The desire to learn: the alienation and reimagining of pedagogy on YouTube, Twitch and TikTok

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to understand the perspectives of young people involved in online learning communities on what they consider valuable for their learning. We do this by bringing their experiences with online community pedagogies (OCPs) into conversation with their critiques of school pedagogies (SPs) to see whether we can understand this interaction as generative of ‘alternative’ pedagogies. Whereas previously alternative pedagogies were understood to arise from ‘new’ technologies, we argue that such pedagogies arise from needs created by youth’s experiences with navigating these different pedagogical contexts. We interviewed 37 community members from six learning communities on YouTube, Twitch and TikTok. We show that youth perceive school as controlling, imposing pressure to perform, and disconnected from what they think matters and qualifies expertise. Based on their online experiences, youth emphasised the importance of control, experimentation space, and being enabled to act on societal issues. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualisation of ‘desire’, and Appadurai’s ‘global imaginaries’, we interpret OPs dialoguing with youth’s alienating perspectives on schooling as ‘reimagined pedagogies’ that act as collective voices for global (re-)imaginaries of school. We conclude with the importance of taking youth’s experiences with alienation and OPs seriously as objects of thought for alternative pedagogic futures.

KEYWORDS:

• Alienation
• pedagogy
• social media platforms
• formal education
• informal learning
• YouTube
• Twitch
• TikTok
• voice of youth

Introduction

The desire is missing in education. Kellan Ringus (21, U.S., history)

Kellan made this claim in an interview conducted for this research when asked to compare online and school-based learning experiences. Youth critiquing their formal education is not new (Gerrard, 2014; Levinson et al., 1996; Porfilio & Carr, 2010). Although often glossed over, for years youths’ critique of and desire for change in their education has inspired social movements to create alternative learning spaces (Gerrard, 2014; Mills & Kraftl, 2014). A relatively recent development is young people’s access to online learning communities where they can voice such critiques and organise learning outside of schools. However, youth’s activities within online learning communities are often characterised as trivial and a distraction from schoolwork; such activities are not recognised for their potential contributions to learning (Ito et al., 2019). We are interested in whether and how young people who are active in online communities compare their online and school learning experiences in aiming to define the experience’s qualities. We conducted interviews with young people about their learning in online communities to explore what these young people consider valuable learning. We took these accounts of their online experiences seriously to see whether we can interpret them as ‘alternative pedagogies’.

We use a definition of pedagogy as a form of nurturing power, extending beyond schools, that structures, values and recognises learning (Bernstein, 2000; Singh, 2017). We are often dealing with multiple coexisting pedagogies that are constantly being (re-)created through ‘new’¹ social and material configurations within and beyond schools (Bernstein, 2000; Singh, 2017). The school as an educational institution with specific associated practices and norms is one such social and material configuration that has a particular way of structuring, valuing, and recognising learning (Ladwig & Sefton-Green, 2018), which we will refer to as ‘school pedagogies’ (SPs). Such social and material configurations can also be emergent technologies that create ‘new’ relations to knowledge (Säljö, 2010), such as access to online communities. We refer to such pedagogies induced by online communities as ‘online community pedagogies’ (OCPs). We do this with a particular interest in how SPs and OCPs do not exist as a binary, but as part of a context in which multiple pedagogies are in ongoing conversation (Bernstein, 2000). This pedagogical perspective allows us to understand young people’s engagement with multiple ways of structuring, valuing, and recognising learning. Accordingly, we take a holistic view of young people’s learning: young people are whole persons who learn across contexts (Akkerman & Van Eijck, 2013). Particularly, we focus on how youth’s experiences of pedagogies in different contexts, online and in school, can be interpreted in terms of youth-generated theories of how to recognise, structure and value learning. We take this pedagogical lens to understand the intermediate status of the different pedagogies in which young people operate online and in school. We then seek to push this argument further by arguing that young people define forms of learning online which might inspire ways of addressing some contemporary issues facing schooling.

As hinted at above, we argue that instead of dismissing young people’s online practices as trivial teenage behaviour, youth’s online activities and critiques of schooling should be seen as a way of understanding how to help students with their education (Wright, 2021). A few have done so previously, Wright, for example describes how young people use acronyms on TikTok to critique their school experiences, such as ‘school’ standing for ‘Six Cruel Hours Of Our Lives’ or math for ‘Mental Abuse To Humans’, using such critiques to reveal youth’s experiences of SPs (2021). In line with this perspective, we want to explore whether comparing young people’s experiences of OCPs and their reflections of SPs might provide interesting objects of thought to inspire educators, educational researchers, and policy makers to critically examine their educational practices.

By taking young people’s online learning activities seriously, we build on a long line of work that argues that young people learn not only in school, but also in (online) communities that, even if not explicitly educational, are far from being considered ‘trivial’ (Ito et al., 2019; Jenkins et al., 2015; Ladwig & Sefton-Green, 2018; Paradise, 1998; Ünlüsoy et al., 2013). Although historically SPs and the pedagogies of learning communities outside of educational institutions are not intrinsically disruptive of each other (Gerrard, 2014) in the case of online learning communities, scholars have claimed that they can produce ‘new’ educational realities (Porfilio & Carr, 2010; Tuck & Yang, 2011). Furthermore, scholars studying these communities have often theorised that they disrupt schooling practices (Säljö, 2010; Wright, 2021). This idea of online communities disrupting schooling practices can be traced back to work on (online) learning communities, which has argued that these communities provide young people opportunities to learn differently from how they learn in schools (Ito et al., 2019; Jenkins et al., 2015; Ladwig & Sefton-Green, 2018; Paradise, 1998; Ünlüsoy et al., 2013). This is particularly argued in respect of online spaces as these offer ‘new’ learning opportunities for youth such as widened access to experts, peers, resources, and opportunities to become producers of information with an audience (Lankshear & Knobel, 2007; Ünlüsoy et al., 2022). Such studies question, for example, why students need to reproduce knowledge by rote for school exams when they can access Google on their mobile phones at any time (Säljö, 2010).

