Abstract
In The Digital Edge: How Black and Latino Youth Navigate Digital Inequality, S. Craig Watkins and co-authors study the digital media practices and ecologies of teens, coining the term digital edge to connote “the institutions, practices, and social relations that make up the daily and mediated lives of black, Latino, and lower-income youth” (p. 2). Through ethnographic inquiry at a public high school on the margins of Austin, Texas, including interviews with students and their parents, the authors offer rich illustrations of teens’ emergent practices with digital technologies. They situate these practices in the context of public education, examining the ways in which the school setting supports and suppresses particular technological practices that would advance students’ learning, facilitate their transitions to the workforce or higher education, and contribute to their socioeconomic mobility.
The seven numbered chapters of the book portray life in the digital edge in and out of school. In the introduction and first two chapters, S. Craig Watkins provides an overview of the digital edge for Black and Latino teens in the United States, supported by the experiences of youth in the study. They may lack home broadband access, particularly because of cost, and instead use mobile phones to access the Internet to a greater extent than their White and Asian counterparts. Watkins contends here and elsewhere (Watkins, 2012) that this is paradoxical: Black and Latino youth are early and enthusiastic adopters of mobile technologies and media and (potentially) late adopters of wired broadband Internet, thereby limiting their participation online. Even if gaps in Internet access have closed because of mobile adoption, mobile-only access compares unfavorably as a pathway to beneficial, capital-enhancing uses of the Internet. In addition, teens’ digital media practices with mobile phones are downplayed at school. The third chapter by Jacqueline Ryan Vickery and Vivian Shaw explores these tensions. Ryan Vickery and Shaw suggest that although schools have legal obligations related to minors’ use of the Internet, they should foster students’ responsible use of mobile technologies for learning and develop their critical digital literacies, activities that did not occur at the school under study because of restrictions on students’ technology use.
The fourth and fifth chapters, both by Watkins, turn to the topic of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education. The fourth chapter moves between description of a poorly planned game design class that the researchers observed, analysis of the limited opportunities to learn that the class afforded, and national trends in STEM education and the workforce. Watkins recommends that STEM learning be more attuned to problem solving and cognitive skills than to using particular technologies and producing digital media. To this point, the fifth chapter reports on an intervention by the research team. They introduced design thinking to a subset of game design students, which led to self-regulated learning experiences for some and offered promise to engage students who may struggle in school. Together, these chapters promote engagement with STEM and games at school in a way that centers students’ collaboration, innovation, and deep learning rather than technologies themselves.
The sixth chapter, by Watkins, Lombana-Bermudez, and Weinzimmer, follows what happens when the school day ends. The authors consider how after-school activities offer enrichment opportunities for low-income youth and shape their relationships to school, given that they are unlikely to participate in out-of-school enrichment opportunities, constrained by family resources. Three cases show how teens codesign their own enrichment and develop their interests, perhaps to their future benefit.
Contradictions between the students’ plans for their futures and the futures they are equipped to achieve are the subject of the seventh chapter, by Cho, Shaw, and Watkins. Delving into the phenomenon of school tracking, they examine troubling outcomes of students on a vocational track: digital media training in school had not prepared them to enter the careers they wished to enter. Their pathways to higher education were also limited. Compounding a lack of social capital and family experience with higher education, the school largely failed to provide resources to support students’ academic success, meaningfully expand their social networks, and contribute to their future socioeconomic mobility.
The book concludes with the proposal that educators should attend to the future readiness of students, since their current focus on students’ college or career readiness has led to the disappointing outcomes of the previous chapter as well as racial inequity in academic achievement nationwide. The future of work is uncertain: Watkins follows predictions about the roles of automation and technology that suggest that some human skills, namely, expert thinking and complex communications, will remain valuable. Ultimately, “equal access to high-quality learning opportunities” (p. 232) should serve students better than more technology.
The Digital Edge succeeds in weaving together detailed portraits of Black, Latino, and low-income youth with quantitative data about their circumstances, in conversation with a range of topics—sharing economies and improvisation with mobile phones, under-resourced public education systems, the hype of STEM education, games, and school tracking, to name some—that intersect with digital inequality. Tying together these topics is a formidable challenge, which the book addresses through its two key proposals, the concept of the digital edge and the recommendation of future-ready education. The earlier chapters better illustrate digital inequality, while the later chapters attend more closely to education and the social reproduction of inequality.
Because of the breadth of The Digital Edge, readers in media studies, education, sociology, and beyond will find themes of interest. They may find a critical orientation to digital media, especially social media, lacking across the initial chapters, and an unquestioning treatment of 21st-century skills and STEM in later chapters. Nevertheless, The Digital Edge traces a complex relationship between digital inequality and educational equity that should be generative for readers.
