Chapter 4: Leveraging new Media And Youths’ Repertoires of Practice Toward Connected Learning

In this chapter we address the growing disconnect youth experience in schools and present new frames for understanding and leveraging youths’ interests and practices. In current sociopolitical contexts, the sociocultural practices of youth from non-dominant communities are marked in ways that constrain, limit, and disrupt the development of new trajectories and a new social imagination about what they might become. Rather than examining the educational and social practices and policies of schools and related institutions, we see the proliferation of school discipline policies that disproportionally regulate and discipline youth bodies and curricular regimes that are devoid of relevance and utility in youths’ lives in and out of school. Youths’ practices are too often not valued, understood, or leveraged.