Such research outlines a disconnect between the technological realities of youth’s learning in online communities and learning at school (Green & Bigum, 1993; Ito et al., 2019). This disconnect can be situated within a broader discussion of alienation from school: young people’s diminishing desire to learn within formal education as they are uncertain how to relate its curriculum to their (future) lives and ambitions (Lave & McDermott, 2002; McInerney, 2009). While in psychological literature ‘alienation’ is often perceived as a psychological trait or individual deficit, implying that it could be solved, for example by implementing educational interventions to improve motivation or engagement (Hascher & Hadjar, 2018; McInerney, 2009), critical studies in education argue that alienation is a societal problem in which educational systems do not match young people’s lived experiences of what is valuable (Lave & McDermott, 2002; McInerney, 2009). This strand of literature is rooted in Marx's theory of alienated labour, where workers are cut off from their work’s value. Similarly, literature on alienated learning sees alienation as a process whereby youth no longer see value, purpose, or societal relevance in their learning (Lave & McDermott, 2002). Subsequently, these youth no longer see ‘real-world’ significance of their learning (Wrigley et al., 2012) or how it helps them develop as democratic citizens (Down et al., 2019). Students who experience alienation may therefore become critical of school as they do not understand how its lessons are relevant. In the context of this paper, alienation refers to how the technologically mediated realities of youth’s out-of-school learning are perhaps increasingly disconnected from in-school learning practices, and vice versa.

By developing an understanding of OCPs and how youth compare them to SPs, we aim to go beyond describing a disconnect, to an understanding of how young people’s OCPs and their alienating experiences at school can be productively understood as destabilising SPs and, potentially, as creating modes of alternative pedagogy. To describe this interaction between different pedagogies, we use Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of (de- and re-)territorialisation Deleuze and Guattari (1987) as a heuristic. Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘(de- and re-)territorialisation’ is rooted in their work that pushes against dualistic frameworks of western philosophy to describe transformation and fixation (Parr, 2010). Deterritorialisation is ‘a movement producing change’, disrupting fixed relations, whereas (re)territorialisation describes stratified relations (Parr, 2010, p. 69). If we apply these concepts to pedagogical contexts, territorialisation as a conservative force can be understood as how particular contexts, such as schools or online communities, produce stratified normative learning relations. For example, how teachers are perceived as experts. Deterritorialisation as a movement of transformation can be understood as disruptive of such fixed pedagogical relations, for example challenging teachers as experts by drawing on online expertise. Reterritorialisation can be understood as alternative pedagogical structures, for example when through such critiques of teachers as experts and based on online forms of expertise, new norms on expertise are acknowledged. We want to explore whether young people’s experiences with OCPs and their critiques of SPs might be interpreted as de- and reterritorialised pedagogies. By using the concept of reterritorialisation, we want to move our analysis beyond describing the interaction between SPs and OCPs as a binary, towards understanding what hybrid pedagogies arise as shifted territories induced by the deterritorialisation OCPs might have brought to SPs’ territorialisation of learning. We do this because we suspect that youth’s reflections on SPs do not stop at a sense of disconnect and opposition between OCPs and SPs (Ito et al., 2019), but that they can be interpreted as a deterritorialising force that produces transformed pedagogies by youth’s engagement with ‘new’ social and material configurations of online learning communities.

Approaching youth’s pedagogies

The study is part of a larger ethnographic study on youth’s online, informal, learning communities, which we understand as ‘communities of practice’ (Lave, 1991; Paradise & Rogoff, 2009). This paper draws on the semi-structured interviews with 37 participants.²

Selection procedure

As detailed below, we first selected social media platforms, second, communities from those platforms, third, community leaders, and, lastly, participants from these leaders’ followers.

Platform selection

We selected YouTube, Twitch and TikTok as these are popular platforms among youth. Though exact numbers on how many 13–25-year-olds use these platforms are not publicly available, these platforms are used frequently by youth (See e.g. Ceci, 2022b, 2022b; Hoekstra et al., 2022; Twitch, 2021).

Community selection

We selected communities centred around a shared interest. This is a common characteristic of informal (online) learning spaces (Gee, 2017) because it is argued the ongoing process of becoming part of a community makes learning inherently meaningful (Paradise & Rogoff, 2009). To avoid moving too far and staying too close to SPs, we selected two communities per platform, one that had learning as a core part of their main interest and aim, and one that had learning as a less central part of their main interest and aim, according to the goals of that community as expressed by the ‘members’. Based on these criteria, we selected three communities with learning as their core aim: an e-commerce community on YouTube, an infosec community on Twitch, and a history community on TikTok and three communities where learning was less explicitly the core aim of the community in comparison to the other selected community: a LGBTQI+ vlogging community on YouTube, a speedrunning community on Twitch, and a sustainability community on TikTok.

