[Air-L] New book announcement - The class: living and learning in the digital age

Tue May 3 08:25:02 PDT 2016

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New book announcement

The class: living and learning in the digital age

By Sonia Livingstone (http://www.sonialivingstone.net/) and Julian Sefton-Green (http://www.julianseftongreen.net/)
Published 3 May 2016 by New York University Press
See: http://nyupress.org/books/9781479824243/

Based upon fieldwork at an ordinary London school, The Class examines young people's experiences of growing up and learning in a digital world. In this original and engaging study, Livingstone and Sefton-Green explore youth values, teenagers’ perspectives on their futures, and their tactics for facing the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. The authors follow the students as they move across their different social worlds—in school, at home, and with their friends, engaging in a range of activities from video games to drama clubs and music lessons.

Based on spending over a year with one class of 13-14 year olds, the authors ask a host of questions that concern parents, teachers, journalists, public policy makers and researchers:
* Do today’s youth have more opportunities than their parents?
* As they build their own social and digital networks, does that offer new routes to learning and friendship?
* How do they navigate opportunities for formal and informal learning in a digitally connected but fiercely competitive, highly individualized world?
* What is expected of parents, and what do parents actually do, when bringing up their young teens in the digital age?

By portraying the texture of the students’ everyday lives, The Class seeks to understand how the structures of social class and cultural capital shape the development of personal interests, relationships and autonomy. Providing insights into how young people’s social, digital, and learning networks enable or disempower them, Livingstone and Sefton-Green reveal that the experience of disconnections and blocked pathways is often more common than that of connections and new opportunities.

The authors will be blogging about the book over the coming few months at www.parenting.digital (http://www.parenting.digital/)  and at http://clalliance.org/publications/the-class-living-and-learning-in-the-digital-age/

We are delighted to note that the book is free to read online at http://connectedyouth.nyupress.org/book/9781479824243/ (http://connectedyouth.nyupress.org/)

If you would like a review copy, please email Betsy C Steve - betsy.steve at nyu.edu (North America) Rachel Shand - rachelshand at combinedacademic.co.uk (EU & ROW).

Contents page
* Introduction: An Invitation to Meet the Class
* 1 Living and Learning in the Digital Age
* 2 A Year of Fieldwork
* 3 Networks and Social Worlds
* 4 Identities and Relationships
* 5 Life at School: From Routines to Civility
* 6 Learning at School: Measuring and “Leveling” the Self
* 7 Life at Home Together and Apart
* 8 Making Space for Learning in the Home
* 9 Learning to Play Music: Class, Culture, and Taste
* 10 Life Trajectories, Social Mobility, and Cultural Capital
* Conclusion: Conservative, Competitive, or Connected

Each chapter is grounded in original empirical research and each seeks to bring children and young people’s experiences and voices to the fore.

The book reflects several years of fieldwork, analysis and writing, part of our participation in the Connected Learning Research Network funded by the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning initiative. Recognising that we live in a thoroughly mediated society, this network is examining how children and young people already – and could in the future - connect their formal and informal learning experiences in school, home, with peers and in interest-driven activities.

The Class is the second in a new series (http://dmlcentral.net/introducing-new-book-series-connected-youth-digital-futures/) called Connected Youth and Digital Futures (http://connectedyouth.nyupress.org/)  which examines “changes at the intersection of civil and political reform, transformations in employment and education, and the growing presence of digital technologies in all aspects of social, cultural and political life.”

Praise already received for The Class:
“In a richly textured account, The Class unpacks many of the grand claims made in public discourse about the perceived impact—positive and negative—of new media technologies on young people’s lives and future prospects. Intellectually engaging, lucidly written, and emotionally engrossing, The Class is required reading for policy makers, parents, and teachers alike."
—Kirsten Drotner, co-editor of Informal Learning and Digital Media (http://www.cambridgescholars.com/download/sample/59154)

“One of the richest investigations to date of young people across the major sites of their lives—school, family, and among their peers—The Class will be a distinctive contribution to media and youth studies. Displaying an impressive breadth of knowledge, the authors showcase lively ethnographic vignettes to draw significant, convincing, and exciting insights.”
—Dorothy Holland, co-author of Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds (http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674005624)

"An exemplary ethnography whose holistic engagement with children at home as well as at school allow for judicious appraisals of what actually matters, motivates, and has consequences for their lives. By fully respecting the children’s attempts to control the impact of digital technologies, negotiate their relationships and internalise but tame institutional pressures, this book gives us precisely the kind of empathetic sense of the child that we need to retain as adults."
—Daniel Miller, author of Social Media in an English Village (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press/browse-books/social-media-in-an-english-village)

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