Natalia Smirnov's research while affiliated with Philadelphia ZOO and other places

This study builds on research of multimodal storytelling in educational settings by presenting a study of a youth-produced documentary on immigration. Drawing from a video documentary project in a high school class, we examine students’ representational processes of scaling in documentary storytelling, and the kinds of resources they use to construct multiple spatiotemporal contexts for understanding their experience of immigration and immigration policy. Our theoretical framework relates the concept of scale to the Bakhtinian concept of voice to consider the semiotic resources that are used to index and connect multiple social and spatiotemporal contexts in storytelling. Focusing on a documentary produced by some students in the class, we analyze how the young filmmakers used particular speaker voices (characters) and their social positioning to invoke and construct relevant scales for understanding the problem of deportation. Our analysis extends the study of scaling to multimodal texts, and the strategies that people use to represent and configure relationships among different socially stratified spaces. By conceptualizing the relations between voice and scale, this work aims to contribute to literacy learning and teaching that support young people in bringing their knowledge, experiences, and narrative resources to engage with societal structures.

In this study, we examine how youth use media production to represent, (de)legitimate, and reimagine their experiences of hypercriminalization—the pervasive complex of social practices such as racial profiling that position young men of color as “always-already criminal.” We analyze two clips from a youth-produced news show called POPPYN, specifically a 2014 episode focusing on youth and the criminal justice system, using tools from recontextualization analysis and multimodal semiotics, which together allow us to index the substitutions, deletions, rearrangements, and additions of component elements of social practices. Through investigation of linguistic and multimodal processes that represent social actors, actions, and constructions of their legitimacy, this study demonstrates ways that media making can serve as a tool for youth of color to process and rewrite persistent hypercriminalizing positionings in more agentive and hopeful ways. We end by proposing implications for multimodal literacy practices and pedagogies.

Journalism can serve as a generative disciplinary context for developing civic and information literacies needed to meaningfully participate in an increasingly networked and mediated public sphere. Using interviews with journalists, we developed a cognitive task analysis model, identifying an iterative sequence of production and domain-specific cognitive constructs of journalism expertise. We diagnose common discrepancies between professional practices and typical youth journalism pedagogies, and offer suggestions for teaching participatory politics and civic literacies through journalism.

Design educators have long used studio-based learning (SBL) environments to create communities of learners to support authentic learning in design. Online social media platforms have enabled the creation of distributed studio networks (DSNs) that link SBL environments into expanded communities of practice and potential networked improvement communities. As learning scientists, we do not adequately understand how to infrastructure learning and resource sharing across distributed studios. In this ethnography of infrastructure of Design for America (DFA), a distributed studio network, we analyzed data from interviews, online communication, and field observations as the organization grew its network of university design studios. We found that DFA managers faced challenges of providing support and resources to address wide variation in needs across studios. Lacking an existing comprehensive network collaboration platform, managers created a proto-infrastructure to distribute support across studios. By studying their iterative adoption of communication and collaboration tools and organizational routines, we define a unique set of design principles to infrastructure distributed studio networks: (a) surfacing local progress and problems; (b) affective crowding; (c) solution mapping; and (d) help routing. Assembling constellations of tools and designing platforms based on these principles could support learning in and improvement of distributed studio networks across domains.

This chapter reviews research on the relation of literacy and identity in the context of transnational migration and changing linguistic and communicative landscapes with online connectivity. In particular, we focus on the ways that youth of migrant backgrounds use digital and online media to construct networks and affiliations with diverse cultural and language practices. The studies we review have provided lenses into how youth of migrant backgrounds draw from multiple linguistic and semiotic resources to represent themselves, how they navigate participation in diverse communities and networks that span national borders, and how diaspora youth blend their cultural heritage and affiliation with transnational youth culture in online participatory practices. The youths’ digital practices indicate that they are orienting to different cultural discourses and practices coming from both local and translocal spaces, across their countries of origin and settlement, as these discourses and practices are accessed, remixed, and circulated on new media platforms. We propose that, at a broader level, these practices point to the ways in which people maneuver differentiated social spaces within and across countries, how people create their own (cultural and historically informed) pathways through them, and in the process reconstruct their understanding and relationships across these spaces. These processes of traversal and reconstruction of social spaces have important implications for further research and educational practice that seek to enhance people’s mobility in a global world.