to intervene in the world around them. Access to technology, we argue, is no longer a sufficient measure of success, better learning futures, or digital equity. Rather, those on the ground—parents, educators—or designing policy to enrich the lives of young people must seek to create spaces, resources, and learning opportunities that empower young people to participate in the making of new social, civic, and economic futures.
Much of the debate about technology in the education of teens in the digital edge pivots around workforce development or preparing them for jobs that are steadily being erased by automation and globalization. The career-ready discourse, as we discuss in the conclusion, misses the critical opportunity to design schools and curricula that prepare students for a society and economy marked by complexity, uncertainty, and diversity. As a result of our fieldwork at Freeway, we pose a different challenge: rather than preparing students for today’s jobs (career readiness), why not support their preparation for the social, civic, and economic uncertainties of tomorrow (future readiness).
The three factors noted above—the new geography of inequality, the resegregation of school and learning, and shifts in the digital divide—contribute in unique ways to the making of the digital edge and the prospects for opportunity and mobility among Freeway students. Schools do not live in a vacuum. In fact, schools are a prominent reflection of society’s racial formations and social and economic inequalities.32 As we began to analyze the data from our fieldwork, we found ourselves striving to understand how the social and economic currents that were happening outside the walls of Freeway influenced what we observed inside the school.
Doing School in the Digital Edge
The demographic and academic achievement data cited above offer insight into the world that we encountered at Freeway. But these data do not tell the whole story. In fact, only looking at these data obscures the practices and social relations that present a more nuanced portrait of Freeway. Thus, our analysis is attentive to the diverse ways Freeway students “do school.” In her investigation of a group of high-achieving high school students, Denise Clark Pope identifies a number of ways that they craftily manage the stress of high-demand courses, hypercompetitive extracurricular schedules, and parental expectations that they gain admission to a select college.33 During our fieldwork at Freeway we considered this question: How do students in resource poor and under-performing school settings do school?
Much of the research to date has been influenced by the view that low-performing black students, for example, foster an oppositional culture that negates academic achievement.34 This claim essentially states that black students do school by trying to fail. In recent years, however, researchers have challenged the oppositional culture perspective.
For example, Prudence Carter suggests that black students’ struggles in school may have less to do with an opposition to learning and more to do with an opposition to authority and a disciplinary apparatus that subjects them to harsher punishment and cultural misunderstandings over their sartorial styles, language, and sources of cultural capital.35 Karolyn Tyson argues that the academic experiences of low-achieving students may be shaped by the practice of resegregation, especially in the form of being sorted into low-ability classes that often establish extremely low expectations.36 Angel Harris compiled an impressive array of data to demonstrate that “kids don’t want to fail” in school.37 Harris maintains that most black students value school and want to achieve but that they may not know how.
In our case studies, students “do school” in a variety of ways. In chapter three Jacqueline Ryan Vickery and Vivian Shaw explain how students do school by resisting and revising the often antiquated district policies that restrict their ability to be more creative with the technology that they have access to in school. As Alexander Cho, Vivian Shaw, and S. Craig Watkins discuss in chapter seven, some of the students in our study enrolled in AP courses and strategically pursued extracurricular activities to establish a competitive academic profile for college. But most of the students in our study employed more nonconventional tactics in the ways that they did school.
In chapter five, for example, Watkins discusses how a group of students formed their own quasi studio to turn their game design class into a more collaborative and dynamic learning experience. Watkins, Andres Lombana-Bermudez, and Lauren Weinzimmer describe in chapter six how some Freeway students transformed the after-school hours into a lively lab for creativity, collaboration, and content creation. In these last two examples, students were less interested in building a competitive profile for college than they were in building opportunities and social relations that simply made school a more interesting and relevant place to be.
Many of these activities were not academic in a traditional manner. But rather than describe them as deviant or oppositional to learning and achievement, we pursue a different analytic track. More precisely, these forms of learning and media production highlight how students do school in ways that are inventive, engaged, and achievement oriented.
This study is also informed by the Connected Learning framework, an approach to learning and youth practice that has been developed by a series of research and design initiatives supported by the MacArthur Foundation.38 The Connected Learning model is as much a vision of learning as it is a theory of learning. More generally, connected learning posits that when learning is linked across multiple spheres—school, after school, peers, home, and online—it is likely to be more powerful and more meaningful.
From a Connected Learning perspective, learning should be networked, experiential, production centered, and marked by a shared purpose between students and adults.39 Unfortunately, the bulk of learning in America’s schools runs counter to these principles and is, instead, typically cut off from the networked world, routinized, test centered, and individualized. In a connected learning world, students are expected to actively produce and apply knowledge. In most schools, students are generally required to passively consume and memorize information.
Not surprisingly, it is much more likely that students from resource-abundant schools and communities will have greater access to connected learning opportunities than their resource-constrained counterparts. In addition to richer opportunities to learn in school, students from affluent households benefit from richer out-of-school learning opportunities.40 Still, even when schools and the adults who run them organize learning in more traditional ways, students occasionally find opportunities to redesign learning in ways that counter established conventions and reflect some of the principles of connected learning. The clever ways in which some Freeway students do school underscore this point.
Technology Is Not a Solution
Our fieldwork was an opportunity to see up close how the social, digital, and educational lives of black, Latino, and lower-income teens are evolving. This is a fact: teens from lower-income families are more likely to have access to Internet-enabled technologies today than they were a decade ago.41 As we discuss in chapter one, access to Internet media comes in a variety of forms, including more affordable computers and smartphones. Similarly, access to Internet media comes from a variety of places, including schools, after-school settings, and home. While access to the Internet and media technologies is improving for young people, access to dynamic educational (i.e., formal curricula) and social (i.e., informal knowledge networks) resources that sustain more capital-enhancing forms of digital participation remains tenuous for teens in resource-constrained settings.
In our fieldwork we tracked two classes—a game design course and a video and technology applications course—to better understand the challenges and opportunities associated with efforts to design and implement digital media and learning in the formal classroom. These were the two main Career and Technology Education courses at Freeway. Consequently, the teachers of these classes were charged with orienting students toward information, technology, and creative careers. Both classes were burdened by the legacy problems associated with vocational education in the United States.42 More specifically, the classes were oriented toward “tools literacy” rather than more academic and design-oriented