaking down barriers, connecting, and flattening the world, the geography of computing opportunity has central nodes in Solicon Valley and other coastal cities. Smaller cities in the US (eg Austin) sustain smaller reproductions of these innovative cultures, and others offer reliable but boring employment in computing. Globally, Hydrabad is where QA happens; Brazil and Poland are where cheap offshore programming happens; China steals intellectual property and sustains a somewhat disconnected world of computing within the great firewall. Russia recapitulates its role as America’s cold war adversary with its capabilities of hacking, network security, and increasingly information warfare.
If we want CS to mean something positive in Cedar Rapids, we need a different placemaking logic for computing. There are promising things happening with agrucultural compting and drones, for example. I remember talking with one student (Leo?) who said he had no interest in being in class. I asked him what he planned to be when he grew up and he told me a tractor engineer. I explained how this is computing, and all the tension between farmers and John Deere’s policies on DRM.
The student-student interactions supported by Unfold Studio take on additional importance for placemaking. In the network diagram (LINK) of interactions between authors and texts, we get a new sense of centrality and periphary. Perhaps we can see marginalization more clearly. This is an example of going against Sheehy’s (CITE) analysis of classrooms as “thick” space with the teacher as a central hub of interaction.
What does this mean for pedagogy? One primary challenge I encountered in working with Max and with Leif (in very different ways) was that they tended to make themselves the central hubs of authority in the classroom. Max did so overtly, emphasizing his role as the one evaluating student work and giving out grades, and presuming students to be in that role (eg “add another paragraph and I will give this an A…”) Leif centered himself more implicitly, as the authority on computer science who was not very effective in assigning competence to students and cultivating a productive space of student-student interactions.
The performance of student stories was particularly important for legitimizing them as texts which other students might have an interest in being audience to. Here again there was a dialogic structure. Authors would volunteer their stories, which we then projected on the front of the screen. The story’s author would ask for volunteers and select one to play the story. The author would narratve the story (playing a role somewhat similar to dungeon master), and the player would make choices. This provided a role for the rest of the students as well, carrying on a constant playful argument over what the player should do, responding to ups and downs, and affirming descriptions of places and events which had shared significance.
For example, one playthrough of a story involved walking into the convenience store across the street from the school. The story was briefly interrupted by audience members arguing about what kind of handle was on the door–a debate which we were able to resolve on a subsequent day after students visited the store and noted its door.
Dialogic and social processes were sometimes particularly helpful for including students who might not otherwise have participated. For example, after watching a quiet Black boy named Darryl reading stories with interest, but not writing his own, I asked Darryl what stories he was thinking about writing. He started telling me a rich description of his auntie’s house in Chicago–I volunteered to write while he talked, and we developed a playable world. He was really interested in adding links between different places, and in adding in people you could meet and talk with.
Another time, there were three students who were quite energetic and off-task, and I invited them to write a story together. We developed a story which represented all three of them, as well as places of individual and shared significance. The player starts by going to each friend’s house, asking their mothers if they can come play in the park, and then buying snacks together and going to the park. From there, the player can walk with the group of friends around different parts of the park they know well, linking them together with the possibility to replay their shared experiences. For example, you can meet another group of youth who demand your snacks. You can give them over, run away, or fight them and then flee. I do not know whether any of these trajectories actually happened; this is another example of how the ambiguity of interactive storytelling connects the actual with potentialities. This story was particularly interesting for the way that digital media connected places and trajectories togehter. You are constantly texting other people who are not in the same physical place, for example in making plans to meet up at the park.
The text-messaging interface was used frequently to create new spatial relationships across distance. For example, in the story about the burglar in the house, the tension of the story is based on connecting geographic distance using text messages. The boy, in immediate physical danger, is saved through text message conversations with the girl, who guides him to safety and then arranges for him to stay with her for a couple of weeks. They go to church together. Then the technosocial situation takes on another nature as it becomes the site of rumors about the boy and girl liking each other. They screenshot their conversations to prove that it’s just a friendship.
80 Days served as a mentor text in this unit, showing how interactive narrative can open up a world. TODO: excavate some precedents of later classroom practices in 80 Days.
Leander, Phillips, and Taylor (CITE) argue that mobility may open learning opportunities by restructuring youth’s “affective relations of place” (p. 340). There is a lot of work showing that youth are blocked from learning comptuer science by stereotypes about the field and incompatibilities between their perception of CS and their own identities. Placing CS in geographies well-known to youth can be helpful in reshaping their ideas about what CS is.
IDEA: Add a force to the literacy diagram pulling students toward the coordinates of the place they wrote about. Then you can SEE the geographies of privilege. Maybe?