Media and Migration

Learning in a globalized world

Kevin Leander, Mariëtte de Haan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317294603
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Media and Migration: Learning in a globalized wor ld brings together studies located at the intersection of migration, media and learning, and considers how the learning practices of youth in migration are shaped by new media. The change in the mobilities of people, media, and material goods which allow new connections between 'global' and 'local' life has had a significant impact on contemporary migration, as well as social life more generally.

The contributors to this book show how learning trajectories of individual learners become defined by broadly distributed networks and knowledge systems. Learning in stable, closed, and culturally uniform settings is becoming the exception rather than the norm. While immigrant youth are often associated with juggling multiple lives or worlds, such juggling is increasingly becoming typical for all youth living with new media. The book therefore addresses youth learning more generally in relation to media, globalization, and diversity, as well as the digital learning practices of immigrants and non-immigrants. This book was originally published as a special issue of Learning, Media and Technology.

Toppling hierarchies? Media and information literacies, ethnicity, and performative media practices

Kirsten Drotner^a and Christian Kobbernagel^b

^aInstitute for the Study of Culture – Media Studies, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark; ^bDepartment of Communication, Business and Information Technologies, Roskilde University, Denmark

This article suggests how we should study media and information literacies (MIL) and do so at a time, when young people nurture these literacies through multiple media practices and across spaces of learning. Our basic argument is this: in order to gain a robust knowledge base for the development of MIL we need to study literacy practices beyond print literacy and numeracy, and we need to study these practices beyond formal spaces of learning. The argument is unfolded with particular focus on ethnic minority youth since this group routinely figures as under-achieving in studies of school literacy, such as Programme for International Student Assessment. Based on a brief overview of literacy studies in view of digitization and a critical examination of recent studies of youthful media practices and ethnicity, the argument is illustrated through an empirical analysis that draws on results from a nationally representative survey of media uses among Danes aged 13–23 years. The analysis demonstrates that ethnic minority youth offer the most serious challenge to existing literacy hierarchies found in formal education. We discuss the implications of these results for educational policy-making and for future research on MIL, advocating inclusive approaches in terms of media for learning and spaces of learning.

In December 2013, the results were released of the latest Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test conducted in 2012. PISA focuses on student attainment in the age band 15–16 years in reading, mathematics and science; it has been conducted since 1997 by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) with three-year intervals, and the latest test encompassed 65 countries. As with previous PISA reports, the results sent shock waves across the educational sectors in many countries; and they mobilized debates on national policy-making whose focus depends on individual countries’ movements up or down the ranking scale. The European Commission’s press release, for example, illuminated this focus:

The EU as a whole is seriously lagging behind in maths, but the picture is more encouraging in science and reading where Europe is on track to achieve its 2020 target for reducing the percentage of low achievers to below 15%. (European Commission 2013, n.p., Authors’ italics)

Why Europe takes this position was indicated by Jan Truszczynski, Director General of the DG Education and Culture at the European Commission, in his speech on the launch of the report in Brussels: ‘PISA 2012 shows that the socio-economic background is a powerful factor determining achievement [...] In addition, migrants often do not perform as well as native-born citizens’ (Truszczynski 2013, n.p.).

The launch of the PISA report in 2013 offers an important insight into one of the key contestations for education today, namely what future competencies are and should be and how they may be studied. Here, an important European player is the OECD. As noted, it is in charge of the PISA tests and reports, whose focus on reading, mathematics and science indicates that these are key competencies. But, in tandem with PISA, the OECD in 1997 launched a project – Definition and Selection of Competencies (DeSeCo) – to define future key competencies in knowledge societies. In its final report, the OECD defines three core competencies as follows: (1) interactive use of tools, (2) interaction in heterogeneous groups and (3) autonomous action (Rychen and Salganik 2003). These competencies are not easily grasped by the PISA tests. This is primarily because PISA focuses on formal schooling, while young people’s training of the DeSeCo competencies takes place beyond the school gates (Arafeh and Levin 2002; Erstad 2010; Zickuhr 2010). Moreover, their training of DeSeCo competencies involves the appropriation of a multitude of digital and increasingly portable media that goes well beyond the educational use of print media and internet-linked computers for information search (Drotner 2008; Ito et al. 2010).

