Katie Headrick Taylor

Counter-Mapping the Neighborhood on Bicycles: Mobilizing Youth to Reimagine the City

Personal mobility is a mundane characteristic of daily life. However, mobility is rarely considered an opportunity for learning in the learning sciences, and is almost never leveraged as relevant, experiential material for teaching. This article describes a social design experiment for spatial justice that focused on changes in the personal mobility of six non-driving, African-American teenagers, who participated in an afterschool bicycle building and riding workshop located in a mid-south city. Our study was designed to teach spatial literacy practices essential for counter-mapping—a discursive practice in which youth used tools similar to those of professional planners to “take place” in the future of their neighborhoods. Using conversation and multimodal discourse analyses with video records, GPS track data, and interactive maps authored by youth, we show how participants in our study had new experiences of mobility in the city, developed technically-articulate criticisms of the built environment in their neighborhoods, and imagined new forms of mobility and activity for the future.

Learning along Lines: Locative Literacies for Reading and Writing the City.

The “everyware” paradigm opens up new possibilities for learning on-the-move with technologies through urban spaces while also raising questions about emerging literacies required of users to understand and use the digital traces these technologies generate. This article develops locative literacies as a way of understanding place-based, digital modes of reading and writing different representational forms at the scale of the city. I explore a new analytic unit, learning along lines, as a tool for supporting the design and analysis of learning contexts where the leading mode of engagement for young learners was physical and digital mobility through the city. Learning along lines emerged from a design study in which youth produced counter-maps of their neighborhood to share with city stakeholders. Using a spatiotemporal framewo rk, I analyze youth learning locative literacies along lines they made of their neighborhood through a designed task, global positioning system (GPS) drawing. First, I focus on youn...The “everyware” paradigm opens up new possibilities for learning on-the-move with technologies through urban spaces while also raising questions about emerging literacies required of users to understand and use the digital traces these technologies generate. This article develops locative literacies as a way of understanding place-based, digital modes of reading and writing different representational forms at the scale of the city. I explore a new analytic unit, learning along lines, as a tool for supporting the design and analysis of learning contexts where the leading mode of engagement for young learners was physical and digital mobility through the city. Learning along lines emerged from a design study in which youth produced counter-maps of their neighborhood to share with city stakeholders. Using a spatiotemporal framewo rk, I analyze youth learning locative literacies along lines they made of their neighborhood through a designed task, global positioning system (GPS) drawing. First, I focus on young people learning to scale their mobility to a neighborhood grid along lines they made through walking and gesture. Second, I focus on young people learning to negotiate inscriptions along lines they made by walking with maps and GPS devices through their neighborhood. Third, I focus on youth learning to re-member their embodied effort along lines they made discursively during moments of reflection. The analyses are intended to push the field’s understanding of mobility in conceptualizing and designing new forms of learning locative literacies. Learning along lines foregrounds humans not merely as consumers or generators of texts but as being part of that text, literacy agents of a text they populate.

Community technology mapping: inscribing places when “everything is on the move”

Interactive, digital mapping technology is providing new pedagogical possibilities for children and their families, as well as new methodological opportunities for education researchers. Our paper reports on an example of this novel terrain we call “Community Technology Mapping” (CTM). CTM was a designed task that was part of a larger ethnographic study of children and families’ digital media and technology practices in and around their homes. CTM incorporated interactive digital mapping technology with a structured interview protocol as a pedagogical context for young people and a methodological tool for researchers. As a pedagogical context for computer-supported collaborative learning, CTM supported young people to see and reflect on their everyday technological practices as temporally and spatially organized across scales of human interaction. As a methodological tool, CTM allowed researchers to see families’ place-based and on-the-move activities that were outside the more naturalistic observations of home-based technology use. Our analysis of CTM draws upon video recordings and screen captures of young people’s reflections on and live mappings of places they typically used technology and engaged with media. We found that children developed strategies with the mapping technology to make places visible, make them coherent, and make them mobile. These strategies produced a “cascade of inscriptions” within the CTM task for mapping new mobilities of digital, daily life. We argue that interactive digital mapping technologies not only support researchers to ask new questions about the spatiotemporal aspects of learning phenomena, but also contribute to a new genre of place-based, digital literacies- locative literacy- for learners to navigate.

Mapping the daily media round: novel methods for understanding families’ mobile technology use

ABSTRACT The pervasiveness of mobile devices in families’ homes has dramatically changed the physical and temporal arrangement of co-viewing media content; the representative image of American families seated around a TV set is an anachronism. But understanding and describing contemporary co-participation arrangements around digital media is challenging because of the mobile nature of these activities. As researchers, our greatest challenge is to observe peoples digital media use that is increasingly ‘on-the-move’ in an effort to understand the significance and possibilities these devices have in family life, learning, and engagement in and across different settings. This article describes an innovative study design for understanding how mobile technologies influence the ways in which families learn together. We analyze the movement of digital media practices, where they are located, and how digital co-participation within families is distributed across time and space.

Dis-placing place-making: how African-American and immigrant youth realize their rights to the city

ABSTRACT Notions of place-making assume that individuals and groups of people have legitimate ‘rights to the city.’ This paper unsettles these notions to incorporate the politically and legally tenuous relationships African-American and Immigrant youth have to their cities. We describe a community-based digital STEAM curriculum called Mobile City Science that invited youth to engage in place-making efforts using mobile and location-aware technologies. The design study relied on a contradiction that is fundamental to youth place-making in an era of white nationalism: for African-American and Immigrant youth to engage power structures in community development processes, they had to engage in a series of dis-placements that removed them from embodied experiences and in-location perceptions of their communities. Self-censoring, witnessing, historicizing, and re-veiwing were all examples of dis-placements youth enacted to speak truth to power with digital and mobile tools.

The Role of Public Education in Place-Remaking: From a Retrospective Walk Through my Hometown to a Call to Action

ABSTRACT This essay examines the role of public education in the process of place-remaking that relies on a false separation between teaching and issues of race, politics, and power. I construct a historical case study of my hometown that presents a counter narrative, presented by students, of race and legacy in the context of a public school and the surrounding community. Building upon a walk-as-method approach, I illustrate the confluence of historical, racialized narratives that are discoverable at the scale of the city but invisible within the walls of the school. I conclude with an in-progress professional code of ethical teaching and research practice for the learning sciences. These commitments are intended to support and protect students (and all young people in our communities) from bearing sole responsibility for critical stances based on their identities and histories-in-place.