A Presentation by Julian Sefton-Green
October 19th
4:30-6:00 PM
Multipurpose Room (2012) in Ponderosa Commons at UBC
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This presentation draws on a year – long ethnography into the ‘learning lives’ of 13-14 year olds in London published as The Class Living and learning in the Digital Age by Sonia Livingstone and Julian Sefton-Green (New York University Press 2016).
Focusing on the everyday and routine uses of media in the home, the talk describes how learning is constructed, mediated and enacted showing how different families adopt and use folk ‘theories of learning’, and how such theories relate to dominant discourses around learning in school. I examine how domestic media technologies contribute to dominant conceptualizations of education and how learning is enacted as a discipline and as a habit within the ebb and flow of family life. I question assumptions about how we talk about learning in the home by showing that who defines learning in domestic contexts, and on what basis, is subject to a series of class-based, inherited and aspirational discourses and imaginaries.
Julian Sefton-Green is an independent scholar working in Education and the Cultural and Creative Industries. He is currently Principal Research Fellow at the Department of Media & Communication, London School of Economics & Political Science and an associate research professor at the University of Oslo working on projects exploring learning and learner identity across formal and informal domains. He has been an Honorary Professor of Education at the University of Nottingham, UK and the Institute of Education, Hong Kong and he is now a Visiting Professor at The Playful Learning Centre, University of Helsinki, Finland.
He has worked as an Associate Research Professor at the University of South Australia, where he was developing a city-wide initiative to imagine and implement new kinds of spaces for learning. He has been the Head of Media Arts and Education at WAC Performing Arts and Media College – a centre for informal training and education – where he directed a range of digital media activities for young people and co-ordinated training for media artists and teachers. He worked as Media Studies teacher in an inner city comprehensive London; and in higher education teaching undergraduate and postgraduate courses, leading teacher training degrees in media education.
He has researched and written widely on many aspects of media education, new technologies, creativity, digital cultures and informal learning and has authored, co-authored or edited 12 volumes including: The International Handbook of Creative Learning (2011 Routledge); Learning at Not-School (2013, MIT Press); Learning and Literacy over Time (2014, Routledge). Recent volumes are The class: living and learning in the digital age (New York University Press 2016) and Learning Identities, Education and Community: young live in the cosmopolitan city (Cambridge University Press 2016). He has directed research projects for the Arts Council of England, the British Film Institute, the London Development Agency, Creative Partnerships and Nominet Trust and has spoken at a number of conferences around the world. www.julianseftongreen.net