Disciplining Play Rafalow, Matthew H.
The American journal of sociology,
03/2018, Letnik:
123, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Adults may still be catching up to digital age, but digital youth bring to school digital skills they learn from each other. Comparative ethnographic analysis of three middle schools that vary by ...student class and race reveals that students’ similar digital skills are differently transformed by teachers into cultural capital for achievement. Teachers effectively discipline students’ digital play but in different ways. At a school serving working-class Latino youth, students are told their digital expressions are irrelevant to learning; at a school with mostly middle-class Asian American youth, students’ digital expressions are seen as threats to their ability to succeed academically; and at a private school with mainly wealthy white youth, students’ digital skills are positioned as essential to school success. Insofar as digital competency represents a kind of cultural capital, the minority and working-class students also have that capital. But theirs is not translated into teacher-supported opportunities for achievement.
In the digital age, schools are a central part of a nationwide effort to make access to technology more equitable, so that all young people, regardless of identity or background, have the opportunity ...to engage with the technologies that are essential to modern life. Most students, however, come to school with digital knowledge they've already acquired from the range of activities they participate in with peers online. Yet, teachers, as Matthew H. Rafalow reveals in "Digital Divisions," interpret these technological skills very differently based on the race and class of their student body. While teachers praise affluent White students for being "innovative" when they bring preexisting and sometimes disruptive tech skills into their classrooms, less affluent students of color do not receive such recognition for the same behavior. Digital skills exhibited by middle class, Asian American students render them "hackers," while the creative digital skills of working-class, Latinx students are either ignored or earn them labels troublemakers. Rafalow finds in his study of three California middle schools that students of all backgrounds use digital technology with sophistication and creativity, but only the teachers in the school serving predominantly White, affluent students help translate the digital skills students develop through their digital play into educational capital. "Digital Divisions" provides an in-depth look at how teachers operate as gatekeepers for students' potential, reacting differently according to the race and class of their student body. As a result, Rafalow shows us that the digital divide is much more than a matter of access: it's about how schools perceive the value of digital technology and then use them day-to-day.
Existing scholarship suggests that schools do the work of social stratification by functioning as “sorting machines,” or institutions that determine which populations of students are provided ...educational resources needed to help them get ahead. We build on this theory of social reproduction by extending it to better understand how digital technology use is implicated in this process of unequal resource allocation in schools. We contend that educational resources, like digital technologies, are also sorted by schools. Drawing on scholarship from both education research and science and technology studies, we show how educational institutions have long played a role in constructing the value of technologies to different ends, by constructing hierarchies of technological activity, like “vocational” and “academic” computer use, even when strikingly similar. We then apply this lens to three areas of inquiry in education research: the use of digital technologies for instruction, school use of student data, and college admissions. Each illustrates how education scholars can view technologies as part of school sorting processes and with implications for inequality within and beyond the classroom.
Conversations about digital inequality in education often revolve around access to technology. However, research into youth culture has shown that many Black and Latinx teens are able to access ...technology and have developed the same digital skills as their white peers. Social scientist Matt Rafalow observed three California middle schools where students had similar levels of access to digital technologies despite being from different racial and class backgrounds and found that teachers perceived students’ technological abilities differently. Wealthy white students’ digital play was seen as essential to learning, while Asian American and Latinx students’ skills were seen as either a threat to their learning or irrelevant to it. Addressing digital inequality will require schools to also address the racial and class prejudice that leads teachers to view students’ abilities differently.
A lightning bolt cut across the sky. Soaked from the waist down, Rafalow gripped his umbrella and ran across the quad at Sheldon Junior High to get to Ms. Finnerty's 8th-grade science class. It was ...7:48 AM on a Thursday and he was very, very late. A freak thunderstorm had set in, catching him in a downpour, but those of us who work in schools know that we must adhere to the bell schedule, rain or shine. These days, Finnerty explained, internet access is "like oxygen." Digital technologies are everywhere in her school. Nearly everybody carries a mobile device, the classrooms all have computers, students use web-based platforms all day long, and teachers constantly rely on their interactive whiteboards. So, when the internet goes down, so does instruction.
