Christian Ehret

Increasingly, adult mentors in informal, media-rich settings, like libraries and museums, seek to integrate both learning and civic engagement opportunities for youth into designed programming. This article illustrates how youth open and sustain opportunities for civic engagement over the course of a six-month, youth-driven program – Metro: Building Blocks (MBB) – housed within a digital media learning lab in an urban public library. Analysis develops the concept of civic rhythms as a means to feel out the social and affective contours of civic engagement that emerge in MBB. To better understand the civic rhythms of MBB, analysis focuses specifically on three rhythmic elements: pulsation, reciprocation, and oscillation. The article concludes suggesting that future research develop principles for designing-in-time that assist researchers and mentors in attuning to the youth-driven rhythms that sustain informal, media-rich programs.

This essay argues that current approaches to participatory design research (PDR) risk
eliding the affective life of making educational change by locating change in cultural mediation alone. Locating change only in mediation subordinates affect, potentially overlooking lived dimensions of learning and being essential to lasting, transformative change. Suggesting a pathway to recovering affect in PDR, the essay critiques affect’s occlusion in theories framing PDR and develops concepts of placemaking and belonging as affective dimensions essential to generating and sustaining change, especially in informal learning environments. Analytic snapshots illustrate these developed concepts, evincing how teenagers actively affect place and belonging over time in an informal digital media and learning program, Metro Building Blocks. The essay concludes calling for developed theories of correspondence in order to better attune method to understanding how bodies generate feelings of belonging and to how bodies actively maintain this sense of belonging through emergent, affective practice.

This article contributes to research on the felt-experience of new media. It describes how the body’s corporal capacities are augmented through one twelve-year-old boy’s play of the videogame, Minecraft, while hospitalized. Expanding player-centric perspectives of video gameplay, the authors leverage work on place-events to develop an intra-actional methodology aligned with their relational materialist analysis. Their analysis illuminates how multiple human and non-human bodies become entangled in gameplace-events and potentially generate affective atmospheres. Analysis shows how these atmospheres reverberate and adhere within social space, revealing experiences of new media as less a one-to-one transaction between player and game and more an affective experience felt across multiple bodies and temporalities. Implications, suggesting both how intimate atmospheres developed during gameplay and how those atmospheres (re)shaped care in the hospital, point toward new media’s potential to engage users in uniquely meaningful felt-experiences made visible—and felt—through methods of intra-action and relational materialism.

English educators are contending with the proliferation of mobile devices in students' lives, and with the imminent integration of mobile devices into classrooms. Concurrently, literacy researchers using social semiotic theories of multimodality to investigate adolescents' digital composing have focused on screens, paying scant attention to the bodies moving with them. Responding to recent critiques of multimodality that have centered on a lack of attention to embodiment and affect, this article leverages the concept of real virtualities to avoid artificially bifurcating screen and body, and to contribute a beginning theorization of the embodied experience of composing with mobile devices, which includes feeling-histories, affective atmospheres, and the felt-experience of time. Data analyzed come from a twelve-week enrichment course in which five adolescents composed digital narratives with iPods. Overarching analysis describes all literacy practices with mobile devices in the course, and microanalysis, using multimodal interaction analysis, compares two students with contrasting histories of mobile device use. Findings show these students' literacies as more body-centered than techno-centered, and evince tensions between institutionalized learning environments and adolescents' affective, cultural histories of being mobile while engaged in literacy. Further, findings describe how the feeling of tools and semiotic material influenced the trajectories of students' bodies and narratives. Theories of digital composition should continue expanding to account for connections between mobility and affect, and the pedagogical importance of motility. The changing nature of literacy in the milieu of mobile computing compels researchers to consider the role of the moving, feeling body in literacy with more scrutiny.

This article describes five middle school students' experiences as they moved with mobile devices to produce digital narratives in a twelve-week digital media enrichment course designed and led by the authors. In the course, iPod Touches were often the exclusive tool for media composition. The authors, as teacher-researchers, designed the course to investigate students' literacies and digital media production processes with mobile devices and apps. Analysis focuses on how students' movements with these devices affected their meaning-making and their experiences of and connections to people, places and things in their school. Data presented in two vignettes describe how students developed counter-mobilities essential to their development as mobile composers. The article develops a framework for considering the mobilities of bodies within socially constructed spaces for literacy learning, and contributes to the nascent body of research on youths' literacies with digital, mobile devices.