Understanding teenager technological expertise in out-of-school settings

Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice, this study explored the construction of technological expertise of eight teenagers (five boys and three girls) aged 13 – 17. The qualitative study specifically employed observations and interviews and focused on home computer use, which for many of the participants was their primary site of leisure. All of the participants considered themselves to be technological experts, and their peers and/or their family supported this premise. This paper outlines findings that identify the participants’ multiple (and contradictory) understandings of expertise and the ways the participants perceive they have attained expertise and perform as experts in out-of-school settings. Traditional views of expertise are contrasted with what the teenagers think about their development of expertise, predominantly using Bourdieu’s framework for analysis. As almost all of the experts in this study gained their expertise through independent means, with minimal input from their schooling, discussion focuses on the trajectories to expertise inherent within these sites of informal learning, and what this might mean for pedagogy and formal learning. Introduction Research projects from a range of fields regularly proceed on the basis that teenagers—by virtue of their generational location—almost routinely acquire, possess and display various markers of technological (and computer based) expertise. Although contemporary education literature regularly gestures towards the fact of teenagers’ (and children’s) ever increasing technological competency, there appears to be little research focused on the ways in which teenagers themselves conceptualise the idea of expert performance and the multiple ways they acquire expert status. In this paper, discussion focuses on the nexus between digital insiders and digital newcomers (Goodson, Knobel, Lankshear & Mangan, 2002). Traditional views of schooling and expertise are contrasted with what the teenagers think about their learning and development of expertise. This gap between digital insiders and digital newcomers is specifically explained in regard to differences between the concepts and value of learning, expertise, and technology, and how they are recognised and valued differently between the generational gap of digital insiders and digital newcomers. In 1996, John Perry Barlow wrote about digital natives and digital immigrants in order to distinguish between those who have always been immersed in digital media (specifically personal computers) and those who have been introduced to it at some point of their lives and are newcomers to its use. The phrase ‘digital natives’ is sometimes regarded as problematic from the standpoint of post-colonial theorists. This relates to the suggestion that ‘natives’ have some inherent character, a problematic suggestion in literature that has long positioned the ‘essential’ native in opposition to ‘immigrants’. Of course, in this case the ‘essence’ ascribed to the native is designed to be a positive recognition of particular sets of skills (that is, computer competence) but the historical pattern of ascribing differences between natives and immigrants (or natives and invaders) makes the easy use of these terms unlikely. For this reason, I wish to employ the terms digital insiders and digital newcomers (Goodson et al., 2002), as these terms allow for multiple experiences, rather than just being at one extreme or the other of a continuum. It is this distinguishable difference of being either a digital insider (always immersed