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Abstract
Many young people today are enacting rich literacies in their lives through the use of digital technologies. While this may be so, there is a narrowing of literacy instruction under neoliberal reforms at a time of increasing informational and digital technologies. In this article, the author draws on an ethnographic study of high school multimedia communications that employed place-based approaches. The study suggests place-based media production as integral to teaching and learning in support of student’s interests in the arts and technology. In conceptualizing place as relational, the study shows how place-based media production within a particular learning ecology supported critical inquiry in the service of place-making. Most salient were the ways in which students constructed relational experiences as racialized, gendered, and minoritized youth in order to enter, alter, and disrupt dominant discourses of educational and social issues affecting their lives. Implications for research and practice that point to the value of critical place inquiry as well as educative possibilities in neoliberal times are also discussed.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to acknowledge the editors of this special issue and anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback; also Ezekiel Dixon-Roman for thoughtful discussions about ideas presented here. Special thanks to the teacher and student participants for helping to construct the narrative. Any errors are mine alone.
Notes
1. There are various studies featuring place-based approaches. It is not my intent here to distinguish pedagogical possibilities of place between local and global contexts, formal and informal or urban and rural settings; more important to this article are the affordances of place-based pedagogies to innovate curriculum that support underserved students from low socioeconomic and historically marginalized backgrounds.
2. According to Agnew (Citation2011), place and space are fairly complex words that signal different understandings of ‘where’ in relation to ‘when’ and ‘how’ something happens. It is outside the scope of this article to delineate the differences that reflect practices of philosophers, cartographers, and sciences. Most important is place as a site in space which relates to other sites due to interaction, movement, and networks.
3. Such perspectives on place build on earlier works (see Massey, Citation1984, 1994).
4. An extended treatment of PBE is discussed in related works (Gruenewald, Citation2008, Citation2003b; Smith & Gruenewald, Citation2008; also see Bowers, Citation2008; McInerney, Smyth, & Down, Citation2011). Place-based perspectives in the arts and humanities also take up ecology in conjunction with pedagogy (see Ball & Lai, Citation2006; Graham, Citation2007).
5. I use ‘ontological’ in this paper to mean the nature of one’s being or becoming in the world. ‘Material ontologies’ refers to the ways in which human bodies and material matter are always already made up of a multiplicity of agents, that is, they are not hailed into existence because they already exist and are mutually shaping each other. ‘Material ontologies of place’ then considers the human and non-human dimensions of being and becoming in relation to place, not privileging one over the other but mutually shaping each other.
6. Elsewhere (Jocson, Citation2015), I have discussed CTE’s framework in relation to the persisting academic–vocational divide that shapes the schooling experiences of many students.
7. One of the topics (school closures) was explored later in the year. Due to a winning football season and playoff schedule, Larry decided to join David in completing the segment on high school graduation rates.