Connected Learning Summit 2019

I'm Teaching This for the Culture!: Examining Creative Capacity and Change Agency of Hip-Hop Educators Under Constraints and Uncertainty
Jabari Miles Evans
Hip-Hop Based Education, the usage of Hip-Hop practices and pedagogy in urban classrooms, has been argued by many researchers as very beneficial to understanding how to improve the educational disparities of urban youth in low income environments. More particularly, Hip-Hop music making activities have been described by many scholars as beneficial to several supplementary and after-school programs. While music educators might previously have been halted by concerns about appropriateness of lyrics and themes in Hip-Hop albums, a music classroom focused on composing original pieces while developing musical skills and understandings relevant to Hip-Hop music could prove meaningful to future academic and vocational aspirations of students. However, if public school systems are unaccepting of the “organic” and unstructured nature of Hip-Hop culture (language, style, dress, and its resistance to the status quo) how can Hip-Hop practices still be used substantially within the classroom? This paper examines the constraints and ideological conflict when teaching Hip-Hop music production in the formal music classroom. Focusing on pedagogical work of the teaching artists within a school based Hip-Hop music program in an urban school district, this article is a case study analysis of four teaching adult facilitators who support youth as they actively participate in school-based Hip-Hop making practices. By using the narratives of these teachers as units of analysis, qualitative methods were used to view the actions and decisions of teachers within this program. This study reveals how administrative expectations placed upon instructors can greatly influence how the learning in Hip-Hop programs is, or is not, taking place. The findings suggest many schools may endorse Hip-Hop music production programs merely to present a guise of inclusiveness and makes suggestions for how music instructors can combat this challenge in the future.

A Toolkit for Analyzing Teaching and Learning Across Contexts
Jeffrey Holmes, Earl Aguilera, Kelly M Tran
This session explicates a theoretical perspective which addresses the complexities of moving across teaching and learning contexts in everyday life, both in formal settings such as school but also informal settings, and between physical and virtual spaces. While the education research community has made important progress toward understanding learning in a variety of formal and informal contexts, less emphasis has been placed on understanding how teaching and learning experiences can be connected across these contexts and about the variety of teaching and teachers that are essential to them. We outline an analytic perspective called distributed teaching and learning systems (DTALS) which augments other models of learning by stressing the importance of movements across contexts and foregrounds teaching as a key feature alongside learning. We then provide a set of tools for analyzing pedagogical situations through a DTALS perspective, and a brief worked example of the tools in action.

The Promise of Using Media to Engage Young Children and Their Parents in Science
Megan Silander, Michelle Cerrone, Leslie Cuellar, Lindsey Hiebert, Jennifer Stiles
The achievement gap begins well before children enter kindergarten. Research has shown that children who start school having missed critical early learning opportunities are already at risk for academic failure. This project seeks to narrow this gap by finding new avenues for bringing early science experiences to preschool children (ages 3-5), particularly those living in communities with few resources. This study examines the promise of using media to help young children and their families, both English and Spanish-speaking, engage in science in the context of home visiting programs. During the study, low-income families who were enrolled in home visiting programs tested an app-based intervention that explored ramps, colors, and sounds over the course of three months through hands-on activities, rich media experiences, and supports for parents and educators. The research described in this paper investigates whether the intervention improves the capacity of parent/caregivers to support young children's learning in science. Ultimately this research aims to build practical and theoretical understanding of: 1) effective media-based family engagement models in science learning; 2) the types of supports that families and home educators need to implement these models.