Speaker Biography and Abstract...

Jabari Mahiri is a Professor in UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Education and a recent chair of its Language and Literacy, Society and Culture program. He is a Senior Scholar for the National Urban Alliance for Effective Education and the Principal Investigator of T E A C H (Technology Equity And Culture High-schools). He received UC Berkeley’s Chancellor’s Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence in 2007, and in 2008 he received the American Educational Research Association’s (Division G) Outstanding Mentorship Award.

Dr. Mahiri is author of Digital Tools in Urban Schools: Mediating a Remix of Learning (Forthcoming, 2011); Out of Bounds: When Scholarship Athletes Become Academic Scholars (2010); Shooting for Excellence: African American and Youth Culture in New Century Schools (1998); and, he is editor of What They Don't Learn in School: Literacy in the Lives of Urban Youth (2004).

On-line youth reshaping the Off-line learning of urban public schools

Jabari Mahiri, Berkeley University

Approaches to teaching and learning in most urban public schools in the United States have resisted substantive changes despite the emergence of myriad digital technologies that dramatically transform how we engage with knowledge and learning. Informal, participatory, interest-driven, on-line learning networks contrast markedly with the off-line texts and techniques that characterize formal learning in schools. The research that will be presented focused on two interventions to increase the use of digital media for learning in urban public high schools in Northern California. One intervention to develop teachers' competence in mediating learning with an array of digital tools took place during the 2007-08 academic year. The research on this intervention documented specific ways that teacher professional development, classroom practices, and inter-generational relationships with youth were ameliorated through digital learning activities. The other project took place during the 2009-10 academic year and documented how groups of nominated students were able to demonstrate to their teachers significant ways that they learned best through the use of digital media and multi-modal texts. Both projects explored the potential and challenges for urban public schools to increase marginalized students' achievement and engagement and to mitigate digital privilege by providing new opportunities for work and learning with digital tools in school. A key argument predicated on the findings from both interventions is that characteristics of what is being found in recent studies of youths' on-line, informal learning like interest-driven motivations for learning and collaborative or participatory learning styles (Ito, et. al, 2010) were also pervasive and powerful ways that students were able to reshape learning in school settings using digital media that was mostly off-line. This is significant as an intermediary step toward a more comprehensive transformation of schooling since institutional resources and rules regarding on-line activity and content present major obstacles for most urban public schools.

Ito, Mizuko, et. al. 2010. Hanging out, messing around and geeking out: Living and learning with new media. Cambridge: MIT Press.

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