I am excited to share three first author publications that just came out spring / summer 2015 (and hint at another one hopefully is on its way on navigating public and private identities and literacies in networked publics). These articles provide practical and theoretical guidance for working with youth, families and educators in the area of digital media and learning, and STEM focused “making and tinkering” activities.

1. Schwartz, L. (2015). A Funds of Knowledge Approach to the Appropriation of Digital Media in a High School Writing Course. Interactive Learning Environments download a copy
   This publication is drawn from my dissertation research and outlines a funds of knowledge approach to digital media use in classrooms. Funds of Knowledge is sometimes misunderstood in practice—I hope to contribute to a better understanding of this participatory and social justice oriented theory and method with this article. This article is in a special issue on learner generated design and participatory culture with wonderful colleagues in the learning sciences.
2. Schwartz, L., DiGiacomo, D., & Gutiérrez, K. (2015). Designing “Contexts for Tinkerability” with Undergraduates and Children within the El Pueblo Mágico Social Design Experiment. International Journal for Research on Extended Education IJREE (3)1.  download a copy
   This article shares the fantastic experience of co-constructing “Making and Tinkering” programs with my colleagues at the University of Colorado over three years. This article documents this design based research through the experiences of undergraduates and k-8 students who participated in our program at two instantiations of “El Pueblo Magico”. Undergraduate researchers I led in one iteration of the program helped me analyze a portion of the data. El Pueblo Magico is Kris Gutierrez’s longstanding 5th dimension after school club and companion pre-service teacher course at CU Boulder. This program is based on her 20 year program Las Redes that was in Los Angeles, CA.
   Acknowledgment: We want to acknowledge M&T as a community effort and movement! This footnote was accidentally lost from the article. Please read to get a better sense of who was involved locally and the larger M&T community. Many thanks to all!
   Gutierrez is the project director and designer of the social design experiment who decided to include M & T activity at EPM.  Participants in the social design experiment all work in concert in shared participation.  We acknowledge the invaluable support of Gutierrez’s colleagues at the San Francisco Exploratorium who shared with us several of their M & T activities for EPM1.  The design of M & T activities for EPM2 and EPM3 were led by Schwartz (me) in partnership with graduate students Sam Severance, Michael Skirpan, and Undergraduate Research Opportunities (UROP) Students, Luke Charbonneau, Sam Goodman, Stephanie Loots, Blair Thurman, Tommy Hoffman and Jake Nelson.   We also acknowledge critical assistance from Swamy Ananthanarayan and the CU Boulder Craft Tech Lab, and Veena Vasudevan and colleagues at Penn GSE.  The implementation of M & T activities we discuss here were made possible by the joint activity and shared participation of the design and instructional teams, who in many instances overlapped.  For each permutation of EPM, instructional team members (who in addition to the authors of this paper and members of the design team (e.g. Sam Severance and Michael Skirpan) include Michael Dominguez and Michael Suarez, along with the M & T designers, were absolutely instrumental in integrating M & T activities into the designed learning ecology through their role in teaching the theory through class activity, their participation at EPM and their engagement with CEs.
3.  Schwartz, L. & Gutierrez, K. (2015). Literacy Studies and Situated Methods: Exploring the social organization of household activity and family media use. In Rowsell, J. & Pahl K. (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Literacy Studies. Routledge. download a copy
   This book chapter with Kris Gutierrez explores Latina mothers’ and daughters ingenuity with mobile phones and digitally mediated family learning.  We take a closeup look at the social organization of learning in homes, particularly in regard to digital media and families’ interests and practices in play and family well being.  Data from this chapter comes the profound experience of working on Dr. Gutierrez’s “Leveraging Horizontal Expertise” study of Latino and low income families in Colorado, where I served as Research Director and postdoctoral research fellow from 2011-2014 (and am currently finishing some articles etc on the work).  The chapter is published in an edited volume by renowned (and incredibly down to earth) literacy scholars and pioneers in multimodality and digital literacies, Kate Pahl and Jennifer Rowsell.

Check out my presentations at AERA. Regrettably, I had to cancel my trip at the last minute but my co-author Daniela is presenting my power points etc for me, or I am sending a video. See below for some materials or my academia.edu page. Somehow it seems to be more work to create presentations and videos for others to share than going to the conference myself! 🙂

Schwartz, L., & DiGiacomo, D., & Gutiérrez, K. (April, 2015). Attending to Latino Parents’ Discourses of Health and Family Time. Paper presentation at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL.  HandoutMomHealthRoundtableCR3

Schwartz, L. (April, 2015). Public / Private Divides and the Appropriation of New Media in Classrooms and Digital Domains. Paper presentation at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL.  Video will be posted later today! 

Schwartz, L., & DiGiacomo, D., & Gutiérrez, K. (April, 2015). Designing “Contexts for Tinkerability[i]” with Undergraduates and Children within the El Pueblo Mágico Social Design Experiment. Paper presentation at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL.

[i] The term “contexts for tinkerability” derives from the work of Resnick and Rosenbaum (2013) that is discussed in this article.

This time around Inventos Boulder is comprised of myself, three undergraduate research opportunity students and 16-20 kids and their group leader who are part of a program that focuses on health and well being. Our intergenerational ensembles will create video documentaries on the intersection of health and technology in their lives, and the lives of their families and communities. We use iPod touches to document and edit the work!

Our research will focus on the aforementioned topic as well as the multimodal literacy practices, ethnographic sensibilities and choices the children ages 7-11 leverage and develop with the project. They will conduct interviews using the iPods and edit their movies with iMovie on these mobile devices.  They will use other tools to create images and music for their videos. We aim to have parent involvement via several dinners for families where kids will interview their parents and get feedback on their post-production process.