Young People's Learning in Digital Worlds: The Alienation and Re-Imagining of Education

Description

A growing body of research acknowledges the learning potential of digital communities, where young people voluntarily spent their time and money to play games, to gain information, to create videos or to interact with friends. Simultaneously, at a societal level, these digital learning experiences are often not acknowledged as ‘learning’ or working towards becoming an ‘educated person’. Combining new materialism and cultural historical theory, this study conceptualises learning as a material, relational process of becoming, and strives to 1) understand how young people learn in intra-action with digital communities, 2) capture ‘alternative’ cultural narratives of ‘educatedness’ in collaboration with young people, and 3) comprehend how the platforms themselves as institutions shape online learning experiences. The popular platforms YouTube, TikTok and Twitch have been selected as key sites to study young people’s learning in digital communities. Using an ethnographic approach, while also involving youth as co-researchers, we use community events, interactive observation sessions, screen and interview recordings amongst others, to capture both within platform dynamics related to learning as well as how these might create tension with notions and practices of traditional schooling. In our analyses, making use of the three-way function of education, as conceptualized by Biesta (2010), we map alternative processes of qualification, socialisation and subjectification in the respective platforms and their communities. Preliminary results show that these platforms open up important alternatives for socialisation not provided in school, but that the affordances of these platforms also impose boundaries on what kind of ‘educatedness’ is to be rewarded or recognized. In our discussion, we draw attention to how these alternative cultural narratives and practices of ‘educatedeness’ relate to concepts of 21th century learning.

Period	4 Aug 2021
Event title	Cultural-Historical Activity Research in crisis contexts: challenges and perspectives: 6th Congress of the International Society for Cultural-Historical Activity Research
Event type	Conference
Location	Natal, BrazilShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International