Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

4.27.10 | How can Latino teenagers in Los Angeles re-invent Pac-Man? Katynka Martinez, an assistant professor of Raza studies at San Francisco State University, spoke recently at a forum on digital literacy about her research on how teaching game design to young people can help them challenge inaccurate representations of themselves and their communities in dominant media.

The forum, Digital Literacy in Networked Learning Environments, was held at Huston-Tillotson University in Austin in March and was part of a series on digital media and learning in multicultural contexts presented by the MacArthur Foundation and the United Negro College fund.

High school students enrolled in an animation course were asked to create their own versions of Pac-Man. Martinez found that personal experiences and narratives emerged in the games they developed for the course. For example, two students changed pac-man into “el immigrante,” a game about an immigrant who comes to the United States to make a better life.

“El immigrante is trying to pick up all the trash around his neighborhood to keep it clean,” wrote the two boys who created the game, “but he can’t because there is minute men after him to send him back to his country.”

Martinez’s research shows that young African American and Latino youth are learning to deconstruct and think critically about the representations of their lives and their neighborhoods that they see in more photo-realistic games, such as “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas,” that have been critiqued as violent.

Martinez says students are learning to “think critically about the world around them and how that world has been represented.”

“We don’t know where they are going to go from here, but what’s most important is that they have the tools and the self-confidence to challenge anything that they feel doesn’t accurately reflect their experiences.”

View more videos about the forum:

Digital Literacy in Networked Learning Environments: The United Negro College Fund and the MacArthur Foundation hosted a public forum on digital media and learning in multicultural contexts in March at Huston-Tillotson University in Austin. It was the second in a series of forums taking place around the country.

Beyond Shakespeare and Grammar: Engaging the Language of Technology: How can educators use social media tools to help students develop traditional and digital media literacies? Spotlight talks with professors at Huston-Tillotson University about their work engaging students with social media tools.