Tracing connections of learning: A comparative study of immigrant-background and native Dutch teens’ networked lives

Abstract

In an increasingly demanding, diverse, and digitally-driven society, it is crucially important to understand learning not only as a phenomenon that could be measured and benchmarked by the outcomes of standardized testing but as a phenomenon that should be understood from a broader sociocultural perspective. In order to fully grasp the complexity of learning, a growing literature focuses on the flow of activities, information, and resources and on how these are utilized and mobilized for learning using digital technologies, across different contexts. Parallel to this literature, my claim here is that in order to account for the multi-contextual, social nature of learning, an important point of departure should be the study of the social structures that host and shape this engagement. This dissertation takes the view that it is important to put our assumptions, hopes, and fears regarding how young people socialize and learn in the highly digitalized world today through the crucible of systematic empirical research. In order to study learning while also systematically and coherently exploring multiple contexts and to weave together the flux of influences that shape young people’s learning today, I adopt a network analytical perspective. Furthermore, I study learning in an ethnoculturally comparative framework, which allows me to explore and compare the learner identities and learning experiences of ethnic-minority populations in the digital era (particularly the Turkish-Dutch and Moroccan-Dutch teens) with native Dutch youth. In chapters 3, 5, and 6, personal networks are taken as units of observation, measured, and analyzed employing quantitative and qualitative methods. Using large-scale survey data (N=1408) we collected information, among other issues, on teens’ online networks. We also conducted in-depth interviews with 79 teens; first mapping their personal networks, covering a much wider range of relationships than we were able to with the survey study. We then employed thematic content analysis to link the interview data with network information. The studies show how the network structures and the resources these offer for learning differ for immigrant and non-immigrant youth. In addition, they reveal how youth with an immigrant background experience themselves as learners and which network factors and network relationships play a role in shaping this experience. In chapter 2 we explore how digitalization, or more specifically the digitalization of social connectivities, is enabling people to engage with each other and with information in new ways. We argue that in order to be able to leverage social media for learning we should first understand what exactly this media can afford. Digitalized social connectivities carried through social media platforms (re)shape our capacities to see, circulate, edit, and archive information, so we ask how these changed capacities could be understood to further the theorization of sociocultural learning. Based on the sociocultural perspectives on learning, while also considering the intersection of technology, migration, and learning, this thesis shows how personal networks shape young people’s learning and socialization in particular ways. It is argued that there is not a prototypical ‘connected learner’, but rather many diverse possibilities of being connected and becoming a learner.