Bristol Conversations in Education - 'The Class'

This event is part of the Graduate School of Education's 'Bristol Conversations in Education' seminar series.

Speaker: Julian Sefton-Green

This presentation draws on a year–long ethnography into the ‘learning lives’ of 13-14 year olds in London published as The Class: Living and learning in the Digital Age by Sonia Livingstone and Julian Sefton-Green (New York University Press 2016).

Focusing on the everyday and routine uses of media in the home, I will describe how learning is constructed, mediated and enacted; how different families adopt and use folk ‘theories of learning’; and how such theories relate to dominant discourses around learning in school. I examine how domestic media technologies contribute to dominant conceptualizations of education and how learning is enacted as a discipline and as a habit within the ebb and flow of family life. I question assumptions about how we talk about learning in the home by showing that who defines learning in domestic contexts - and on what basis - is subject to a series of class-based, inherited and aspirational discourses and imaginaries.

Julian Sefton-Green is a Principal Research Fellow at the Department of Media & Communication, London School of Economics & Political Science and an Associate Research Professor at the University of Oslo. He is also a Visiting Professor at The Playful Learning Centre, University of Helsinki, Finland. Julian has researched and written widely on many aspects of media education, new technologies, creativity, digital cultures and informal learning and has authored, co-authored or edited 12 volumes including: The International Handbook of Creative Learning (2011 Routledge); Learning at Not-School (2013, MIT Press); Learning and Literacy over Time (2014, Routledge); and Learning Identities, Education and Community: young live in the cosmopolitan city (Cambridge University Press 2016). See: www.julianseftongreen.ne

Refreshments will be served from 12:30 onwards.