A Space Called Home: An Immigrant Adolescent's Digital Literacy Practices
This case study explores the digital literacy and identity-making practices of a Caribbean American high school student across three interrelated areas: immigrant, female adolescent, and learner. Data were drawn from interviews, participant observations, and digital documents. Narrative analysis provides the framework from which to analyze and represent the adolescent's experiences. The findings show that the adolescent actively used digital media and online social networking sites to construct her identities across her native and adopted homes. Virtual spaces afforded the adolescent the agency to make a space called “home” and mitigate what was lost in migration by re-authoring cultural models, performing her identities, and constructing virtual ethnic enclaves. Understanding the texts, motivations, and contexts of youth digital literacies offers opportunities to create literacy connections with diverse learners in the contemporary classroom.
This is the second in a series of working ::: papers published by the Higher Education ::: Academy to disseminate information about ::: the project entitled 'What is learned at ::: university: the social and organisational ::: mediation of university learning' (SOMUL). ::: This second working paper focuses on the ::: organisational mediation of learning, i.e. how ::: institutional characteristics shape the ::: student experience and resultant learning ::: outcomes within an increasingly diverse ::: higher education system.