Participant selection

Since the communities on the selected platforms are vast and extend the boundaries of the selected platforms, creating a representative selection from a delimited population is impossible. Based on our selection strategy, we cannot claim representativeness for all the communities, which is neither the goal given our research aim nor possible. Neither do we claim to be representative of all youth. Not all youth for instance wish to participate or have access to online communities. Nonetheless, we implemented criteria to attempt to achieve a broad representation of the youth who do participate within these communities. The first criterion is that participants needed to be ‘members’ of the community. Participants struggled with the term ‘membership’ though. Previous research has also argued that ‘membership’ is often more fluid in these types of communities online (Gee, 2017). As such, instead of asking participants to self-identify as a member, we asked participants whether they were watching and/or interacting with the content of community’s leaders. Community leaders had to be video content creators and ‘heavyweight’ members on these platforms:

Frequent, embedded members, with ties and commitment to others in the group, have a strong concern for their reputation in the network, the continuation of the initiative and how the community operates. (Haythornthwaite, 2018, p. 27)

Secondly, participants had to be 13 to 25 years old, allowing for slightly older creators to participate, whilst focussing on young people still in formal education or recently finishing formal education. Thirdly, we included both peripheral and core members of communities, aiming for a mix of community leaders, long term members and casual members to represent the diverse ways of youth’s community engagement (Lave, 1991). We did not ask participants to provide their gender for the purposes of this research. We refer to participants as ‘they’, unless their pronouns were explicitly and publicly shared. To offer participants the possibility to recognise themselves in published research, while taking protecting the privacy of our participants seriously, we offered participants to remain anonymous via a pseudonym. Most chose pseudonyms themselves, some used user- or real names, others we chose for them. Community leaders who were not interviewed are mentioned by their publicly accessible usernames.

Approaching participants

We contacted ‘regular members’ and community leaders in three manners, via:

1. a direct message to them or their manager asking them to participate,

2. an online form shared within the community where participants could sign up,

3. or through snowballing if the other methods failed to bring about enough participants.

We shared messages and forms via YouTube, Twitch, TikTok and adjacent platforms these communities used. We conducted all interviews via a live video call, except for the interviews with Agus and Daruk which we conducted via chat. Interviews were semi-structured, and a topic list was used (see supplement). We first asked participants to reflect on their online learning experiences, then on their experiences with school and at the end asked participants to explicitly compare those contexts, though sometimes participants would mention these topics themselves in a different order. We used NVivo to organise participant expressions to answer our research questions. Participants tended to experience the interviews as valuable to themselves, expressing having gained new insights due to the interview or thanking us for the interview, for instance Vani (20, U.S.): ‘this was really entertaining, helped me learn a lot too. So, thank you for your time as well’. This could indicate that participants tended to become more reflective of their own practices online throughout the interview. Such reflection on their own online practices as learning, might be valuable for youth to feel recognised in their online activities, also indicated by participants expressing gratefulness for the fact that we ‘found them’. Dutch citations (the native language of three authors) are translated to English in keeping as closely to the original wording as possible, indicated by ‘(T)’.

Analysing young people’s perspectives on pedagogies

Our analysis focuses on understanding how youth’s experiences with OCPs dialogue with their reflections on SPs. We start from an understanding of pedagogy as a particular form of power that is disciplinary and nurturing (Bernstein, 2000; Singh, 2017). In other words, at the heart of our analysis we are interested in how power relations embedded in online communities and school discourses, shape youth’s experiences of learning. Accordingly, we use a critical discourse analysis to look at interviewees’ experiences, understanding power as embedded in everyday discourse. However, we look at the relations between these different forms of power through the previously introduced Deleuzian-Guattarian concepts of de- and (re-)territorialisation to interrogate the ‘regimes of truth’ embedded in SPs and OCPs. This takes the form of concentrating on what young people say they value and how they attribute purpose, meaning and validity to the texture of the learning experience and how they credit its existential and instrumental effects through the comparisons they make and qualities they ascribe in the immediate and longer term. Critical discourse analysis provides the framework for looking at youth’s individual experiences to interrogate the regimes of truth of OCPs and SPs (Bignall, 2008). The concepts of de- and (re-)territorialisation enable an analysis of how those truth regimes of OCPs and SPs (co-)create and disrupt each other.

We took a bottom-up understanding to map SPs and OCPs, taking as SPs anything that young people repeatedly label explicitly as belonging to school (e.g. teachers, classes); and as online pedagogies anything that young people repeatedly label as online ways of structuring, valuing, and recognising learning. Subsequently, we focused on what youth themselves consider to be SPs or OCPs which limits our understanding of these pedagogies to youth’s reflections on their experiences, and thus we make no claims about how such reflections represent what happens in school or online communities. Importantly, we do not wish to say that OCPs and SPs exist in a binary (see e.g. Bronkhorst & Akkerman, 2016), but rather argue that these are in a constant de- and reterritorialisation process, which may impact (some) young people’s needs for learning.

We began our analysis with the direct comparisons youth made between their individual online experiences and pedagogies they associated with school, and with their descriptions of OCPs and SPs more generally, where such a comparison would be more direct. An example of a direct comparison would be ‘Online you can pick your own teachers, whereas at school you are stuck with the one you get’. An example of an indirect comparison would be: ‘At school you are stuck with a syllabus picked out for you’. While a later they would say ‘Online I can pick and choose which resources and teachers I want to use’. We then looked at which comparisons between SPs and OCPs would recur and could be clustered around certain central comparisons. Finally, we looked at how we could interpret this conversation between SPs and OCPs, their (de-)territorialisation, as producing reterritorialised/alternative pedagogies.

