WP20 Interaction, Media Culture, and Adolescents at School: End-of-Project Report

Funded under the Spencer Foundation?s Small Grant Program, this project focuses on an existing data-set of radio-microphone recordings, interviews and fieldnotes, collected in two London schools in 1997-8,2 and it aims:
? to map some of the principal ways in which young people spontaneously draw media culture into their daily lives at school
? to explore some of the ways in which this either complements or conflicts with the instruction from their teachers.
In studying the encounter between school and media culture, our analysis spans three time-scales (or dur?es): the historical, the quotidian, and the momentary. More specifically, in the search for answers to particular questions, we consider:
i) historical and communicative processes in society at large
ii) the ethos in particular schools and classrooms
iii) the cultural resources and dispositions that individual students bring with them (their wealth, linguistic abilities, educational expectations, and positioning within (sub-)cultures of consumption)
iv) the positioning of individuals at school and within the peer group
v) discourse strategies within specific communicative events, and the local interactional affordances of particular media