In more general terms, the conflictual nature of OECD’s definition speaks to a situation in which competence formation is being distributed across a range of sites and settings (Leander, Phillips, and Taylor 2010): school no longer holds a monopoly on learning. It also speaks to a situation in which competencies are fundamentally being transformed into media and information literacies (MIL). By this we mean that the handling of semiotic tools of meaning-making – be they figures, text, sound or images – are at the core of competence formation (Drotner 2007). These semiotic tools are increasingly shaped, shared and stored through the appropriation of digital media – whether they are ‘born’ digital (mobiles, computers and the internet) or ‘made’ digital (television, radio, books and newspapers): the book no longer holds a monopoly on literacy.

This article addresses the digitization of literacy formation and the dispersion of learning sites for young people. In order to better understand how this dispersion plays out, we examine media practices across a broad spectrum of media, not merely traditional print media such as books or merely recent digital technologies such as computers and the internet; and we discuss how these practices may offer resources for MIL. We also hone in on young people’s everyday media practices beyond formal education. For in order to gain a robust knowledge base for the development of MIL, we need to study literacy practices that go beyond PISA’s focus on print literacy and numeracy; and we need to study these practices not only in schools and at work, but equally beyond those formal spaces of learning.

Everyday media practices beyond formal sites of learning are contextualized processes related to interlaced differentials of region, age, class, gender and ethnicity. Our empirical analysis examines the relations between everyday media practices of ethnic majority and minority groups. This relation is sought out for particular attention, because ethnicity is routinely referenced as a key factor of literacy (under)achievement at school, as indicated by Truszczynski’s position quoted above. Moreover, the dimension of ethnicity is singled out because it is as understudied by media audience research as it is central to discourses of educational achievement. In more concrete terms, we ask: What characterizes the relations between everyday media practices of young ethnic majority and minority groups? How do these empirical relations tie in with public priorities on literacy and ethnicity? And how can our results inform a future-directed understanding of MIL? Providing answers to these research questions are important for two reasons. First, they allow a critical examination of seemingly self-evident and widely held assumptions about the relations between education, literacy and ethnicity. Second, they help sketch a path for a more granular, theoretical understanding of MIL.

The article briefly situates its research questions through critical overviews of prevalent literacy concepts and their relations to MIL, and of recent studies conducted on youthful media practices and ethnicity. Then illustrative answers are provided through an empirical analysis that draws on results from a nationally representative survey of media uses among Danes aged 13–23 years (Kobbernagel, Schrøder, and Drotner 2011). Finally, the main results are discussed and related to their wider implications for educational policy-making and for future research on MIL, advocating inclusive approaches in terms of media for learning and spaces of learning.

Literacy studies beyond print

Following socio-cultural learning theories, material and symbolic tools may be defined as keys to learning and knowledge production (Wertsch 1998). Today, digital media is a catalyst in transforming the very fabric of knowledge production towards semiotic tools for situated meaning-making (Drotner 2008); or what the Swedish education researcher Roger Säljö calls ‘discursive tools’ (Säljö 2000). Furthermore, digital – and increasingly portable – media serves to further disperse arenas of learning because they are not bound to specific locales or times of use. It is, therefore, important to spell out how these changed aims and means of knowledge production impact our understanding of literacy.

An important implication of the transformation of knowledge production is that the once-familiar concept of literacy is being questioned and refashioned. Rather than a concept involving the ability to handle written text (read and write) and manipulate numbers (arithmetic) through the use of print media such as books, today we have a range of bundled literacies. Some scholars, coming out of information science and research on human–computer interaction, focus on changing tools, or technologies, as drivers of people’s changing literacies. Others, with a background in audience studies or socio-cultural traditions of learning, focus on people’s changing modes of meaning-making and appropriation of literacy through different technological means (see overview in Drotner and Erstad 2014). Arguably, we need a ‘multi-dimensional’ concept of literacy (Park 2012) that is inclusive in terms of technologies (Graham and Goodrum 2007) and attuned to appropriations beyond mere access (Hobbs 2008).