Introducing participants and communities

General information on interviewed youth

Though participants from these communities were socially, and culturally diverse, participants from the same community would share an interest, values and aims that adhered to their community as will become apparent in the themes below. The age of participants for instance varied from 14 to 24 years old (n = 37, mean = 19, SD = 2.4). Educational level of participants from all communities across all platforms also varied from, for example, vocational education, university dropouts to middle/high school students to students in the applied sciences. Participants’ current country of residence varied as well ranging from the Netherlands to Brazil, to the United States, to Finland, to South-Africa, to India. For specific participant information see the table in the supplements.

Community introductions

Below, we will introduce each community based on its dominant aims, norms, and practices, which we take from participants’ expressions about the community and the videos the community leaders produce. We introduce these communities to contextualise the experiences of participants and to demonstrate how these are online learning communities. We added a hyperlink to each introduction with an example from this community to aid in understanding these communities. For YouTube and TikTok these channels draw such a big number of viewers that these can be considered ‘public space’ (see NESH, 2019). On Twitch, due to the platform’s more intimate nature, the streamers have given informed consent to use their channels in publications.

YouTube – E-commerce

The e-commerce community aims to educate and motivate around a shared interest in becoming an online entrepreneur in areas such as online marketing. On YouTube, the main practice revolves around community leaders sharing their (luxury) lifestyle and story, and explaining skills related to becoming an online entrepreneur, often with the additional aim of selling their online courses (https://www.youtube.com/@JoshuaKaats/featured).

YouTube – LGBTQI+ vlogging

The LGBTQI+ vlogging community aims to entertain their audiences with vlog content such as shop vlogs, make up tutorials, and reaction videos. Some of these videos centre on the aim to educate viewers about LGBTQI+ identities and sexual health. Their main practices on YouTube revolve around viewing and discussing LGBTQI+ vlogging content, often with humour (https://www.youtube.com/@AliceOlsthoorn).

Twitch – infosec

The infosec community on Twitch aims to teach and share information-security (infosec) knowledge online. Infosec concerns itself with the tools and processes for (testing) the protection of digital information. Their main practices on Twitch revolve around real-time programming and chatting about infosec and other topics (https://www.twitch.tv/d0nutptr).

Twitch - speedrun

The speedrun community on Twitch aims to entertain and socialise around the shared interest in gaming and speedrunning. Speedrunning is the activity of trying to complete a game as quickly as possible by ‘running it’. The main practices on Twitch are tournaments or speedrunners practicing (https://www.twitch.tv/bsg_marathon).

TikTok – history

The history community on TikTok aims to entertain and educate TikTok users with historical knowledge. They hope to encourage their peers to become interested in history. Their main practices are sharing, discussing, and delivering (humorous) commentaries about history via TikTok videos (https://shorturl.at/7liYt).

TikTok - sustainability

The sustainability community on TikTok aims to educate and activate users around a shared interest in sustainability issues. Their main practices range from creating and interacting with videos in which members call upon viewers to sign petitions to informative videos on recycling and marine ecosystems (https://www.ecotokcollective.com/).

OCPs deterritorialising SPs

We distinguished four thematic areas that were recurring throughout the interviews and embody how OCPs can be seen as deterritorialising SPs and how youth’s comparisons between OCPs and SPs can be interpreted as potentially resulting in alienation from school and as producing needs for ‘alternative’ online pedagogies. For each theme, we focus on one or two illustrative interviews of how the theme resonated across interviews.

Online control over learning and school’s alienating control over learning

Participants from the e-com, infosec and history community note that participation in their communities provides them with opportunities to organise their own learning. In contrast, they criticised how school ‘controlled’ their learning. Albony Cal (14, India), from the infosec community, for example, makes the following comparison between school and online:

you have to follow a certain syllabus when you’re learning in school you know. Online you can just learn what you want to learn, and what you’re interested in. (…) Like if I don’t want to learn history, I will not learn it. But in school you have to do it, because, you know, there are exams.

Albony experiences syllabi as controlling their learning, and exams as the purpose for their learning. In contrast, Albony reflects that online spaces allow them to take control over their own learning. Furthermore, they also have a sense of purpose for taking such control over their learning that is produced through encountering the infosec community:

I wanted to hack my neighbours Wi-Fi to get free internet (…). So, I started searching about hacking, but then I found about (…) ethical hacking and, you know, you can build a career in it.

Albony’s wish for free Wi-Fi evolves into something else when they encounter the infosec community – as becomes apparent in response to a question about ethical hacking: ‘I want to, you know, secure the internet, help other people. I’m really into it to learn new things’. Whereas school stands, for Albony, for control and unclear purposes, in the infosec community Albony feels a sense of control and is aware of a clear aim for their learning. Albony continues to talk about how they use streamers and YouTube to learn and develop their own approach to doing infosec. f3b4def45dd6295 (21, infosec, the Netherlands) also describes that in their experience creating their own learning goals and path using online resources, worked better for them than the laid-out path and goals for learning at school. Participants’ descriptions of their experiences with online learning in comparison to their experiences with formal education, like Albony’s and f3b4def45dd6295’s, illustrate how for them, school’s control alienates them from their purpose of what and how they (want to) learn. Moreover, their online experiences within the infosec community could have perhaps produced such a desire to need more control as they have experienced online, or the other way around.

