New ways of knowing: Learning at the margins

Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2003). New literacies: Changing knowledge and classroom learning. Buckingham, PA: Open University Press.

Chapter 8. New ways of knowing: Learning at the margins

This a case study of the Language Australia Yanga Headlands State High School project. Main concerns about research in pedagogical approach to using new technologies within classroom settings with disadvantaged learners

• Teachers' cultural identities and experiences are often very different from those of their students (digital insiders/natives vs digital outsiders/immigrants)
  
• Low levels of technical and cultural knowledge on the part of teachers often result in computer-mediated learning activities being ineffective, inefficiacious, or mystifying (e.g., how to get the machines to work)
  
• Teachers often make well-intentioned uses of student 'savvy' with new technologies to get around snags at the technical operation level (enlist native competence in the service of immigrant practices)
  

The new project (Networks of practice)

• Researchers: participant observers (documents, activities - qualitative); info resources
• Participants: 4 "problem" boys
• Time: 2 hrs/week over an 8-10 week period

Features of the learning process

• A logic of transcendence
  
  • Different from contemporary preformativity-oriented ed. systems (which focuses on learning outcomes)
  • Learning consequences vs learning outcomes: students learn beyond the checklist of learning outcomes (e.g., becoming a good citizen, worker, community person and family member)
    
• Purposefully decentered learning
  
  • Learning in network context vs subject-based fixed content approach
  • uncovering new ground vs covering predetermined ground
    

Learning consequences (Pedagogical contexts look backwards as well as forwards. They project learners into new areas of capability and understanding, while drawing on what they have previously experienced, learned and understood, p. 193)

• Technical capability
• Cultural knowledge
• Self-perception of learners (from "fans" to "stars"; "failures was not a fixed, permanent, and natural position but rather sth. that could be challenged, disrupted, and rejected)
  

Rethinking the economics of attention

• Well-established patterns of student behaviors and teacher practices in a closed school economy
  
• "Brat level": seeking and gaining attention by illegitimate means constitutes resistance to the tight controls of the school attention economy
• ICT - deregulated economy (calling for criteria and standard change)
• Attention economy outside school vs within school
• In this project, students started from deflective attention work to being receiving full attention of a teacher
• Persuasion as a powerful social instrument - negotiating people's places in social groups

End notes

• Status quo: under the powerful impetus of state guidelines, policies, and funding arrangements, literacy is defined in terms of state mandated standardized tests; proficiency statements and knowledge are defined in terms of the content of a national curriculum; school-business partnership concept
• Top line: formal education can be so much more, and make far better, more direct, and more enabling connections between what students learn now and what will do and be later
• Bottom line: teachers' acknowledgment of the kinds of things young people are doing and being outside school in order to make effective pedagogical connections to them in class, despite the complexities teachers face on a day-to-day basis