Community IT Centre

What do you do with your community IT centre?

understanding policy and practice through life stories

and users’ voices

Bluefield Lanes• Large 1960s social housing estate on the periphery of a

medium sized city in Southern England

• Population of 23,874, 18% of the city’s population

– Together with the four adjacent estates in the “Regen Arc” nearly 2/3 of the city’s population of 60,000 lives in areas where there are multiple indices of deprivation

• Largest concentration of social housing in the city

• High unemployment/underemployment and educational under achievement

– The most significant issue is education, skills & training attainment with two SOAs in the top third and ten SOAs … in the top ten percent most deprived areas in England

But…S So maybe it’s not just the family centre that gave me that energy

and that. I think its [this place]. That’s when I became more energised. Moving up here. Coming away from what I’d always been brought up with, to coming here, where, you know I’ve got that sense of belonging and my child’s the happiest I think she’ll ever be.

A That’s good, because they tend to give this estate such a bad name and a lot of people are afraid to come onto [it]. Because they say where do you live and you say [Bluefield Lanes] and they: aowwooh, how can you live up there.

P Like you were saying about walking up the street you can walk from one place to another. I think that everyone can say that. You’re bound to run into someone you know and even if you don’t know they’ll all say hello, you know what I mean…

T If you go to other areas you don’t really get that. People hate that. People in [Bluefield Lanes] … because we are such a large community in ourselves and what we have here you don’t get in other places.

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But, on the other hand…

H it’s like now how many years later down the line it’s kind of transformed itself to be true you know like the young people getting involved in a lot of drugs and crime and especially this whole knives and guns thing at the moment as well that’s you know really scary… You know it’s like for me how many more years is it going to be ‘til actually those guns are out because everyone knows somebody in [the city] who’s got some kind of gun or weapon you know what I mean, I don’t care what anyone says somebody knows somebody that’s got something you know and it’s just like because you know we’re not in London or Birmingham, you’re not hearing gunshots every five minutes it’s only a matter of time.


Aims

• To discuss

– a complex, multimodal approach needed to study IT practices in marginalised communities

– patterns of engagement and key practices in community IT centres

– while funding is precarious and has many ulterior motives, nevertheless community persists and is revealed, in part, through the social action of IT

Questions• How do people, who associate themselves with the

community IT centre, use that association to make positive changes in their lives?

• Are there recognisable patterns of engagement or “trajectories” followed by people through the community IT centre?

• What are the IT practices of the people who associate themselves with the community IT centre?

• Are these patterns of engagement and practices also seen at other centres in different neighbourhoods and regions?

• What are the policy implications for community IT centres?

Gaps in or understanding• In respect of adult community education policy there

are gaps in our understanding of

– the relationship between personal development and community development

– the relationship between social capital development and human capital development

– the relationship between lifelong learning and continuous retraining

– and the relationship between an individual’s responsibility for skills acquisition for existing jobs whatever they may be, and a social, collective responsibility for economic development in order to create new, worthwhile, jobs or other forms of meaningful social and civic participation.

Gaps in knowledge

• The life histories, experiences and voices of the users of community IT centres are largely absent from the literature

– Users of centres are represented by synthetic descriptions and models of the problematic other, often culled from the analyses of research into the experience of centre managers and evaluation reports of various initiatives

Data collection• Biographic-narrative interviews: “Life stories”

– Narrative expression is closest to people’s lived experience both of conscious concerns and also less conscious cultural, social and individual presuppositions and processes

– Surfacing mainly invisible experiences and contexts of issues that are difficult for society and individuals to confront

– Grounding research in “bottom-up practice” (Barnat & Walmsley, 2004)

• Appreciative inquiry (AI) focus groups

– the act of undertaking research has a transforming effect

– needs-based approaches to community development tend to reinforce the circumstances of exclusion

– explicitly avoids the discourse of problems allowing people to articulate an empowered discourse of alterierity

