Organizing Learning Environments for Relational Equity in New Digital Media

Abstract

This chapter theorizes the notion of relational equity in the context of new mediasupported learning environments. Drawing upon examples from multiyear investigations into the social organization of learning activity in an elementary afterschool program in Colorado and an adolescent music and journalism production program in California, we outline an emerging framework for how to organize learning ecologies in ways that encourage more symmetrical relations among adults and youth across various lines of difference. In articulating design principles at the level of the technology tool, the social interaction, and the broader learning environment, this chapter offers empirically grounded insight for those interested in organizing learning opportunities with new digital media in expansive and equitable ways. Further, it makes visible how attention to (in)equity must not constrain itself to one place, space, or time – cognizant of the ways in which power operates through a multiplicity of relations and processes that serve largely to reproduce inequality in society. It is with this understanding of power that we foreground the ways that new educational technologies might reorganize social relations in educational practices in schools and the community, with careful attention to how such technologies might change the normative yet deeply entrenched relations of power and privilege that exist in contemporary societies.