software that enabled them to join in robust forms of digital media learning and participatory cultures. Freeway, moreover, was a crucial source of community, offering access to peers, teachers, mentors, and a cluster of media makers that helped students transform the school into a place that, at times, was relevant and inspiring. In short, Freeway was a source of human capital, techno-capital, and social capital for many students.
The teachers that we met at Freeway struggled to design and implement a curriculum that supported deep learning. Some even taught courses that they were not qualified to teach. Still, teachers like the ones that you meet in the book—Mr. Warren and Mr. Lopez—gave students more than we could ever credit them for in this book. In addition to sharing their knowledge with students, they shared their time and their social ties. Mr. Warren and Mr. Lopez stayed late after school to share their classrooms and the technology they supervised, allowing students to take laptops, software, and digital cameras home to work on a variety of creative projects such as films, games, music, and graphic art. In the face of diminishing resources, the teachers empowered several of the students and their extraordinary struggle to make school matter.
Ethnographic accounts of schools provide a glimpse into the practices, experiences, and social relations that are fluid and messy but also vital to understanding schools as complex social systems. In theory, schools are places where students go for academic-oriented learning. In addition, schools are supposed to prepare students for the transition to young adulthood, including work or postsecondary education. Still, it is common knowledge that some schools are better resourced to prepare their students for life’s transitions than others. Not surprisingly, the economic and population shifts that remade the student body at Freeway severely challenged the school’s ability to build and sustain high-quality instructional environments and viable future-oriented pathways.
The chapters draw from our extensive fieldwork to share our insights regarding the challenges that schools face in preparing students for the world of tomorrow. Even as technology has spread to more schools, disparities in academic achievement, economic opportunity, and social mobility persist. This suggests two things: first, that a technology-driven solution to the education crisis is a solution that is certain to fail; and second, that a substantive remake of education requires engagement with broader social and economic forces. In short, the challenges that schools like Freeway face are far more severe than any technology or in-school-only solution can adequately resolve.
1
How Black and Latino Youth Are Remaking the Digital Divide
S. Craig Watkins
One of the factors that attracted our team to Freeway was the abundance of technology in the school. From the mobile devices that students owned to some relatively technology-rich classrooms, Freeway was living proof that the United States has entered a new era in the spread of media and Internet technologies. The often resilient and creative media practices of black and Latino teens are not only dramatically remaking the digital divide but also disrupting decades-old assumptions about race, technology, and participation in the digital world. As you will learn in this and several other chapters in this volume, the students at Freeway did not always suffer from a lack of technology. Still, they constantly found themselves in situations that required them to be creative in the face of the constant barriers—familial, financial, educational—that threatened to block their participation in the digital media cultures shaped and coveted by teens.
When more conventional or middle-class paths of access to and participation in digital media cultures were not available (e.g., home broadband, computer ownership), teens worked around social and economic barriers to pursue their creative investments in digital media. Within our research team we often referred to these activities as a form of social hacking.
The social hacking that we frequently observed differs from technical hacking but is no less ingenuous. Whereas technical hacking involves reprogramming or reengineering technology to do something that it was not originally designed to do, social hacking involves reengineering social situations to do something that one was not originally in a position to do, such as creating digital media content. The forms of social hacking that are profiled throughout this book are customary features of life in the digital edge and a pivotal reminder that many black and Latino youth face persistent barriers to cultivating more substantive and sustained participation in digital media cultures.
Moreover, these practices compel a reconsideration of how the contours of the digital divide are shifting largely as a result of the inventive ways black and Latino youth are making distinct media practices. Despite the persistence of economic challenges—for example, lack of home broadband, outdated computers, data caps—many of the students in our sample found ways to get their hands on digital media. But the story does not end there. Black and Latino youth have done more than simply find ways to access social and mobile media. To the surprise of many, they emerged as early adopters and trendsetters in the social media space, leading the migration to the mobile Internet and driving the rise, for example, of Black Twitter a force in both pop culture and political life. In the case of black and Latino teens, their early adopter and trendsetter status has occurred in spite of the fact that they are not the beneficiaries of economic privilege or members of the tech elite, attributes that are typically associated with early adopter status in the consumer technology economy.
Several quantitative studies suggest that black and Latino teens are quite active when it comes to the use of, for example, social and mobile media.1 Still, we know very little about the intricacies of black and Latino teens’ engagement with these technologies. Our qualitative study is designed, in part, to fill in some of the knowledge gaps related to the rapidly changing dynamics of black and Latino teen participation in the digital media world. Whereas quantitative data can tell us how much time black and Latino teens spend on social media on a given day, qualitative data can tell us what they do when using social media. Furthermore, qualitative approaches can offer more in-depth perspective on the context and conditions in which black and Latino teens are using technology. This last point is especially crucial because the settings in which teens use technology—in school, at home, with peers—are in constant flux and situate different opportunities for engagement.
But even as access to the Internet for black and Latino teens has improved over the years, this does not mean that all forms of access are equal. Young people’s Internet-related activities continue to be influenced, for example, by race and ethnicity, parental education, and the quality of schools they attend. Black and Latino youth are much more likely than their white and Asian counterparts to grow up in homes without access to broadband Internet. Parental education often influences, for example, the kinds of social ties and support systems their children have access to. Black and Latino youth are also more likely to attend schools that offer limited access to classes, instructors, and learning opportunities that develop the technical and cognitive skills that align with a rapidly evolving knowledge economy. It is also true that black and Latino youth carve out their own distinct spaces for identity and community in the digital spaces that are transforming youth culture and everyday life. In this chapter we offer a framework for understanding the agency that Latino and black youth assert in the making of their social and mobile media lives but in relation to structural conditions that are not of their own making.
In the United States (and around the world) we are witnessing a social transformation as a greater diversity of youth than ever before are using Internet-based technologies and networks. Today, black and Latino youth spend more time using social and mobile media than their white counterparts, a fact that no one would have dared to predict just a few years ago.2 Still, access to technology does not necessarily lead to greater digital media literacy or, as we discuss throughout this book, social and economic opportunity. Similarly, access to media technology does not guarantee access to the forms of capital—social and cultural—that are the crucial gateway to educational achievement, economic development, and political engagement.
Immersion in the everyday schooling and
