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The Class: Living and Learning in the Digital Age
An intimate look at how children network, identify, learn and grow in a connected world.Read Online at connectedyouth.nyupress.orgDo today’s youth have more opportunities than their parents? As they build their own social and digital networks, does that offer new routes to learning and friendship? How do they navigate the meaning of education in a digitally connected but fiercely competitive, highly individualized world?Based upon fieldwork at an ordinary London school, The Class examines young people's experiences of growing up and learning in a digital world. In this original and engaging study, Livingstone and Sefton-Green explore youth values, teenagers’ perspectives on their futures, and their tactics for facing the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. The authors follow the students as they move across their different social worlds—in school, at home, and with their friends, engaging in a range of activities from video games to drama clubs and music lessons. By portraying the texture of the students’ everyday lives, The Class seeks to understand how the structures of social class and cultural capital shape the development of personal interests, relationships and autonomy. Providing insights into how young people’s social, digital, and learning networks enable or disempower them, Livingstone and Sefton-Green reveal that the experience of disconnections and blocked pathways is often more common than that of connections and new opportunities.
- GenresEducation
372 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 3, 2016
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December 11, 2019
I work with one of the authors of this book. And this is a fascinating piece of research. I always love it when researchers get to follow kids around both in an out of school. When I was thinking of becoming a secondary school teacher and doing my masters of teaching we read a paper by an English teacher (subject English, not national English), whose first assignment for the year was always to get the parents to write to him and tell him what they could about their child as a learner. The English teacher said that the kids always loved the idea that they weren’t going to have to do their first piece of homework. But this told the teacher a lot. If parents didn’t send in anything, it told him they were unlikely to be helping their kids in other ways too, so, perhaps those kids might need additional assistance. Given the parents had been watching their children grow up for longer than the teacher could have been, it was also likely that they would have some interesting things to say about how their children learnt and their likely interests. Most importantly, this exercise gave the parents a sense of permission to be interested and to show interest in their children’s schooling right from the start of the school year.
All of these things are great – but it was never really something I would have done myself as a teacher. A number of members of my family are functionally illiterate. Having their child ask them to do this task would quickly become a source of near infinite embarrassment for them. The unintended cruelty of this task doesn’t really stop it being cruel. Also, in Australia many parents are from non-English speaking backgrounds. Such a task would reinforce their feelings of distance from the school – the exact opposite of the intention.
All the same, and why I’ve started with this example, most research finds that teachers basically end up knowing next to nothing about the lives of their students outside of school. Which is almost amusing in a sense, because one of the things that is drummed into you when you are studying to become a teacher is to make as much use of the lives and interests of your students as you possibly can. This research, then, is interesting because the researchers got to know the kids’ three lives – at school, at home and with their friends. And they were able to do this both in the physical world and in the virtual world of Facebook too. I kept thinking while I was reading this, thank god I didn’t have to write the ethics approval form for this research.
In some ways this research was similar to Lareau’s Unequal Childhoods. They found examples of concerted cultivation by middle class families, for instance – however, the findings were more nuanced. The working class children were not left to ‘natural growth’, but this didn’t mean there was no differences or advantages to be had from possessing the cultural capital of being middle class. The researchers definitely found that middle class kids had academic capital that made school easier for them than it proved for the working class kids. They were also likely to be given an easier ride by their teachers too. There is a nice bit in this where the kids apply to participate in the World Challenge. My eldest daughter did this too. Basically, the students have to apply to participate and in applying they need to be able to convince their teachers that they would work well as part of a team to raise money to travel to a developing nation. While in this developing nation they would take part in various adventures – climbing mountains and such – but also so something to help a local community. Anyway, in the class the researchers were in, the only kids selected were the most middle class kids. While the process otherwise looked fair, and open to all comers, in reality the teachers ‘played it safe’. The expectation being that if the team wasn't able to raise enough money from their own efforts, that the parents would need to chip in – and middle class parents were more likely to have the wherewithal to be able to do that. And so the perverse nature of our ‘meritocracy’ plays itself out yet again.
What I found particularly interesting here was that some of the modern myths we have about kids – that they are glued to screens, for instance, didn’t prove to be quite as true as is often assumed. In fact, the kids often preferred to spend time with friends physically, but that this was often limited by parental concerns. So that internet connectivity often proved to be a secondary option for many of the children. Also, even when it was used, it was used in ways that complemented other modes of friendships and interconnection, rather than being the self-destructive black hole it is often presented to be.
There is a fabulous chapter in this where they discuss various kids and their relationship to music. Some of the middle class kids were doing music lessons outside of school – piano and violin. This middle class relationship to music obviously can be seen as relating to concerted cultivation – but the authors troubled this in some ways, showing that some of these kids used music as an escape, and not just another chore. One of the other children learning music was Turkish and so he was learning music as a direct link to his cultural background. And this was interesting because it showed an aspect of him – studious, focused and proud – that was significantly different from what they knew of him at school. Which is the point I was making before about the problem teachers often have in not knowing anything about the lives of their students outside of their own classroom. This is similarly true of parents, who, when they ask their kids what they did at school today are generally told, ‘nothing, it was so boring’. It is also the case that teachers often don’t know how their students behave in other classrooms other than their own. All of the adults in a child’s life have a remarkably narrow view of the life of the child. Not that this stops the adults from extrapolating that that narrow view is the full view and then boxing the child’s whole life into that vision. - splendid or otherwise.
All the same, while some kids might appear to be one sort of person in one context, only to prove to be quite different in another, sometimes kids can be trapped in awkward and difficult childhoods in all of the roles they play. Also, as with the music lessons, it proved likely that the only kids that would be able to use certain skills as convertible cultural capital were the middle class kids. For the Turkish child, for instance, his ability to play a culturally significant musical instrument was unlikely to be acknowledged or rewarded anywhere outside of his own community.
