Civic rhythms in an informal, media-rich learning program

Abstract

Increasingly, adult mentors in informal, media-rich settings, like libraries and museums, seek to integrate both learning and civic engagement opportunities for youth into designed programming. This article illustrates how youth open and sustain opportunities for civic engagement over the course of a six-month, youth-driven programMetro: Building Blocks (MBB) -housed within a digital media learning lab in an urban public library. Analysis develops the concept of civic rhythms as a means to feel out the social and affective contours of civic engagement that emerge in MBB. To better understand the civic rhythms of MBB, analysis focuses specifically on three rhythmic elements: pulsation, reciprocation, and oscillation. The article concludes suggesting that future research develop principles for designing-in-time that assist researchers and mentors in attuning to the youth-driven rhythms that sustain informal, media-rich programs. ARTICLE HISTORY

Can media literacy education increase digital engagement in politics?

“…From the standpoint of policy and practice, it is also important to recognize that while the current study examines the impact of learning opportunities that occurred in schools, extracurricular programing also provides these kinds of learning opportunities. Studies by Charmaraman (2013) and Hollett and Ehret (2017), for example, highlight ways extracurricular programing can foster development of varied media literacies tied to creative production, remix, and circulation and can often link to civic engagement and social change. One challenge of assessing the impact of these approaches on future civic and political engagement is the voluntary nature of participation in these programs and the self-selection that characterizes exposure to learning opportunities in non-school settings.…”

Immediations and rhythms of speculative design: Implications for value in design‐based research

“…As we have noted, however, our process philosophical approach offers a way of being in time with youth that is ontologically incommensurate with the structuralist theories undergirding CHAT-based approaches to DBR. This approach to being in time (see also, Boldt, Lewis, & Leander, 2015;Hollett & Ehret, 2017), over time, with youth, honours the singular qualities of experience that give life to DBR alongside youth and that are elided in CHAT-based theories that analyse experience from outside of its own unfolding. Rather, our approach to DBR informed by a theory of immediations enters both design and analysis from the middle of experience, attuned to how moments of affective intensity might open towards new, unexpected potential of undetermined value.…”

“…Played in the minor key, our speculative social change project, we realize, requires an embodied attunement to rhythm in terms of space, time and affect (see also, Leander & Hollett, ; Hollett & Ehret, ). This means not just participating in the babbling collectivity‐in‐the‐making, but also sensing when the collective feels off and whether that feeling‐offness is even counter‐productive to our moving forward together, or just the out‐of‐sync sense that comes once in a while, especially when we have spent so many days playing around the red couch together.…”

Learning to see the familiar: Technological assemblages in a higher education (non)classroom setting

“…Course learning objectives were operationalized through Site Visits—students observing how learning and teaching take place in nonclassroom spaces—because the most powerful theories of learning were derived from looking at and understanding learning as it happens in all of the other contexts of our daily lives: gardening and cooking in homes (González et al , ), apprenticing in a trade (Lave & Wenger, ), reading stories with parents and siblings (Heath, ), playing video games at the library (Hollett & Ehret, ), returning to museum exhibits to answer questions about dinosaurs (Crowley & Jacobs, ). These sociocultural theories frame learning as relational (eg, Bang, ; Bang, Medin, & Atran, ; Bang & Vossoughi, ); our learning process depends on being in relation with others, with materials and with environments (Ellsworth, ).…”