Antero Garcia, "Good Reception: Teens, Teachers, and Mobile Media in a Los Angeles High School," in conversation with Lauren Davenport
Please join us on January 31st for our winter quarter Faculty Research Fellows Chautauqua. This event will feature 2018-2019 fellow Antero Garcia (Education) speaking about their recent book Good Reception: Teens, Teachers, and Mobile Media in a Los Angeles High School. The discussion will be moderated by Professor Lauren Davenport (Political Science).
Schools and school districts have one approach to innovation: buy more technology. In Good Reception, Antero Garcia describes what happens when educators build on the ways students already use technology outside of school to help them learn in the classroom. As a teacher in a public high school in South Central Los Angeles, Garcia watched his students' nearly universal adoption of mobile devices. Whether recent immigrants from Central America or teens who had spent their entire lives in Los Angeles, the majority of his students relied on mobile devices to connect with family and friends and to keep up with complex social networks. Garcia determined to discover how these devices and student predilection for gameplay, combined with an evolving “culture of participation,” could be used in the classroom.
Garcia charts a year in the life of his ninth-grade English class, first surveying mobile media use on campus and then documenting a year-long experiment in creating a “wireless critical pedagogy” by incorporating mobile media and games in classroom work. He describes the design and implementation of “Ask Anansi,” an alternate reality game that allows students to conduct inquiry-based research around questions that interest them (including “Why is the food at South Central High School so bad?”). Garcia cautions that the transformative effect on education depends not on the glorification of devices but on teacher support and a trusting teacher-student relationship.
We look forward to seeing you there!