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The Media & Communications Institutes: Reframing Adult Digital Literacy for Social Movement Building
Type of Presentation
Shared
Session Abstract
This session presents initial findings from an institutional ethnography of an urban social justice organization that received government funding to increase digital literacy education for the city’s most vulnerable populations.
Target Audience
This session will be of interest to those who are engaged in adult education for social justice purposes, whether through social movement, non-profit, or service organizations; and those who are interested in the role of technology in society. Radical adult educators who work in community programs often must secure funding, and then navigate funders' agendas. This research looks at an urban social justice organization's federally funded digital literacy programs and investigates how the organization strives to continue and expand their original movement building agenda. The presentation focuses on one particular program that successfully reframes the dominant themes surrounding broadband adoption.
Learning Outcomes
Attendees of this session will come away with new perspectives and interest in the implications of an influx of federal dollars to this grassroots organization, and the ways that radical program planners are negotiating funding guidelines and the organization's mission. The program that is the focus of the presentation will introduce a learning model that combines critical education, media literacy, and media production/distribution skills with poor and working adult learners in public computer centers. Attendees will also be exposed to the research method of institutional ethnography and the strengths of this approach to adult education.
Session Description
Scholarship in adult education regarding digital literacy is emerging and there are different perspectives on the competing claims surrounding new technologies. Practices of radical adult educators who are concerned about growing inequities and are leading efforts to harness new digital technologies to challenge negative effects of globalization have not been examined.
The research documents the organization's contradictory partnership with the city government and other partners and their resulting practices as they have implemented new programs into their own public computer centers and education efforts. I will focus here on the story that emerged from interviews, texts, and observations, which marked when leaders decided to redirect their organizational efforts and created intensive “media institutes,” comprised of radical adult education, media production, and the integration of these new skills into organizing campaigns.
Efforts are made to try to schedule sessions on the day preferred by the Primary Presenter, though this cannot be guaranteed. Please check your preference.
Wednesday November 6
Primary Presenter
Shivaani Selvaraj, Pennsylvania State University
Work Title
Instructional Designer