I liked this book – the authors say at one point that they had wanted this to be almost like a drama – and in parts it almost was. And like any good drama, you might find yourself wanting to give some advice to these kids. What was also interesting here was that even when the kids were going through very difficult times, and the researchers were told this by the teachers or the parents, they were rarely told it by the students themselves until after the problem had been resolved. The other thing I was interested in was the idea that the children were rarely allowed to be just children. That is, they were constantly being prepared for the adults they were to become – so that they were constantly living in an imagined future - or at least in preparation for that future. Often the kids would find ways to subvert this – have pat answers to the ‘what to you want to be when you grow up’ question that ticked all the expected boxes, but didn’t necessarily say anything worth knowing about their actual interests or ambitions.
There was lots in this book like that, stuff that caught my attention. Well worth a read if you can get hold of it
All of these things are great – but it was never really something I would have done myself as a teacher. A number of members of my family are functionally illiterate. Having their child ask them to do this task would quickly become a source of near infinite embarrassment for them. The unintended cruelty of this task doesn’t really stop it being cruel. Also, in Australia many parents are from non-English speaking backgrounds. Such a task would reinforce their feelings of distance from the school – the exact opposite of the intention.
All the same, and why I’ve started with this example, most research finds that teachers basically end up knowing next to nothing about the lives of their students outside of school. Which is almost amusing in a sense, because one of the things that is drummed into you when you are studying to become a teacher is to make as much use of the lives and interests of your students as you possibly can. This research, then, is interesting because the researchers got to know the kids’ three lives – at school, at home and with their friends. And they were able to do this both in the physical world and in the virtual world of Facebook too. I kept thinking while I was reading this, thank god I didn’t have to write the ethics approval form for this research.
In some ways this research was similar to Lareau’s Unequal Childhoods. They found examples of concerted cultivation by middle class families, for instance – however, the findings were more nuanced. The working class children were not left to ‘natural growth’, but this didn’t mean there was no differences or advantages to be had from possessing the cultural capital of being middle class. The researchers definitely found that middle class kids had academic capital that made school easier for them than it proved for the working class kids. They were also likely to be given an easier ride by their teachers too. There is a nice bit in this where the kids apply to participate in the World Challenge. My eldest daughter did this too. Basically, the students have to apply to participate and in applying they need to be able to convince their teachers that they would work well as part of a team to raise money to travel to a developing nation. While in this developing nation they would take part in various adventures – climbing mountains and such – but also so something to help a local community. Anyway, in the class the researchers were in, the only kids selected were the most middle class kids. While the process otherwise looked fair, and open to all comers, in reality the teachers ‘played it safe’. The expectation being that if the team wasn't able to raise enough money from their own efforts, that the parents would need to chip in – and middle class parents were more likely to have the wherewithal to be able to do that. And so the perverse nature of our ‘meritocracy’ plays itself out yet again.
What I found particularly interesting here was that some of the modern myths we have about kids – that they are glued to screens, for instance, didn’t prove to be quite as true as is often assumed. In fact, the kids often preferred to spend time with friends physically, but that this was often limited by parental concerns. So that internet connectivity often proved to be a secondary option for many of the children. Also, even when it was used, it was used in ways that complemented other modes of friendships and interconnection, rather than being the self-destructive black hole it is often presented to be.
There is a fabulous chapter in this where they discuss various kids and their relationship to music. Some of the middle class kids were doing music lessons outside of school – piano and violin. This middle class relationship to music obviously can be seen as relating to concerted cultivation – but the authors troubled this in some ways, showing that some of these kids used music as an escape, and not just another chore. One of the other children learning music was Turkish and so he was learning music as a direct link to his cultural background. And this was interesting because it showed an aspect of him – studious, focused and proud – that was significantly different from what they knew of him at school. Which is the point I was making before about the problem teachers often have in not knowing anything about the lives of their students outside of their own classroom. This is similarly true of parents, who, when they ask their kids what they did at school today are generally told, ‘nothing, it was so boring’. It is also the case that teachers often don’t know how their students behave in other classrooms other than their own. All of the adults in a child’s life have a remarkably narrow view of the life of the child. Not that this stops the adults from extrapolating that that narrow view is the full view and then boxing the child’s whole life into that vision. - splendid or otherwise.
All the same, while some kids might appear to be one sort of person in one context, only to prove to be quite different in another, sometimes kids can be trapped in awkward and difficult childhoods in all of the roles they play. Also, as with the music lessons, it proved likely that the only kids that would be able to use certain skills as convertible cultural capital were the middle class kids. For the Turkish child, for instance, his ability to play a culturally significant musical instrument was unlikely to be acknowledged or rewarded anywhere outside of his own community.
I liked this book – the authors say at one point that they had wanted this to be almost like a drama – and in parts it almost was. And like any good drama, you might find yourself wanting to give some advice to these kids. What was also interesting here was that even when the kids were going through very difficult times, and the researchers were told this by the teachers or the parents, they were rarely told it by the students themselves until after the problem had been resolved. The other thing I was interested in was the idea that the children were rarely allowed to be just children. That is, they were constantly being prepared for the adults they were to become – so that they were constantly living in an imagined future - or at least in preparation for that future. Often the kids would find ways to subvert this – have pat answers to the ‘what to you want to be when you grow up’ question that ticked all the expected boxes, but didn’t necessarily say anything worth knowing about their actual interests or ambitions.
There was lots in this book like that, stuff that caught my attention. Well worth a read if you can get hold of it
Displaying 1 of 1 review