Digital Divisions: How Schools Create Inequality in the Tech Era

Matt Rafalow, PhD
Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley's Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society, and a social scientist at Google

Abstract: Education researchers struggle with the fact that students arrive at school already shaped by their unequal childhoods. Would we see greater gains among less privileged students if they had a more level playing field? This talk draws on the author’s book, Digital Divisions: How Schools Create Inequality in the Tech Era, a comparative ethnographic study of three middle schools to address this question, focusing on the case of digital technology use. In the contemporary moment, kids’ digital skills appear in the form of their digital play with peers, like through social media use, video gaming, and creating online content. Drawing on six hundred hours of observation and over one hundred interviews with teachers, administrators, and students, the book on which this talk is based shows how teachers treat these very similar digital skills differently by school demographic. The book also illustrates the ways these social forces at school shape students’ participation online, in and outside of school. The book updates class-focused theories of cultural inequality by showing how race and racism, as well as school organizational culture, determine whether students’ digital skills can help them get ahead.

Pitt students, staff, and faculty can access the eBook for free via the University Library System: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pitt-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6259745. Please submit any questions to: EMM225@pitt.edu.

Register for this talk here.

Co-sponsored by the Sara Fine Institute of the School of Computing and Information Science and the Office of Research