Good Reception: Teens, Teachers, and Mobile Media in a Los Angeles High School

by Antero García

A year in the life of a ninth-grade English class shows how participatory culture and mobile devices can transform learning in schools. 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.

Genres: Education

248 pages, Hardcover

Published November 3, 2017

About the author

Antero Garcia is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University where he studies how technology and gaming shape both youth and adult learning, literacy practices, and civic identities.

He is the author of Good Reception: Teens, Teachers, and Mobile Media in a Los Angeles High School (MIT Press).

Reviews

[Herman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Antero Garcia research for his doctorial dissertation alternated between really insightful useful and critical observations on the traditional pedagogy classrooms relating too uses and changes with mobile media, and the occasional wonkiness of being too inside a subject writing this for the basis of a PHD dissertation so the audience for this book is more limited than it needed to be.

There are some really good bits of information here,
I certainly enjoyed several parts of it that I recognized from my own career in schools. Unlike Mr. Garcia I’m not a teacher I’m a technology specialist with a career that started in south central at a middle school in 2004 so this book speaks to my professional experiences, my first hand knowledge of how technology is used in LAUSD.

First let me say his ask Anansi game is a real gem of an ideal. Unfortunately it requires imagination and my experience is that most teacher’s don’t always process that trait.

I think he’s onto something about changing the paradigm from sit and listen quietly to a boring lecture, power point, web video broadcast, etc., like how teacher’s themselves are taught in professional development to a model that encourages exploration by way of inform perform and transform. Good stuff but again in order to change teaching you need to change teachers, if one could model this in a PA with teacher’s then maybe you can get it to work in a classroom but the district has so many issues that set up roadblocks to this sort of approach I’m almost certain it can’t work except on a individual per teacher basis. Let me give a few of my observations about issues within LAUSD.

There was a point in the book the author spoke about the physical space of a classroom my firm belief is that the traditional classroom needs to be redesigned for better enabling of technology usage.
Classrooms haven’t changed since when I went to school back in the sixties and when technology is brought in it’s added as an afterthought.
Best example is placement of network drops determined by the cost to contractors, will it be cheaper or easier for us, to run the conduit here (more often than not in a location that will be very inconvenient for ease of use) first look at redesigning the classroom in a manner that makes sense from a teaching and technological point of view.

Then we realize we can’t do that because of scale all these brick and mortar construction projects were done at a time when government had funds to spend on things like education, which is no longer the case.
Therefore we need to take a long hard look at the structure of education, on one hand we have the charter movement which is sucking the air and funding out of education to the detriment of schools like those in south central LA.
Groups like LA Best, or Blue Dot, trout this public private partnership but who I can tell you do not have good sound pedagogical structures or good learning practices at the schools they run.
Physical design of classrooms and the lack of facility funding made worse by the pigs to the trough funding approach are two major impediments that need to be addressed via new policy.

Finally LAUSD power structure itself might be the biggest impediment of all. To understand this lets compared the district to a business like McDonalds and the output is on the same order but like McDonalds you can be confused if you don’t see the underling business model McDonalds is a land-holding company it leases out it’s franchise and the owner pays the land mortgage same with LAUSD which is the largest land-holding organization in the second largest urban area in the nation. All decisions need to be measured against that fact it’s not driven by politics or questions about how best to teach Kim and Carlos how to read it’s driven by money. It’s big business and it deals only with other big business Parents students and for the most part teachers are down in the kids seats of window dressing and PR management the real decisions are all money related and no one without a $300 dollar coat and tie on needs to attend. That’s the real problem with the schools a deep disconnect from high finance to ground level problems. Most school administrators barely have a clue about the shape of the issues that they are dealing with as well as being starved for resources to deal with them if they did, and are told the opposite approach to proceed if they were too even try. So redesigning the classroom spaces, breaking down the walls of high finance and economic control that has been built into the public sector by private industry and retraining teachers to administrators to move away from a control model to a empowerment model. These issues some of which are unrelated to teaching students but any new approach if done on any measurable scale will need to make these types of adjustments first before any change in classroom achievement can be had.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this book teachers are reminded that technology alone will not change the traditional power structures in schools hat lead to authentic engagement, learning, and civic identity development of students. Rather we should focus dialogue about how to utilize the digital realities of our students through mobile media to examine how new literacies emerge in our classrooms and how we can best support their development through a humanizing pedagogy centered on relationships and trust between adults and young people.

[Samantha Dupree · Rating 3 out of 5]

review to come