struggled earnestly and creatively to find their pathways to better futures. Many of the students that we got to know worked hard to make school a more relevant place by transforming their classrooms, after-school life, and social relations into a vibrant ecosystem for exploring, tinkering, and learning with technology. We believe that if the president, tech leaders, high-powered councils, and policy makers could meet the students that we met, they would see the challenges in education through a different lens. Rather than labeling black, Latino, and lower-income students as disinterested in learning STEM—lacking inspiration—they would come to appreciate how the most diverse student body in U.S. history is eager to participate in building tomorrow’s world.
Our research team did not know it, but the site for our fieldwork—the school, the city, and the state—emerged as a powerfully emblematic place to think about many of the challenges and (missed) opportunities in STEM education addressed by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Many of the issues that are connected to the crisis in our schools (the lack of educational opportunity) and the crisis in the tech industry (the lack of diversity) were on vivid display throughout our fieldwork. The school that we were fortunate enough to gain access to placed us on the front lines of the future—a future marked by increasing diversity, uncertainty, and complexity.
This is the world that we share with you in the following pages.
Acknowledgments
A book like this does not happen without the support and contributions of a number of people. There are far too many to mention by name here so a special thanks to the many people, organizations, and universities that contributed to this project in some way.
I owe a special thanks to the Digital Edge team, which helped to design the study and collect and analyze the data that informs this book. The core team members over the life of this project were Andres Lombana-Bermudez, Jacqueline Vickery, Alexander Cho, Vivian Shaw, Lauren Weinzimmer, Adam Williams, Jennifer Noble, and Bailey Cool.
This project was also influenced by my colleagues from the Connected Learning Research Network, a team of extraordinarily generous scholars who offered expertise, feedback, and rich perspectives over the life of this work. This group includes, Mimi Ito, Sonia Livinstone, Kris Gutiérrez, Juliet Schor, Jean Rhodes, Bill Penuel, Vera Michalchik, and Dalton Conley. Also, advisors to the CLRN that influenced this project include Julian Sefton-Green, Ben Kirshner, Richard Arum, Katie Salen Tekinbaş, Nichole Pinkard, Daniel Schwartz, and Kylie Peppler.
A lot of this work was also supported by the fantastic team at the Digital Media and Learning Hub at the University of California at Irvine, including David Theo Goldberg, Claudia Caro Sullivan, Amanda Wortman, Mimi Ko Cruz, Anita Centeno, and Jeff Brazil.
Several of my colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin also provided intellectual support and encouragement, including Sharon Strover and the UT|Portugal Collaboration, Wenhong Chen, Tom Schatz, Joseph Straubhaar, Kathleen Tyner, and two Deans, Rod Hart and Jay Bernhart.
The Digital Edge team and CLRN were the beneficiaries of generous and forward thinking funding from the MacArthur Foundation and the Digital Media and Learning—DML—initiative. DML anticipated the digital revolution in the lives of young people and funded both research, policy, and the prototyping of new learning futures. During her stewardship of the DML effort, Connie Yowell was a significant advocate of the work that I and my CLRN colleagues conducted. There are so many people to thank at the Foundation including, Jennifer Humke and the current President, Julie M. Stasch.
Family provide more than they ever know when taking on a project of this scope. Thus, I’d like to thank my beautiful wife and daughter, Angela Hall Watkins and Cameron Grace Watkins. I shared many insightful conversations about this project with Sherry Watkins and Karen Munson, two people who have been a constant source of inspiration in my life.
Finally, this book was made possible by members of the Freeway High School community—teachers, administrators, district leaders, parents, and students—who gave us incredible access to their lives. We could not have asked for more and hope that we represent you in a fair, respectful, and appreciative light.
Introduction
The Digital Edge
S. Craig Watkins
In a 2013 cover story for Time magazine titled “Why Texas Is Our Future,” economist Tyler Cowen explains why a growing number of Americans are moving to Texas. Cowen writes, “More than any other state, Texas looks like the future … offering a glimpse of what’s to come for the country at large in the decades ahead.”1 One data point about Texas and what it implies about the nation’s future from the most recent U.S. Census is especially revealing: between 2000 and 2010 the number of under-eighteen-year-olds in the United States increased by about two million. Roughly half of the nation’s increase occurred in one state: Texas.2 Moreover, fully 95 percent of the growth in Texas was by Latino children.
Freeway High School is emblematic of the changes that are shaping the future of American demography, geography, and opportunity. Like many things in Texas, Freeway is big. The cavernous school is broad, tall, and home to more than 2,200 students. Located in the suburban fringes of Austin, Freeway is tucked far away from the entrepreneurial energy and affluence that are commonly associated with Austin’s technology-and university-driven innovation economy.3 The school building is surrounded by many of the familiar landmarks of a suburban geography characterized by nondistinct architecture, big-box stores, fast-food chains, immigrant-owned mini-markets, and arterial roads that are built, in theory, to aid the navigation of Austin’s sprawling metropolis.
Freeway was also the home of our research team for nearly two years and provided an opportunity to examine the many challenges that confront our schools in a time of epic change. If, as Cowen claims, Texas is a microcosm of our future, then Freeway presents a unique opportunity to see that future up close.
Ostensibly, the goal of our research was to gain an on-the-ground perspective of the role that digital media play in the formal and informal learning environments of teens from resource-constrained schools and households. We were aware of the many studies that suggested that Latino, African American, and lower-income youth were adopters of social and mobile media.4 In fact, their adoption of social and mobile media has prompted some to argue that smartphones, the poor’s primary platform for Internet access, have accomplished what many well-intentioned policy makers, philanthropists, and educators have failed to do—bridge the nation’s stubborn digital divide. Even before beginning our fieldwork at Freeway we knew that the story was more complex than that narrative suggested.
Freeway presented an opportunity to develop a more detailed and textured understanding of the media practices forming in the daily lives of black and Latino teens. Additionally, we wanted to explore the implications of this evolving digital media ecology for learning, opportunity, and social mobility. More specifically, we explore in detail what we call the digital edge.
The digital edge is a reference to the institutions, practices, and social relations that make up the daily and mediated lives of black, Latino, and lower-income youth. Our notion of the digital edge is informed by an essential conflict that is woven throughout the chapters in this book: even though a greater diversity of children and teens are using Internet technologies than ever before, not all forms of technology adoption are equal. The digital media practices of black, Latino, and lower-income youth are influenced by broader social and economic currents that give rise to distinct practices, techno-dispositions, and opportunities for participation in the digital world.
In the technology world, “edge” usually connotes something positive and even forward oriented. Being on the “cutting edge” of technology usually references innovation in either the design of technology (e.g., building a new platform) or the creative use of technology (e.g., finding inventive ways to use technology). Our use of the term “edge” is meant to highlight the contradictory contours