Recently, I've been reading Mimi Ito's book, Engineering Play, which examines the history of the children's software movement during the 80's and 90's through a cultural lens. Wonderfully written, it unpacks how parental expectations, market forces and youth culture all played into the ways that the industry unfolded, for better or worse.
There's a lot to be said about the book, but my interest was peaked by one idea in particular that Ito spends some time on that I think has serious implications for anyone working in education and particularly those of us in the afterschool space. In discussing how youth interacted with an old
Magic Schoolbus software title in an afterschool context, she noted that they would display what she calls "micro-political resistance" to adult agendas around learning.
A science-based title, the software was pretty open ended, allowing youth to explore different parts of the body at their leisure, and part of its attraction was a slick aesthetic design with regards to graphics and sound effects. Ito noted that often youth in the study would spend excruciatingly long periods of time clicking on various items in the interface that would produce "gross" sound effects, a feature that was detached from the overall learning objectives of the software, but one that amused to no end. I mean, who doesn't love making little squishing noises when clicking on semi-digested food in a virtual stomach? :)
She interprets the behavior and some of the discourse around it, however, in a political light. Youth here were rebelling, albeit to a small degree, against the adult oriented values and agendas that were at play both in the software as well as in the afterschool space. This area of "fun" was one they could validly claim as youth, while not having to play into notions of progress and achievement.
As an afterschool educator, this hit me in a powerful way, and makes me ask a lot of questions about why youth choose to engage in these informal learning spaces that often still have adult agendas embedded in them. I, for one, definitely do come to the table with an adult agenda (in the form of learning objectives) for every afterschool workshop I facilitate. How are the agendas of a program I run received by the youth that attend? How do we design these programs to avoid running completely against the grain of youth culture and interests?
I've always referred to the afterschool work we do here at Global Kids as "market based", that if youth don't want to come they won't, and we have to in some ways compete for their attention against other spaces and activities that they could be engaged in afterschool. In a way, that might have been part of our original impetus in bringing in technologies like video games, social media production and virtual worlds into our work. If youth are going to choose to do those things instead of coming to something like GK, why can't we leverage those media forms to promote engagement with the kinds of ideas that we value? Youth are playing a game, why can't they design one about an issue they care about?
I definitely don't have an answer to this dilemma of conflicting adult and youth agendas, but definitely think that a couple of things can be kept in mind for those of us working to educate young people. Above my colleague Molly's desk is a little piece of paper that has the words "Solidarity, not Charity" scribbled on it. I've always appreciated it, and interpreted it as a sort of reminder that the work that we do here really shouldn't be about our presumptive agendas but rather about finding a common space between our own values as human rights educators and the values and interests of the youth we work with, and have that be the starting point for the work we do together. I believe that if we do this well we can minimize, if not eliminate entirely, those parts of our program designs that youth might feel the need to rebel against.