E-commerce, speedrun, infosec and history community participants also shared experiencing control over their learning in online communities creating a purpose, in contrast to experiencing school as controlling. This produces a sense of alienation, experiencing SPs’ control over their learning as disconnected from their learning goals, while online communities provided them with control and purpose for their learning. Simultaneously, participants from the e-commerce and history communities still implicitly held the assumption that school’s control is also important for example, to teach their peers (and themselves) to see the value and need for learning about history. In conclusion, these interviews could be interpreted to express an alternative pedagogy which emphasises control over learning.

Online ‘real world’ accreditation and school’s alienating ‘out of context’ testing

As we will explain below, participants from the infosec and e-commerce community question the value of formal credentials, because they perceive these as having, in part, lost their relevance for demonstrating the skills and knowledge needed to succeed in the fields of their online communities.

Participants from the infosec community argued that formal education accreditation systems cannot keep up with the developments in their field. Our interview with infosec community leader d0nut (25, U.S., infosec) on Twitch illustrates this theme particularly well. D0nut works in the infosec sector and did not finish their university degree. D0nut argues their field moves towards less formal degrees: ‘I think uh tech in general is moving towards less degrees weirdly enough. (…) Infosec especially is like very anti degree in a weird way’. Participants explain this move towards less degrees as rooted in how formal exams, according to them, do not test the skills needed to perform in infosec, but rather knowledge about the skill. D0nut:

infosec seems to prioritise practical things. So, […] would you want to test a developer by them doing a multiple-choice question or would you want them to sit down and write code and do something? […] that’s why (…) in the community people do like or like OSCP [Offensive Security Certified Professional] that have [] practical examination.

The OSCP certification that d0nut mentions here, requires their ‘students’ to demonstrate infosec abilities by doing practical penetration tests of security systems. Such a certification, created by the wider infosec community, is valued because it asks of ‘students’ to demonstrate skills they need to perform in this field. Additionally, when we ask d0nut to compare online learning with schooling, they expressed another critique on school testing, which can be extended to school learning more generally, and forms both a contrast with OSCP testing and the infosec working context:

if I’m doing my job, I can always like google something or look something up on my phone, like I’m not restricted by that. But if I’m in class and the teacher is lecturing uhm, […] and something they said didn’t make a lot of sense and I want to look it up. Like I get it, like kids get distracted with phones […]. I really can’t fault them too much for that but […] it feels very silly.

Being cut off from resources in examinations is what seems to cause d0nut to feel a sense of disconnect between their practices as an expert in the field, and how formal education prepares for and tests skills for such a job.

The e-commerce and infosec community’s critique on schools’ accreditation practices is in line with classic critiques of schools and of the school context more generally being divorced from ‘real world’ practices. However, these communities also promote particular forms of accreditation of on-the-spot testing of current problems while being observed by experts and having optimal access to online resources while being tested. Furthermore, their critique must also be understood against ‘new’ opportunities for careers that are produced in online communities that formal education cannot keep up with. This theme demonstrates how these communities experience a need for alternative qualifications, deterritorialising school’s territorialisation of such examinations by creating their own (means for) qualification. Rosa (17, the Netherlands, e-commerce) (T): ‘Teachers at our school are all older and old-fashioned […] this [e-commerce] is the new way of working or to earn money’. Though this critique is most common within the infosec and e-commerce communities, participants from other communities also echo these doubts. Vani (22, U.S.), who has a sustainable business, for instance shares that they aim for a degree ‘to keep my family at bay’, but would not pursue a formal degree if they would be ‘racking up debt’ as they believe their sustainable business, for which they argue to rely on online learning resources, can provide them with a successful future, not initially their degree in Marine Science. Nonetheless, participants acknowledge that this might be specific to their field, arguing that formal accreditation might still be important for fields other than their own.

Online’s felt societal impact and school’s alienating ‘ignorance’

As we will illustrate below, participants from the sustainability and LGBTQI+ vlogging communities describe their learning experiences online as relevant for societal issues they care about. In part they attribute this relevance to how online spaces enable access to a wider audience for these issues, which produces a need to use such a space for advocacy for LGBTQI+ rights and sustainability issues. In contrast, they experience school as paying insufficient attention to this need for activism.

Our interview with Jamie de Vries (19, the Netherlands) is indicative for how these online communities produce a need for an alternative pedagogy that deterritorialises formal pedagogies; they explain, when we asked them why they watch LGBTQI+ vlogging content, that it helps them to ‘educate themselves’ about ‘what matters’ (T):

She doesn’t only concern herself with what is funny, but also with what matters, and I think it’s kind of nice to then also educate myself in those areas because I don’t know a lot about it.

We asked them for an example to clarify how they then ‘educate themselves’ (T):

Well, that I for instance used to use a lot of [slurs] (.) […] Well, that’s something I no longer do, because that’s not entirely, that I also kind of owe [my standard], because I also don’t like it when people call me faggot.

Such a description of placing value on a learning experience revolving around becoming more inclusive and finding a particular position in a societal issue that matters to them, are common among participants from this community. In contrast, Jamie, and others, described school as divorced from the societal issues that they think matter: ‘I think actually that I’ve learnt more societal stuff from YouTube […] and that school is really a bit detached from this’. This is a critique given new energy and space for the mainstream online. All participants from this community perceive school as not paying sufficient attention to educating youth about the diversity of gender identities and sexualities. When discussing social media though, they describe to value how these spaces enable them to obtain and spread knowledge about gender identities and sexualities in their own and others’ lives. In result, they experience a disconnect between what is to them important to learn and act on, as they have experienced in these online communities, and school’s perceived disregard for these topics. Based on their online experiences, they also argue that school should teach about these topics. As such, they simultaneously acknowledge the value of the normative role education could play in youth’s lives, though it does not meet the needs of their community.

