Leveling Up: Connected Mentor Learning in a Digital Media Production After-School Space

This article introduces mirrored practice of leveling up as a model for educator learning grounded in connected learning and the connected mentor framework. Our purpose is to introduce this model and share examples of how it can be enacted. We argue that the model is a rich and successful way for youth development professionals to expand their capacities as educators and to support expansive possibilities for young people’s learning. The model supports all educators’ learning and growth, but it is particularly applicable to mentors working in interest-driven, informal learning environments like makerspaces and YOUmedia learning labs. The model is drawn from our analysis of 2 years of ethnographic observations in an after-school digital design studio housed in an urban public high school in Chicago. We describe mirrored practice as the mentors using the same principles and tools to learn that their students utilized. In the model, leveling up means that both students and mentors are supported in constantly moving towards progressively complex tasks, knowledge, and understanding. Methods of data collection include video- and audio-taped observations and interviews with digital media mentors.

Building spaces for literacy in school: mapping the emergence of a literacy makerspace

Purpose Building on the growing interest in school-based “making” and “makerspaces,” this paper aims to map the emergence of a literacy-oriented makerspace in a non-selective urban public high school. It examines how competing conceptions of literacy came to be negotiated as students and teachers shaped this new space for literacy practice, and it traces how the layered uses of the space, in turn, reworked understandings of literacy in the larger school community. Design/methodology/approach Part of a longitudinal design-research partnership with an urban public high school, the paper draws on two years of ethnographic data collection to follow the creation, development and uses of a school-based literacy-oriented makerspace. Findings Using notions of “re-territorialization,” the paper examines how the processes of designing, mapping and building a literacy lab offered space for layered and contested purposes that instantiated more expansive views of literacy in the school – even as it created new frictions. In presenting two analytic mappings, the paper illustrates how mapping can offers resources for people to make and remake the spaces they inhabit, a form of worldmaking that can open possibilities for reshaping the built world in more just and equitable ways. Originality/value The study offers insights into how mapping can serve as a research and pedagogical resource for making legible the emergent dimensions of literacy practice across time and spaces and the multiple perspectives that inform the design and use of educational spaces. Further, it contributes to a growing literature on “making” and literacy by examining how informal making practices are folded into formal school structures and considering how this reconfigures literacy learning.

“College for All? These Kids Can’t Dig Ditches”: Confronting the Leadership Challenges for Justice-Based Reform in Underperforming Schools

The case explores the challenges of school leaders to facilitate social justice–based reforms for low-income students of color who attend underperforming schools. In particular, it examines the 1st-year experiences of Principal Yolanda Lopez at Kennedy High School, an underperforming and underresourced urban public high school. Lopez is tasked with improving college access and readiness among all students. As the year progresses—and pressures mount from various stakeholders—she questions the viability of sustained reform and her own role as a change agent within a complex and often unjust system.

Making Publics: Mobilizing Audiences in High School Makerspaces

Background/Context Researchers, policy makers, and practitioners are paying increasing attention to the educational opportunities afforded by the maker movement—a growing public interested in do-it-yourself designing, remixing, and tinkering using physical and digital tools. While education research on “making” has often focused on informal learning contexts, this article examines the possibilities and tensions that surface as a new urban public high school brings making to the center of its teaching and learning. Focus of Study This research examines the learning opportunities that emerged as students engaged in their school's Media Production Makerspace. Focusing on the ways students created, remixed, and shared individual and collaborative media texts in the classroom, the study asks: What are the resources and constraints of the Media Production Makerspace's learning ecology for students from nondominant communities, and what practices, tools, and knowledge do students draw on and develop as they engage in school-based making activities and extend those to other audiences? Setting The study is situated in the Collaborative Design School, a non-selective urban public high school organized around principles of making and the maker movement. Research Design This study was a social design experiment that followed 45 high school freshmen in the Collaborative Design School's media makerspace over three design cycles during the 2014–2015 school year. Conclusions/Recommendations The study revealed that the work of cultivating and mobilizing audiences was central to young people's making activities. However, the ways these audiences were cultivated and mobilized depended on a number of historical, cultural, social, and political factors and involved significant labor by multiple stakeholders. To mobilize audiences into meaningful publics oriented toward collective action, young people needed to see themselves as civic actors who could contribute to broader public conversations and whose opinions, perspectives, and experiences mattered. In tracing the tensions that arose in this process of making publics, the authors suggest that integrating makerspaces in schools can lead to powerful learning opportunities and serve as generative routes to civic action for some students but also that makerspaces should not be positioned as panaceas that can be inserted into schools as an autonomous fix.

“Out gay boys? There’s, like, one point seven five”: Negotiating identity in super-diversity

Examining processes through which identity and semiotic markers of race, gender, and sexuality are constructed, this article looks at the ways categories like “gay”, “Asian”, and “Latino”, for example, are articulated, counted, and delineated as well as complicated by intersecting lines of difference that entangle subject positions. Drawing on findings from a three-year ethnographic study in a Northern California urban public high school, this research connects the micro-level processes of language and the macro-level processes through which difference is constructed. Arguing that notions of enoughness and authenticity are used to assess participants’ claims to identities, this article further pushes scholars of super-diversity to consider the role of power and privilege in shaping such forms of legitimacy. Focusing on power and privilege in the negotiation of identity is significant for scholars of super-diversity because it moves us toward an analysis of the ways unequal power relations are produced and articulated through people, their interactions and relations, and perceived differences. In an era of super-diversity, subjects live with multiple, overlapping, mutually inflecting identities, far from previous tick-box approaches which treat identity as a static set of categories one may check off as representing. Considering intersecting lines of difference, we see that identity is not just discrete categories, but a process of drawing boundaries, taking positions, playing with representations, and making meaning out of symbolic resources.