Adults may still be catching up to digital age, but digital youth bring to school digital skills they learn from each other. Comparative ethnographic analysis of three middle schools that vary by ...student class and race reveals that students’ similar digital skills are differently transformed by teachers into cultural capital for achievement. Teachers effectively discipline students’ digital play but in different ways. At a school serving working-class Latino youth, students are told their digital expressions are irrelevant to learning; at a school with mostly middle-class Asian American youth, students’ digital expressions are seen as threats to their ability to succeed academically; and at a private school with mainly wealthy white youth, students’ digital skills are positioned as essential to school success. Insofar as digital competency represents a kind of cultural capital, the minority and working-class students also have that capital. But theirs is not translated into teacher-supported opportunities for achievement.
Navigating the Tavern Rafalow, Matthew H.; Adams, Britni L.
Symbolic interaction,
02/2017, Letnik:
40, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The widespread adoption of digital communications technologies has provided new avenues for social interaction to occur. We build on the sociological literature of fleeting encounters in bar settings ...to showhow patrons’ use of these technologies augments the bar experience and shapes the social networks thatmay develop through interaction. Using seven gay, lesbian, and heterosexual bars located in Southern California as research sites, we describe how patrons invoke digital technologies as props to aid the impression management strategies used to facilitate new connections. Second, we demonstrate how these encounters are subject to greater relationship persistence as a result of the way these technologies are used to quickly create a shared history. We conclude by arguing that fleeting encounters are no longer connections that either persist or completely fade away after face-to-face interaction. Rather, they often persist through technology-mediated communications in ways that result in, at minimum, the development of weak ties. This greater relationship persistence can permit more opportunity to get to know a potential partner in digitally mediated settings like Facebook or via texting, but it could also require newstrategies to evade interested others given this new lack of ephemerality and the influx of weak ties.
How online affinity networks expand learning and opportunity for young people
Boyband One Direction fanfiction writers, gamers who solve math problems together, Harry Potter fans who knit for a ...cause. Across subcultures and geographies, young fans have found each other and formed community online, learning from one another along the way. From these and other in-depth case studies of online affinity networks, Affinity Online considers how young people have found new opportunities for expanded learning in the digital age. These cases reveal the shared characteristics and unique cultures and practices of different online affinity networks, and how they support “connected learning”—learning that brings together youth interests, social activity, and accomplishment in civic, academic, and career relevant arenas. Although involvement in online communities is an established fixture of growing up in the networked age, participation in these spaces show how young people are actively taking up new media for their own engaged learning and social development.
While providing a wealth of positive examples for how the online world provides new opportunities for learning, the book also examines the ways in which these communities still reproduce inequalities based on gender, race, and socioeconomic status. The book concludes with a set of concrete suggestions for how the positive learning opportunities offered by online communities could be made available to more young people, at school and at home. Affinity Online explores how online practices and networks bridge the divide between in-school and out-of-school learning, finding that online affinity networks are creating new spaces of opportunity for realizing the ideals of connected learning.
While concerns about the “digital divide,” or access to technology, remain relevant for many schools, we do not yet fully know how often-expensive education technologies are employed across school ...contexts. In particular, few studies exist that evaluate how teacher beliefs about student social class and race-ethnicity, as well as institutional perceptions of the value of new technologies, inform everyday teacher practices with such technologies. Classroom observation and interviews were conducted with 5 teachers across three elementary schools that vary by race and class. Results indicated that teachers at middle/upper class schools encouraged dynamic uses of interactive whiteboards, while in the low-income school they functioned like traditional blackboards. Findings suggest that teacher beliefs and institutional perceptions inform how technologies are used in the classroom. In particular, beliefs about the meaning of student race and social class, as well as institutional goals for implementing new technologies, inform the extent to which students are granted agency to learn with new technologies.
Recent work shows that race is a critical factor in shaping sexual identities, partner preference, and family formation, suggesting there may be racial differences in whether lesbians already have ...children at the time that they look for companions. In this study, we draw on a sample of 1,923 lesbians on Match.com to quantitatively test whether there are racial differences in dating preferences for women with children, underscoring implications for family inequality through racial differences in who has children when looking for a partner. We find that Blacks, Latinas, and Asians are more likely than Whites to not only have children but also be open to dating other women with children. This suggests that race differentially structures lesbians' openness to partners with children, and such preferences may be a possible mechanism for racial stratification.
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