The sustainability community experiences a similar alienating disconnect. Emma (2) (22, U.S.): ‘as a student, you’re sort of in a weird place where you are learning about all these things, you’re not really doing anything’. Emma (2) explains that they started to create content on TikTok, because TikTok offers them the tools to reach people with their activism beyond their educational level and direct environment, whereas they feel school insufficiently teaches them about sustainability and more particularly does not enable them to act on the knowledge that they receive. Such sentiments are echoed by other participants. Participants’ descriptions of learning within the TikTok sustainability and the YouTube vlogging LGBTQI+ community describe how online pedagogies produce a need to reach out and act on societal issues they care about, which could be interpreted, by using their reflections on formal education, as deterritorialising SPs (experienced) distance from societal issues.

The online space for collaborative experimentation and school’s alienating pressure to perform

Participants from the Twitch communities, infosec and speedrunning, describe SPs as creating a pressure to perform by leaving no room for mistakes and experimentation. Simultaneously, they describe their communities as offering a safe space for experimentation by perceiving performance as a collaborative practice. For example, Ezra (15, U.S.) speedruns, though at first, they thought: ‘there’s no way someone like me could do that’. However, their attitude changed quickly by engaging with the speedrun community: ‘Oh, this doesn’t look that complicated or hard. And I was like, I could probably try this myself’. The sense of safety for Ezra to start to experiment with something they first thought intimidating stands in stark contrast with their evaluation of school:

within school, it’s a lot of like, there’s this idea that if you’re not good at these core subjects, that means that you’re just not smart in general. And I feel like that kind of impacts and hurts a lot of students like myself included, because I was always really bad at math. And my teachers would, actually it was just because I was like dumb, when there were other aspects that I was doing really well. And it was just like that one class I wasn’t good at.

They describe a performative culture at school where they feel unsafe to experiment as they feel as if one individual mistake defines one as ‘dumb’. This description stands in stark contrast with Ezra’s descriptions of their experiences in the speedrun community, which they describe as providing a safe space for experimentation and making mistakes by placing the pressure to perform on the general community:

in these online communities, it’s very well known that certain runners are just better at some categories. And certain runners are just like not good at categories. And like, you know, people don’t make a big deal out of it or be like you’re not as good of a runner because you choose this way instead of the other way.

Though engaging in learning in an environment that might at first seem highly performative, as it is about being the fastest, it is at school where Ezra experiences a performance culture in which the grading system fixes you within a category without offering a place to experiment to prove otherwise. In contrast, online Ezra is allowed to explore where their strengths to perform lie.

For others from the speedrunning community this also translates to skills beyond speedrunning. Carl. T (17, Luxembourg) and Mark (19, Netherlands), for example, reflect on how Twitch’s anonymity in chat allows for experimentation for building social skills, of not being afraid of failure. D0nut describes how in their stream they help people to regain that sense of safety for experimentation apart from the anonymity that is afforded by the platform. D0nut starts by explaining how these people express their negative attitude towards learning: ‘they hate learning because they had bad experiences’. D0nut tries to again get these people interested in learning in this manner:

if something doesn’t make sense, like you can always have the opportunity to re-explain it and people are behind a pseudonym so, it’s not like you know, you get picked on for not understanding the second or third explanation you know, you can always ask. You can google something really quick.

These communities recognise and value learning by offering a space for experimentation while also making learning a communal effort in which mistakes and exploration are part of finding a personal way to learn. This collective effort produces a different pedagogy where performance still matters, but by emphasising communal performance rather than individual performance, this community produces a need to value learning when it contributes to the community. Returning from experiencing such a collective, safe experience for learning to school might alienate these members from the individualised performative learning culture, or vice versa. Members do not consistently have to perform well to come along in these communities, they are allowed to slip up and experiment. If they are interested and wish to contribute to the community, they can explore how they can best perform and be a part of that community.

Youth’s reimagining of pedagogy

We now want to explore whether we can interpret the conversation between OCPs and SPs as laid out in the above themes more conceptually, as ‘reimagined pedagogies’. We do so to continue the work of mapping how current (technological) contexts produce particular pedagogies (Lankshear & Knobel, 2007; Säljö, 2010) while also moving beyond a binary description of how online learning alienates young people from school learning (Green & Bigum, 1993; Ito et al., 2019; Säljö, 2010). We attempt such a move by imagining alternative pedagogic futures, in line with Bernstein (Singh, 2017). We do this by returning to the concept used by Kellan, one of the participants: ‘desire’.

Using the idea of ‘desire’ as a starting point for thinking about reimagination, forces us to read our themes, these conversations between the different pedagogies youth experience, as a productive force of reimagination. Alienated experiences of schooling in conversation with OCPs can then become both productive and destructive to create ‘new’ pedagogic futures. Kellan’s expression of the desire missing in education, then becomes not about ‘missing’ or lack, but indicates an alienation that can become productive. Deleuze and Guattari explicitly position ‘desire’ as also not a force of ‘lack’, but as a creative and destructive force that is not encouraged by needs but rather needs are the result of desire (Buchanon, 2013; Ringrose, 2015). They describe ‘desire’ as a creative force that does not exist within the individual but rather emerges from collective movements (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Using ‘desire’ in this way we can understand that these OCPs are not indicating a lack of certain learning experiences, but rather that the conversation between the collective creative and destructive forces of online communities and alienating experiences with SPs, produce ‘new’ needs for learning (such as space for experimentation), that are then individually experienced as ‘missing’.

