resources should schools cultivate to provide rich digital media and learning opportunities? What kinds of skills—social, cognitive, technological—should schools be cultivating among their students? Moreover, why do school officials put more faith in the acquisition of technology than in the development of rich curriculum and instruction?
We engaged these questions through long, deep, and up close observation. The world that we became intimate with at Freeway—the world of formal schooling and learning—is remarkably complex. As we contend in the following pages, studying Freeway provided us with a detailed glimpse of one of the most pivotal challenges our country faces—preparing the nation’s most diverse student population in history for a rapidly evolving society and economy. The teachers, administrators, students, and parents that we discuss in the book opened up their world to us. They gave us access to their classrooms, extracurricular activities, home life, and more. In addition, they participated in candid, in-depth conversations about many issues. Without their generosity this book would not be possible.
As researchers we are obligated to document and analyze what we observed as fairly and rigorously as we possibly can. This means being critical of people we came to know and respect. If you have ever spent time in a U.S. public school, you know that it consists mainly of noble people striving to do the good work of education. In a time of growing economic uncertainty and societal change, the work of education may be tougher than ever. Schools are trying valiantly to remain relevant even as they appear to be losing ground in the face of historical changes and mounting pressure. It is an epic struggle and one that produces stunning disparities in the quality of education that black, Latino, and lower-income students receive.
We discuss these and other outcomes not to be critical of the school and teachers that invited us in but rather to be as forthcoming as we can about the challenges our nation faces. Only through persistent documentation and analysis can we design schools that are capable of building better futures. For all of the shortcomings that we observed at Freeway, one thing was strikingly clear: the school was the last, best chance for many of the students in our study to find their unique pathway to opportunity.
Freeway was the only place students could reliably pursue both formal and informal learning opportunities that were connected to their interest in digital media. Also, Freeway was the only place students could access the hardware and 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.
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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.
