This dissertation examines how schools exacerbate inequality in the digital era. Existing educational research argues that one reason social stratification persists is that privileged children develop valued cultural competencies as a result of class-based differences in parenting. However, we are at a point in history when children, regardless of social origin, develop competencies with digital technologies through online play with peers. Does this mean less privileged children are no longer disadvantaged in their use of digital technology at school?
I use comparative ethnographic data collected in three middle schools to show how teachers treat students’ online play. Contrary to Bourdieuian perspectives of social reproduction that emphasize the role of parenting in providing students vital resources for educational success, I document the role played by teachers in determining whether kids’ digital play is an educational asset or not.
This disciplinary process occurred through teachers’ messages to children about the value of the skills they developed in play online with peers. I find that at a school for mostly wealthy and White children, teachers actively encouraged, if not required, students to communicate online, use social media, and share video game creations as a part of school success. At a school for mostly middle-class and Asian-American children, teachers reprimanded and sanctioned students for the exact same types of activities in favor of traditional learning activities like exams. Lastly, at a school for mostly working class and Latino youth, teachers communicated that online play was irrelevant to achievement, instead emphasizing the development of basic digital skills for twenty-first century vocational work. School-level approaches to kids’ digital play differently enabled the use of digital youth culture for educational success.
A likely consequence of this variability in how teachers discipline play is that children were differently prepared for their next steps as students. Only privileged students received training to geek out and mess around with digital tools as part of a learning agenda. Schools provided early training grounds for kids to see learning as either a space to create and share or, instead, simply as only an activity where students were consumers of teachers’ lessons.
