Abstract:

The focus of this paper is the challenges of participatory research with young people in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) settings in schools and universities. In particular, we articulate two concerns: firstly, with developing the role of creative practices and virtual communities in helping young people to find a voice and become participatory researchers of their own lived experiences; secondly with the importance of TEL researchers working together in research communities and joint enterprises, focused on their shared interests and concerns. Young people’s use and understanding of the Internet is widely under-researched. We argue that researching alongside young people in TEL settings presents researchers with conceptual, methodological and theoretical challenges. The realities of research processes and young people’s lived experiences with TEL do not always sit together easily.

In this paper we have tried to extend our argument beyond reflexively considering theory in our own work, to the use of theory as part of the intellectual ‘self-defence toolkit’ that researchers and practitioners in the global TEL community need to consider. Theory, and its relationships with practice, can be complex. Yet theory can offer us the language, history, scope and power that we need to be aware of both our own interests and those of others who are working with us. Our work arose from our concern to provide evidence that our Virtual Research Community (VRC) was helping young people pursue their own research agendas and find their research “voices”, and was actually effective in serving young people’s interests as well as our own. This concern was around two research agendas and two sets of interests – that of the project participants, and our own as the funded researchers. We focused on the processes in which we became engaged as we tried to ensure that our agenda did not dominate the VRC – leading to the emergence of some key themes.

These themes include the need for more empirical evidence of the realities of young people’s lives with TEL. Another was the role of theory in our own work, and the need for re-theorisation of the subjectivities of young people in TEL settings. We explored how Activity Theory (AT) might assist in the methodological and analytical work of researching young people’s creativity in a VRC. We specifically considered AT, but our argument has broader application to other theoretical frameworks.

We also focused on the significance of learning spaces that can support communities. They are part of the intellectual toolkit that can be used to resist to subordination of community ideas and work to particular interests. Resistance to the large-scale industrialisation of TEL, and its ideologies, seems to us to be a key issue, including the potential for surveillance and control that is contained in the whole learning analytics movement in which so many TEL researchers are involved. We are also mindful of the enormous potential of creative practices drawn from Art and Design to assist us in this work.

Our aim in this work is to support a theoretically informed and open TEL community of critical researchers. We hope that that these reflections will, even if in some small ways, nourish and assist individuals and TEL communities to flourish amid the crises and perplexities of our educational working conditions, and the present state of TEL.

Keywords:

Technology Enhanced Learning, Art and Design Education, Community, Theory, Learning Spaces.