In particular, a multi-dimensional concept of literacy must include what may be termed ‘performative media practices’, by which we mean practices to do with the shaping, editing and sharing of the semiotic content. Writing is the key performative dimension of traditional literacy practices – new content is produced through the creation of letters, words and numbers. But with digitization, this performative dimension potentially undergoes quite dramatic changes: software tools and distribution services are easily available in many parts of the world whereby users may produce, edit, store and share images, sounds, texts and numbers – and mixtures of these.

Here, we follow UNESCO’s definition of MIL as a ‘composite concept’ to ‘understand the functions of media and other information providers, to critically evaluate their content and to make informed decisions as users and producers of information and media content’ (UNESCO 2012, n.p.). MIL are widely accepted and adopted in policy circles and hence carry weight in terms of educational action if the concept can be aligned with robust, empirical action. In research terms, the term is useful, since it indicates that literacy is a particular competence, namely the relevant use of semiotic tools for meaning-making; and media is defined as a conglomerate of meaning-making technologies that catalyses this competence formation.

Still, in studying MIL we need to go beyond the formal contexts of schooling (and the ramifications of PISA tests): we need to also capture how MIL are resourced through media practices. This is because MIL are nurtured through media users’ appropriation of a multitude of digital and increasingly portable media, and these appropriations are primarily exercised in out-of-school domains. Some of these may be termed informal learning spaces, where people use media without any intention of gaining knowledge. Others may be termed semi-formal learning spaces that people intentionally enter to explore, perhaps with guidance, but often with little or no explicit learning outcomes (see the overview of terms in Drotner 2008). In order to fully understand how MIL are resourced, we need empirical research designs that encompass a multitude of media and practices. Equally, we need granular analyses of MIL users and their socio-cultural relations, including the relations between ethnic majority and minority users. The latter analyses must be based on equally granular conceptualizations of media and ethnicity.

Ethnicity and media studies

In a meta-analysis of European media studies and ethnic minority audiences, Swiss media researchers Bonfadelli, Bucher, and Piga cogently remark that ‘in relation to studies of ethnic representations in the media, studies of ethnic minority audiences remain a rarity’ ( 2007, 149). This situation makes it extra important to chart theoretical and empirical trends of this user approach. As Bonfadelli and colleagues also note, studies of ethnic minorities’ media practices follow main fault lines in media studies at large. Effects studies focus on the impact of media uses on social integration (Peeters and d’Haenens 2005); uses and gratifications studies focus on ethnic minorities’ preferences for so-called majority and minority media (Adoni, Cohen, and Caspi 2006), and these terms are often linked to host country productions (majority media) or home country productions (minority media) (Elias and Lemish 2008; Dhoest, Nikunen, and Cola 2013). Both effects studies and uses and gratifications research mainly take quantitative, survey-based approaches. Conversely, audience studies primarily adopt qualitative approaches, such as discourse analysis, semiotic analysis or ethnographic-oriented analysis. The aim is to uncover how particular ethnic groups make sense of particular media or genres as part of their everyday identity work (for classic studies, see Fuglesang 1994; Gillespie 1995). Some combine an audience and a production perspectiv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Toppling hierarchies? Media and information literacies, ethnicity, and performative media practices
• 2. Mobilizing learning resources in a transnational classroom: translocal and digital resources in a community technology center
• 3. The future of digital working: knowledge migration and learning
• 4. Understanding glocal learning spaces. An empirical study of languaging and transmigrant positions in the virtual classroom
• 5. Literacy and capital in immigrant youths’ online networks across countries
• 6. Challenging ideals of connected learning: the networked configurations for learning of migrant youth in the Netherlands
• Index