A funds of knowledge approach to the appropriation of new media in a high school writing classroom

Abstract

Youths’ learner-generated designs, instantiated in digital practices, spaces and artifacts, are underutilized in schools. Additionally, digital media tools are often taken up in reductive ways that serve to perpetuate deficit discourses for youth from nondominant communities, rather than reflect the creativity and innovation that youth practice within digital domains. To address these issues, this article shares a funds of knowledge approach to the use of new media in classrooms. Coupled with an emphasis on new literacies and multiliteracies, this approach was instantiated in partnership with Ms Smith and her high school writing classroom. The partnership engaged new media in order to appropriate and develop learner-generated designs in classroom spaces.

Keywords:

• new media
• Latino youth
• funds of knowledge
• high school classroom
• collaboration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Lisa H. Schwartz is a Postdoctoral Researcher for the Connected Learning Research Network at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her work focuses on the study and co-design of new media learning ecologies with youth, families, and educators.

Notes

1. Pseudonyms are used for all participants’ names, the names of digital spaces, and in images and representations of students’ work that appear in this article.

2. For simplicity, I use the term new media broadly to refer to technology tools such as mobile phones, virtual spaces such as social network sites and digitally mediated practices such as texting and viewing, posting and creating media. The conflation of tool, space and practice also underscores the ways in which context and activity are interconnected.

3. For an extended discussion of identity in this work, see Schwartz (2014) and Schwartz et al. (2014).