Antero Garcia
Antero Garcia is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. Prior to completing his Ph.D., Antero was an English teacher at a public high school in South Central Los Angeles.
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Books by Antero Garcia
Schools and school districts have one approach to innovation: buy more technology. In Good Reception, Antero Garcia describes what happens when educators build on the ways students already use technology outside of school to help them learn in the classroom. As a teacher in a public high school in South Central Los Angeles, Garcia watched his students' nearly universal adoption of mobile devices. Whether recent immigrants from Central America or teens who had spent their entire lives in Los Angeles, the majority of his students relied on mobile devices to connect with family and friends and to keep up with complex social networks. Garcia determined to discover how these devices and student predilection for gameplay, combined with an evolving “culture of participation,” could be used in the classroom.
Garcia charts a year in the life of his ninth-grade English class, first surveying mobile media use on campus and then documenting a year-long experiment in creating a “wireless critical pedagogy” by incorporating mobile media and games in classroom work. He describes the design and implementation of “Ask Anansi,” an alternate reality game that allows students to conduct inquiry-based research around questions that interest them (including “Why is the food at South Central High School so bad?”). Garcia cautions that the transformative effect on education depends not on the glorification of devices but on teacher support and a trusting teacher-student relationship.
Much more than a "how-to" guide for those interested in creating their own YPAR projects, this book draws upon the voices of students and educators, as well as the multiple historical traditions of critical research, to describe how youth inquiry transforms each step of the traditional research process. From identifying research questions to collecting data and disseminating findings, each chapter details how YPAR revolutionizes traditional conceptions of who produces knowledge, how it is produced, and for what purposes. The book weaves together research, policy, and practice to offer YPAR as a practice with the power to challenge entrenched social and educational inequalities, empower critically aware youth, and revolutionize pedagogy in classrooms and communities.
For researchers, educators, community members, and youth who want to connect, question, and transform the world collectively, Doing Youth Participatory Action Research is a rich source of both pragmatic methodological guidance and inspiration.
Book Features:
* A structure for career-long growth for ELA teachers, including ways to adapt pedagogy from one year to the next.
* A focus on culturally proactive positions within ELA classrooms to ensure criticality in how we teach and how we advocate for the teaching profession.
* Six different poses that are standards-aligned, critical, and expand the possibilities of what takes place in school.
* Guidelines for creating original poses beyond the scope of the book, discussion questions for courses, and resources for classroom teachers.
Taking a critical approach, Critical Foundations in Young Adult Literature: Challenging Genres offers educators, youth librarians, and students a set of strategies for unpacking, challenging, and transforming the assumptions of some of the genre's most popular titles. Pushing the genre forward, Antero Garcia builds on his experiences as a former high school teacher to offer strategies for integrating Young Adult literature in a contemporary critical pedagogy through the use of participatory media.
The chapters in this volume represent a bold re-envisioning of what education can look like, as well as illustrate what it means to open the doors to youth culture and the promise that this work holds. While there are certainly similarities across these diverse narratives, the key is that they have taken a common set of design principles and applied them to their particular educational context. The examples aren't your typical approaches to the classroom; these educators are talking about integrating design principles into their living practice derived from cutting-edge research. We know from this research that forging learning opportunities between academic pursuits, youth’s digital interests, and peer culture is not only possible, but positions youth to adapt and thrive under the ever-shifting demands of the twenty-first century. We refer to this approach as the theory and practice of “connected learning,” which offers a set of design principles—further articulated by this group of educators—for how to meet the needs of students seeking coherence across the boundaries of school, out-of-school, and today’s workplace. Taken together, these narratives can be considered “working examples” that serve as models for how educators can leverage connected learning principles in making context-dependent decisions to better support their learners.
Papers by Antero Garcia