our case studies, students “do school” in a variety of ways. In chapter three Jacqueline Ryan Vickery and Vivian Shaw explain how students do school by resisting and revising the often antiquated district policies that restrict their ability to be more creative with the technology that they have access to in school. As Alexander Cho, Vivian Shaw, and S. Craig Watkins discuss in chapter seven, some of the students in our study enrolled in AP courses and strategically pursued extracurricular activities to establish a competitive academic profile for college. But most of the students in our study employed more nonconventional tactics in the ways that they did school.
In chapter five, for example, Watkins discusses how a group of students formed their own quasi studio to turn their game design class into a more collaborative and dynamic learning experience. Watkins, Andres Lombana-Bermudez, and Lauren Weinzimmer describe in chapter six how some Freeway students transformed the after-school hours into a lively lab for creativity, collaboration, and content creation. In these last two examples, students were less interested in building a competitive profile for college than they were in building opportunities and social relations that simply made school a more interesting and relevant place to be.
Many of these activities were not academic in a traditional manner. But rather than describe them as deviant or oppositional to learning and achievement, we pursue a different analytic track. More precisely, these forms of learning and media production highlight how students do school in ways that are inventive, engaged, and achievement oriented.
This study is also informed by the Connected Learning framework, an approach to learning and youth practice that has been developed by a series of research and design initiatives supported by the MacArthur Foundation.38 The Connected Learning model is as much a vision of learning as it is a theory of learning. More generally, connected learning posits that when learning is linked across multiple spheres—school, after school, peers, home, and online—it is likely to be more powerful and more meaningful.
From a Connected Learning perspective, learning should be networked, experiential, production centered, and marked by a shared purpose between students and adults.39 Unfortunately, the bulk of learning in America’s schools runs counter to these principles and is, instead, typically cut off from the networked world, routinized, test centered, and individualized. In a connected learning world, students are expected to actively produce and apply knowledge. In most schools, students are generally required to passively consume and memorize information.
Not surprisingly, it is much more likely that students from resource-abundant schools and communities will have greater access to connected learning opportunities than their resource-constrained counterparts. In addition to richer opportunities to learn in school, students from affluent households benefit from richer out-of-school learning opportunities.40 Still, even when schools and the adults who run them organize learning in more traditional ways, students occasionally find opportunities to redesign learning in ways that counter established conventions and reflect some of the principles of connected learning. The clever ways in which some Freeway students do school underscore this point.
Technology Is Not a Solution
Our fieldwork was an opportunity to see up close how the social, digital, and educational lives of black, Latino, and lower-income teens are evolving. This is a fact: teens from lower-income families are more likely to have access to Internet-enabled technologies today than they were a decade ago.41 As we discuss in chapter one, access to Internet media comes in a variety of forms, including more affordable computers and smartphones. Similarly, access to Internet media comes from a variety of places, including schools, after-school settings, and home. While access to the Internet and media technologies is improving for young people, access to dynamic educational (i.e., formal curricula) and social (i.e., informal knowledge networks) resources that sustain more capital-enhancing forms of digital participation remains tenuous for teens in resource-constrained settings.
In our fieldwork we tracked two classes—a game design course and a video and technology applications course—to better understand the challenges and opportunities associated with efforts to design and implement digital media and learning in the formal classroom. These were the two main Career and Technology Education courses at Freeway. Consequently, the teachers of these classes were charged with orienting students toward information, technology, and creative careers. Both classes were burdened by the legacy problems associated with vocational education in the United States.42 More specifically, the classes were oriented toward “tools literacy” rather than more academic and design-oriented literacies.43 Tools literacy skills such as learning how to use basic software applications like Word or PowerPoint are foundational. By contrast, academic oriented skills such as coding and design thinking are transformational. In the chapters that follow we fully consider the limits of vocational technical education and the implication for learning and future opportunity.
Additionally, we spent tens of hours observing the activities in the after-school spaces that were devoted to the digital media arts, including, for example, video and film production, social media, graphic design, and game development. The students involved in these activities devoted substantial amounts of time and energy to pursuing creative activities, social relations, and learning experiences that often exceeded what was available during the school day to grow their skills and aspirations as digital media content creators.
Like their counterparts in many schools, Freeway teachers and administrators believed that the mere use of technology in the classroom was a source of achievement. We dispute this view in our analysis but also maintain that Freeway was the most important node in the digital media ecology of students from lower-income households for two main reasons. First, Freeway was the most reliable source for them to access computers, the Internet, and the software applications that supported sustained engagement in production-centered digital media practices. Similar to national trends, home broadband Internet adoption was irregular and intermittent for many in our study.44 Second, some of the classes and after-school settings offered access to the kinds of social milieus and creative spaces that support deeper engagement in the production of digital media content.45 While access to technology—hardware and software—is commonly recognized as important to enabling robust participation in the digital world, access to vibrant social spaces, knowledge-rich peer networks, and supportive communities is often overlooked.
We entered this study excited about the opportunity to see up close the use of technology in a school populated by teens from black, Latino, immigrant, and lower-income households. Freeway had just launched a game development track that aspired to enhance the STEM literacies of students and prepare them for entry into a knowledge-driven economy. The technology applications course intended to expose students to media production, digital storytelling, and elements of design. Finally, we were intrigued to learn about the digital media club, an extracurricular activity that created a space and a community for the school’s most passionate digital media makers. These were all indicators of a school that appeared to embrace new learning futures that included technology-rich courses, STEM education, and extracurricular activities that spark the development of what are often characterized as twenty-first-century skills and new media literacies.46
But as our time in the school grew so did the questions that we felt obligated to ask. What is the role of education in a knowledge-driven economy?