We can further interpret this sense of ‘desire’ as a mode of ‘reimagination’. Appadurai describes ‘imagination’ as a collective act that creates social imaginaries through which the collective and individual members of a collective can be controlled and can create counter narratives (2000). We can thus use ‘reimagination’ as a positive and normative way of coping with these de-/reterritorialising forms of desire. The idea of reimagination allows us to modulate desire as an experimental, productive and (potentially) destructive social force into one that creates (counter)narratives in collectives, such as young people learning together online. In sum, while previous approaches have argued that young people experience pedagogies online that they then feel are lacking within school (Ito et al., 2019; Lankshear & Knobel, 2007; Säljö, 2010), we argue that new needs for learning in schools are produced by the desires that arise from being able to participate in and across different pedagogical contexts.

If we apply this lens of reimagination to our themes, what alternative pedagogic futures can we see? The first theme offers a pedagogy in which learners are given more control over their learning trajectories, a theme that has been developed extensively in relation to web 2.0 technologies (Ito et al., 2019; Jenkins, 2006; Lankshear & Knobel, 2007; Säljö, 2010). Learning becomes about giving young people the agency and confidence to shape their own learning trajectories to some extent, beyond the disciplinary curricula of school. The second theme, the destabilisation of recognition for formal accreditation, could be interpreted as a reimagining of accreditation as being about demonstrating skill and knowledge in ‘real’ professional contexts. Especially considering a wider discussion about what skills should be valued given the ‘new’ career opportunities young people are encountering online. In the third theme, youth value how online pedagogies empower them to act on societal issues. This experience explicitly critiques formal pedagogies, which are perceived as alienating because of their perceived inability to provide learners with opportunities to effect change. This challenge to SPs stands as a way of reimagining how learning could be valued when it is engaging societal issues youth care about. Our fourth theme could be interpreted to restructure learning to diminish the alienating, pressure to perform, by making learning part of a collaborative effort and by including failure and experimentation as part of a personal way to learn.

While we can connect these reimagined pedagogies to existing ideas in the literature on the innovative power of technologies for learning (see e.g. Gee, 2017; Ito et al., 2019; Lankshear & Knobel, 2007), our study contributes ‘new’ insights in three ways. First, our discussion is rooted in youth’s own evaluations of what is meaningful for their learning. Second, whereas earlier research often discussed these pedagogies as if produced by ‘new’ technologies on their own, here we demonstrate that OCPs are constituted by an ongoing process of engagement with how SPs impose boundaries on youth’s learning. Similarly, youth’s critiques rooted in alienation only exist in the entanglement with online, ‘alternative’ pedagogies to produce reimagined pedagogies. Third, we have situated our themes within a reimagination perspective to make them productive of alternative pedagogical realities, moving beyond disruption.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we will first reflect on our use of (de-/re-)territorialisation as an analytical framework. Second, we explore how we can draw from the latter reimaginations to inspire pedagogies that make alienation experiences productive of change. Finally, we will consider how these online pedagogies can be read as collective forces for new global (re-)imaginaries of school, given that these participants live across the globe.

First, we have shown that using (de-/re-)territorialisation to analyse conversations between different pedagogical contexts is productive for a holistic approach to youth’s perspectives on what constitutes valuable learning. Particularly, it enables such a discussion without falling into binaries between pedagogical contexts (school versus online). Instead, this lens facilitates a discussion of how different pedagogical contexts intersect and produce collective ‘new’ needs for learning. Additionally, our usage of ‘desire’ enables a discussion of how to reimagine learning based on needs produced by the intersections of OCPs and SPs, rather than perceiving OCPs as a trivial disruption of SPs.

Second, rather than arguing that school is no longer needed in the digital age, which is not what youth themselves argue, we hope that our conclusions can act as a heuristic for reimagining how learning can be valued, recognised, and structured. Inspired by the speedrunners, educators can, for example, seek to confront the performative culture of SPs by creating opportunities for experimentation, replacing learning measurements with support while at the same time responding to young people’s need to experience learning as a collective performance. Such a reimagining is in line with critical studies of alienation, which argue that the measurements of school leads learners who experience alienation to worry about individual performances in relation to others, rather than focusing on what people could learn if they collaborated (Lave & McDermott, 2002). This study not only builds on such work but takes one step further by demonstrating how youth construct such learning online. Thus, paying more attention to collective performance and space for experimentation may be one way to move beyond such alienated learning experiences. Another example, inspired by LGBTQI+ vloggers’ and sustainability TikTokkers’ practices to engage with pressing societal issues, is that schools could implement (more) ‘community-engaged learning’, where school-learning is designed with the aim of critically co-producing knowledge with communities that are in practice working on the topic one is learning about (see e.g. Cachelin & Nicolosi, 2022). Such learning would be consistent with how sustainability TikTokkers and LGBTQI+ vloggers learn about making a change, while actively experiencing themselves as contributing to that change. This result is consistent with previous work that attempts to counter alienation by arguing for the development of critical consciousness in students by engaging them in discussions about societal issues (McInerney, 2009). The idea is that by making such discussion an integral part of education, students can feel more empowered and knowledgeable about the issues they face in everyday life and see value in the contributions education can make to face such issues (McInerney, 2009). In conclusion, these reimagined pedagogies could help academics, educators, and policy makers to critically re-evaluate mainstream pedagogies and address some of the underlying issues that result in experiencing alienation within schools. Simultaneously, these online communities could benefit from learning critical attitudes in schools about the issues surrounding online learning as a territory controlled by commercial companies (see e.g. Van Dijck et al., 2018), as schools offer a unique space, separate from such influences, to reflect on the ‘outside world’ (Masschelein & Simons, 2013). In other words, by facilitating a conversation between OCPs and SPs we can challenge educators and students to move beyond a disconnect and enable a perspective on learning in which SPs and OCPs be put to work for youth’s learning both in and out of school.

