In the NSF Learning across Networked and Emerging Spaces (LANES) project, conceived and coordinated by Reed Stevens (Northwestern University) and Katie Headrick Taylor (University of Washington), we were extending research of the Learning in Formal and Informal Environments (LIFE) Center. Our particular part of the project focused on how new media and digital technologies were reconfiguring family life, especially given the proliferation of mobile devices in home environments. Our team investigated what these changes in learning looked like in 13 homes in 2 US cities, and used ethnographic methods to explore the technological texture of very diverse families’ lives.
Children Learning to Maintain Technologies
In my doctoral dissertation study that emerged from this research, I theorized how families were performing “routine maintenance” through their changing media and tech engagement. I saw maintenance on at least three scales: the scale of the family (i.e., maintaining relationships with each other); the scale of the activity (i.e., keeping everyday routines going through their regular maintenance of technologies), and the scale of the social order (i.e., technology served to stabilize historical patterns in social life).
Some of my subsequent work has extended these findings about children maintaining technologies at home to ask: where else are children learning to perform care and maintenance for technology? What sorts of technologies require routine maintenance? And how can we design learning environments or learning technologies based on cradle-to-cradle principles of design, or what I call “re-new-ability” of learning design? I also continue to research the gendered division of labor I observed in homes, informed by feminist scholarship in STS and beyond.