Short Talk Panel IPE: Innovations Across Communities: Technology, Participation and Education

Title: Language Learning Games

Session Type: individual-paper

Organizer: Anuj Twari

Participant: Anuj Twari

In this presentation we will talk about three projects that explore the implications of technology in education.

Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies (MILLEE)
MILLEE aims at developing cellphones applications that enable children in the villages and slums in the developing world to acquire language and literacy in immersive, game-like environments. These applications target localized language learning needs and aim to make literacy resources more accessible to underprivileged children, at times and places that are more convenient than schools. Our design methodology is informed by best practices in commercial language learning packages and the traditional village games that children in the developing world play. 

Speech and Pronunciation Improvement via Games (SPRING)
Lack of proper English pronunciations is a major problem for immigrant population in developed countries like U.S. This poses various problems, including a barrier to entry into mainstream society. Project SPRING is an exploration of speech technologies merged with activity-based and arcade-based games to do pronunciation feedback for Hispanic children within the U.S. We have also done a 3-month long study with immigrant population in California to investigate and analyze the effectiveness of computer aided pronunciation feedback through games.

Technologies to support early child literacy
A large body of research has shown that the literacy gap between children is well-established before formal schooling begins, that it is enormous, and that it predicts academic performance throughout primary, middle and secondary school. Indeed rather than closing this gap, there is much evidence that formal schooling exacerbates it: once behind in reading and vocabulary, children read with lower comprehension, learn more slowly and have lower motivation than their more language-able peers. Many national organizations like National early literacy panel, National Centre for Family Literacy and NIH recognize the essential role of early literacy in a child’s later educational and life opportunities. As a part of this research, we are trying to explore natural interactions for pre-schoolers that would involve them in game-like activities that involve short follow-up conversations. We are hoping to make interventions that use speech-enabled technologies in various forms aimed towards early childhood literacy that happens through conversations, and primarily question-answer sequences.

Title: Seeing through Student Experiences: Using Digital Media to Unveil Complexities in the 

School-Community Divide for Muslim girls

Session Type: individual-paper

Organizer: Negin Dahya

Participant: Negin Dahya

The Toronto District School Board, Toronto, Ontario (Canada), considers the declining state of schools in low-income areas as closely related to the faltering relationship between schools and the community, and to multiple forms of marginalization for students. For Muslim girls, the students at the focus of this study, marginalization occurs based on class, race, gender, religion, and more (Zine, 2000). In response to this problem, I am conducting an ethnographic study in the 2011-2012 school-year with Muslim girls who are creating digital media to represent their perceptions and experiences of themselves, their school and their community. This work draws on postcolonial feminist theory to understand the complex and diverse factors relevant to the lives of Muslim girls. I draw on feminist ethnography as my methodology to deconstruct the interrelationship between ‘systems of difference’ (Visweswaran, 1994), focused on how multimodal digital media production impacts and exposes the diverse experiences of Muslim girls in a public school.

In this short talk, I will present the preliminary findings from this doctoral research, which looks to better understand the educational experiences of these girls, the relationship between the school and community according to them, and to explore the impact of innovative pedagogical practices using new technology with underprivileged and racialized communities. My research builds on Ito et al. (2010), Buckingham (2003) and others who assert that digital media production can engage youth in a valuable, hands-on processes of creation, through which they can also participate in their education, society and in cultural production.

Title: The politics of participation: Transnational media programming and democratization

Session Type: individual-paper

Organizer: Chelsey Hauge

Participant: Chelsey Hauge

Too often, youth hailing from rural communities in the global south have little or no consistent access to digital technologies or the educational opportunities they afford. Yet, these youth navigate transnational media and technology networks on a daily basis as they traverse borders to find work, participate in both local and global social networks, and consume and mash-up media originating from diverse parts of the world. There are numerous international public education programs designed to provide opportunity for these youth to interface with media literacy- these programs often teach video editing, radio broadcasting, blogging, and other like skills. Frequently, these programs and pedagogical interventions hope to foster democratic practices and participation through involvement with media projects. There is much excitement around the possibility of new media to revitalize education. Even so, the excitement sometimes is manifested as romantisization of youth voice and participation in liberatory media projects can inadvertently work against itself, “positing a fully egalitarian environment where none exists, thereby obscuring rather than unsettling uneven distributions of power” (Soep, 2006, p. 201).

This talk complicates capacity in international youth media programming by attending to the ways it both fosters moments of democratic participation, and at other times makes democratic practice challenging and even impossible. I do this by analyzing the experiences and resulting narrative of a group of transnational youth gathered in a Nicaraguan community on the side of the Pan-American highway. The youth are from three countries, and, some of them having themselves to Costa Rica and the US, decide to create a video about immigration, hoping to rupture notions of the American Dream and create critical conversations with their peers about the globalized economic, social, and cultural injustices that drive immigration. At times, they interact with both local and global publics in ways that evidence democratization, whilst at other moments their participation in these publics fails. In order to understand how digital innovation could directly intervene in disparities in achievement and access for historically marginalized populations, we must situate experiences of media pedagogy and practices within broader networks of globalization and transnationalism, and understand the ways in which media discourses and pedagogies both challenge and reinforce the globalized structures and forces that cause the marginalization we are attempting to ameliorate at all.

Soep, L. (2006). Beyond literacy and voice in youth media production. McGill Journal of Education, 41(5), 197-214.

Title: Appropriation practices of innovative ICT in developing Veracruz, Mexico

Session Type: individual-paper

Organizer: Gerardo D. Sanchez Romero

Participant: Gerardo D. Sanchez Romero 

Digital Innovation and ICT4D have become a hugely debated subject in discussions of information access. In many circles, the questions of democratic and equitable access to information and knowledge has been conceptualized as concomitant with human rights as the basis of the knowledge society. The aim of the paper is to analyze the approach of ‘Programa Vasconcelos’ of the State of Veracruz to foster the Information literacy and innovation in social participation, by examining the methodology of a “misión” (mission) in two different communities in the State. The inquiry is framed in the context of the unequal access to ICT between rural and urban landscapes in Mexico in a process of social inclusion/exclusion. By doing this the following questions will be stated: What is the current usage of these technologies amongst the beneficiaries of the program? How are they appropriating these new tools in their everyday life? And/or, what are the main barriers to appropriate ICT? And how are they shaping these practices of meaning?  It will be argued that, beyond consideration of the social impact of ICT4D in segregated localities, it is also important to consider the construction of meaning laying on the practices of ICT usage in everyday life, in order to better understand the ways in which undeveloped communities appropriate and make sense of ICT according/opposed to traditional wisdom, and other signifying systems. The paper will conclude by enacting the challenges the program is facing to truly achieve the goal of social inclusion through innovative communal participation using ICT.