Lastly, our conclusions show that critiques of school online and experiences of alienation transcend national boundaries. We saw similarities in young people’s reflections on alienated learning in formal education, even though participants are part of different education systems in different parts of the world. Ezra from the U.S. and Bradley from the Netherlands both experience a pressure to perform in school. Aliza from South-Africa and Ronald from the Netherlands both experience that school does not allow them to learn (enough) about the issues that matter to their everyday lives. These criticisms partly reflect a longer history of critiques on school discourses, but it could also be the result of contemporary educational policies with a global reach (Beech, 2009; McInerney, 2009). Alternatively, their online communities, through which they engage with youth from around the world, could facilitate a shared social imaginary of what ‘school’ is and responses to such a social imaginary. Because of the ‘spreadability’ and ‘reach’ (Boyd, 2014) of social media, such narratives can be more easily disseminated. Such social imaginaries could indicate a narrative of schooling that is collective and global, which speaks to Appadurai’s description of imagination as a collective act in times of globalisation, resulting in people creating and sharing social imaginaries that transcend local boundaries. Similarly, it has been argued that such online spaces play a role in creating global narratives on what it means to be young (Kontopodis et al., 2017). Such opportunities for youth to compare national educational systems online, could further fuel alienation from (national) schooling, and be collective forces for new global imaginaries of schooling. Vice versa, through the constant re-working of what learning means through the different pedagogies existing online, offline, at school and in school, such opportunities could inspire what youth consider as non-alienated forms of learning online. Therefore, it becomes even more pressing to take youth’s critiques of pedagogy seriously online and use them as resources to critically reimagine what it means to learn within international educational policy and research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Haagsche Genootschap.

Notes on contributors

Z. Vermeire

Z. Vermeire, Postdoc researcher, Utrecht University Zowi Vermeire is interested in research that crosses the boundaries between youth, education and (popular) media. She started her academic career in media, sociology and philosophy and has always remained interested in the impact of media on our assumptions about our socio- cultural context. Using an interdisciplinary lens in her research, she aims to contribute to research that challenges readers to rethink the status quo. Currently, she works as a postdoc researcher, studying the governance of interdisciplinary education at Utrecht University.

M.J. de Haan

M.J. de Haan, Professor Social and Intercultural Education, Utrecht University Maria de Haan is interested in how learning practices are shaped and transformed by the wider conditions of the socio-cultural communities they are part of, in particular in how ‘old’ traditions transform through the contact of ‘new’ ones. Earlier work focuses on transformation of learning practices in a Native American community in Mexico and on inter-ethnic knowledge sharing in multi-ethnic classrooms in the Netherlands. More recent work involves the transformation of socialization during migration and the informal learning of (immigrant) teens online. Currently she is also involved in the design of educational interventions in relation to polarisation and digital citizenship.

J. Sefton-Green

J. Sefton-Green, Professor New Media Education, Deakin University Julian Sefton-Green is interested in all things digital from a critical perspective. He has studied: classroom interactions, school life, curriculum change, creative media practices, youth community centre and out-of-school digital cultures over the last 30 years. He is particularly interested in forms of learning outside of the school, both in non-formal learning institutions and in everyday social activities; and how these might play a part in wider political projects of educational reform. He explores how everyday uses of the digital intersect with social inequality in order to enable learning in young people’s cultural, creative, civic and political lives.

S.F. Akkerman

S.F. Akkerman, Professor of Educational Sciences, Utrecht University Sanne Akkerman is Professor of Educational and Learning Sciences. Her research focuses on the question how students and professionals cross social, organizational, and disciplinary boundaries, with a PhD (2006, judicium cum laude) on this topic, and two literature syntheses on boundary crossing (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011; Bronkhorst & Akkerman, 2016). Akkerman is currently finalizing an ERC Grant (Lost in Transition? Multiple Interests in contexts of Education, Leisure and Work) in which she and her team examined challenges faced by adolescents’ in 1) pursuing multiple and often diverging interests across disciplinary and leisure domains, 2) receiving potentially conflicting social support in school, peer and home contexts, and 3) subsequent challenges in making school and career choices. A central instrument in this research is a smartphone application that functions as a so-called diary method (or so-called Experience Sampling Method) to capture the everyday interest experiences.

Notes

1. We use inverted commas for ‘new’ to emphasise that practices, events, or technologies are hardly ever entirely new, but rooted in longstanding histories of the interaction between social developments and perspectives on technological progress.

2. The study is approved by the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences of Utrecht University, approval number: 20–0553.