‘Put Us on the Map’: place-based media production and critical inquiry in CTE

Abstract

Many young people today are enacting rich literacies in their lives through the use of digital technologies. While this may be so, there is a narrowing of literacy instruction under neoliberal reforms at a time of increasing informational and digital technologies. In this article, the author draws on an ethnographic study of high school multimedia communications that employed place-based approaches. The study suggests place-based media production as integral to teaching and learning in support of student’s interests in the arts and technology. In conceptualizing place as relational, the study shows how place-based media production within a particular learning ecology supported critical inquiry in the service of place-making. Most salient were the ways in which students constructed relational experiences as racialized, gendered, and minoritized youth in order to enter, alter, and disrupt dominant discourses of educational and social issues affecting their lives. Implications for research and practice that point to the value of critical place inquiry as well as educative possibilities in neoliberal times are also discussed.