Spend any time in schools in North America, and you are likely to observe young people using their smartphones to take pictures, record sounds, make music, or videos. From selfies to sexting, digital images—created and shared through mobile, social networks—play a significant role in the daily lives of teens and young adults. Typically, educators, parents, and school administrators react with trepidation or outright prohibition to the presence of image producing and broadcasting tools—the smartphone—in school. As a former high school art teacher and now a university educator preparing the next generation of art educators, I have witnessed the simultaneously radical and yet subtle shifts mobile media has prompted in classrooms. In the art room, the smartphone is, for the most part, an indispensable image research tool for students. Yet, much to the lament of art teachers, students are becoming too reliant on Google Image search. Students can make professional quality images and distribute them all over the world. Conversely, they can also make harmful images that can devastate the lives of their peers (e.g., bullying, sexting, and revenge pornography). What are art educators to do with these devices that contain such creative and destructive power? This question is the rationale for this book and the eight years of research it represents.
The motivation of this book and research started for me when I began researching how young people can use social and mobile media as a creative learning tool. In 2006, after I left my high school art classroom to undertake a Ph.D., I received an invitation from my former students to join a group hosted on an online platform called Facebook. At the time, I had heard little about Facebook, and I assumed it was just another variation of MySpace or its earlier predecessors, a bulletin board system (BBS). However, I was captivated after a few months of watching what my former students did on Facebook. On the Art Group page, students from the beginning to the end of my time as a high school art teacher were sharing their artwork and interacting. What made Facebook and social media different was the ease in which users could upload images and other media content.
The shift in Internet computing—going from having to code HTML to build a Web site to quickly posting images—was so compelling that I decided to devote my doctoral research to its potential for art classrooms (Castro, 2010). I found that peer-learning, or peer-networked learning, has tremendous potential in art education. I also discovered that media forms—specifically images and text—that are peer-generated are potent teachers (Castro, 2015). As I was conducting my dissertation research with art students and their teachers on a closed social network in 2007, the first Apple iPhone was released. Although the iPhone was not the first smartphone on the market, it did seamlessly converge multiple media tools into one device. The iPhone untethered access to the Internet from desktop computers. The speed, amplification, and ubiquity of information sharing increased radically. By the time I completed my dissertation, I knew the future was mobile.
In 2012, with my colleague David Pariser and Art Education graduate student Martin Lalonde, we piloted MonCoin, an experimental art curriculum that used mobile media to foster civic engagement with at-risk youth. MonCoin, French for “my corner” or “my area,” is based on research that contended if at-risk youth were engaged with their civic environments using digital tools, they would be more engaged with their education (Bennett, Wells, & Rank, 2009). Our pilot research worked with young people who either dropped out or were at risk of dropping out, aged 16–18 years old, in Montreal. They attended a specialized school that was designed to reintegrate students into the school system or help them obtain a high school equivalency. For 18 months, we tested a curriculum based on missions that were sent to student participants’ mobile devices through a semi-private image-based social network—Instagram. The curriculum was designed to have students examine themselves in the context of their immediate surroundings and move outward to explore their larger civic environment. We implemented the curriculum in four- to six-week cycles, getting valuable feedback from our participants along the way, and then redesigned the missions and sequence for the next group of students.
Our data analysis from this pilot phase yielded insights into the potentials and pitfalls of using mobile media in schools that both affirmed and challenged our initial assumptions. In terms of civic engagement, we found that young people were initially more interested in learning how to make “good-looking” images, before looking critically at their civic environments (Pariser, Castro, & Lalonde, 2016). When we asked students to photograph and share areas of their public spaces that needed change, we barely had any response from participants. We found that young people, especially at-risk youth, felt disempowered, so much so, they had no interest in pursuing the question of how to change their neighborhoods for the better. Within the past decade, the field of art education has come to understand the vital role of social and civic engagement as an essential part of contemporary art (Tavin & Ballengee Morris, 2012). What our participants told us was that they did not feel as if they had any power to make a meaningful change. They instead wanted to learn how to make good-looking photographs, which we did teach them in follow-up workshops. In future iterations of the MonCoin curriculum, we strove to integrate the teaching of design and photographic techniques, and we affirmed that this was empowering for young people. Students were learning the grammar of visual culture and as a result, were then more inclined to address questions of civic concern. Mobile media is a powerful tool for image making, but it is still just a tool. Users still need proper instruction on making engaging pictures. These skills are empowering currency on social media for young people.
We also found that young people are invested in constructing their identity online through the multimodal documentation of the physical and temporal spaces of their everyday lives (Lalonde, Castro, & Pariser, 2016). Much of mobile and social media use for young people is motivated by building one’s identity, presentation, and dissemination. To protect the student’s identity in the project, we required them to refrain from posting images of themselves or others directly. This restriction coupled with projects that asked students to explore aspects of the self produced an abundance of pictures of participants’ material world—their favorite objects and collections that expressed their affinities and ideas about themselves. The material world is rich with meaning for teens and adolescents and often ends up as essential signifiers of social status and identity. Material culture is also a rich source of pedagogical material for art educators (Blandy & Bolin, 2018). The smartphone has become a necessity in how young people construct and share their identities through the material world around them—it is just as crucial to their identity as selfies.
Further, the use of mobile media was initially hypothesized as a means for engaging at-risk youth outside of school. However, we found when participants had the choice of where they could move and meet, participants expressly sought out opportunities to be together in school (Castro, Lalonde, & Pariser, 2016). MonCoin was an opportunity to give at-risk youth, who had a high rate of absenteeism, a way to engage with school using the networked capability of mobile devices, a social network, and a curriculum premised on exploring civic environments. We thought we could deliver the MonCoin curriculum, through their own mobile device or one we lent them, to students regardless if they were physically in school. What we observed were students who usually did not want to come to school, gathering after the school day to meet up with the instructor and fellow students to discuss the projects or self-organize walking field trips to explore their neighborhood. In our final interviews with students, we discussed their willingness to come together at the school or in the neighborhood during the MonCoin project. They expressed an affinity toward the sense of agency they were granted, which stemmed from the movement afforded by the curriculum and technology. The increased mobility provided to these students was in marked contrast to their typical experience of school—whereas for at-risk students their mobility was considerably restricted. Mobile media coupled with a curriculum predicated on exploring space created the conditions in which the freedom to move empowered students to engage more with their education and peers inside and outside of school.
This book picks up where our pilot research ended and the MonCo...