• Participant observation diaries

Life stories

• Please tell me the story of your life, the events and experiences that have been important to you, from wherever you want to begin, up to and including the present time: you as a user/volunteer/manager/tutor/friend of the Bluefield Lanes IT Zone

• 7, stage 1 interviews conducted

– 4 transcribed

– 3 more scheduled

• Follow-up semi-structured interviews to be conducted in the winter

Focus Groups: Learning lunches

• 2 stages– Affective recall,Discovery

• 1 group (n=6) conducted; 3 planned

• Appreciative approach– attempt to get beyond essentialism, ethical foundationalism

and hierarchical ordering of identity politics (Gergen)– affirms a sensibility towards the inner dimensions of teaching

and practitioner research that would include the imagination, emotion and passion involved in reflective practice (Luckcock)

– part of an integrated approach to community – and particularly community-driven – development. interviews and storytelling that draw out ... positive memories, and on a collective analysis of the elements of success. (Mathie & Cunningham)

Positive change?

• Values, positive and negative, are closely tied to individual identity and identity practices

– normatively adopt certain behaviours

– or conversely reject the same behaviours

Identity perspectives

• Technical– tokens, access, authentication, verification, persistence, non-repudiation

• Forensic– Monitoring and control: relates tokens to physical bodies

• Developmental– Teleological and hierarchical: growing up or into your “achieved” self

• Deviance– Unitary transgressive selves

– Divided, multiple, fragmented selves

“... distance between personal and professional selves can cause a tentativeness... that undermines ... trust.” (Rodgers and Raider-Roth 2006)

• Social …

Social Identity

• “... the actions of people participating in routine cultural contexts”, where context has “... a central role in the constitution of human nature”. The unit of analysis “... includes individuals and their sociocultural milieu”. (Cole, Engeström et al. 1997)

• “social identity/identification appears to be related in a logical and coherent way to values assumed by people.” (Gouveia, deAlbuquerque et al. 2002)

Demographics?• Variation and individuation is vast

• Classification may inhibit understanding

– Counting and dividing could be part of the problem

• e.g. Black, African, Caribbean

– Woman of African heritage, alienated from the much larger Caribbean community

– African man, son of the Minister of Finance, alienated from his parents

– African man, ex civil servant, retired to England

– African man, ex-combatant officer in liberation wars

– First, second, third generation Jamaican British

• White, Asian, East Timorese, West Papuan, Santhelenian, Serbian, Afghan, Yank and many others

H There’s the black issue. The black issue’s always been an issue anywhere. I even remember when I was like 20 or 21 there were a lot of West Indians here and stuff so it’s kind of like they never really had a high opinion of Africans then. Do you know what I mean, then it was all kind of like, “I’m African. I’m African [quickly] da da da.” And if you try to say anything about the African ancestry, you know, it’s like, “I’m Jamaican! I’m Jamaican! de de de!” So you know. … people just automatically assume that I am West Indian. They won’t even consider the fact that I’m African. They just straight-away assume that I am West Indian. And even down to the elders in the West Indian community: “Who’s your mum and dad?” You know like, “You won’t know my mum and dad.”


S In [place] it was all about cliques. It was all about fitting in with certain people. But, coming to [Bluefield Lanes] everyone just got on with everyone. Everyone had a sense of belonging. You weren’t just the white person or the black person. You weren’t the older person or the younger person. You were all together, all united. I had a strong sense of belonging after moving to [Bluefield]. I made really strong friendships and I still have them. And, I keep making more friendships through, thing, here.


But…

Individual social identity• Idiosyncratic and person-specific attributes (personal

identity)

• Social order attributes related to groups or categories (social identity)

• Behaviours vary continuously between these two points:

– The mere fact of being assigned to different groups (based on gender, race, nationality, family, etc.) does not guarantee the individual’s social identity

• The main components of social identity are feelings of belonging to specific groups/categories or affinity towards them. (Gouveia, deAlbuquerque et al. 2002)

PeopleA Black, British, immigrated from Jamaica as a child, female, 50-60, children

grown, community nurseB White, British, male, 40-50, single, community development workerD Black, British, 1st gen WI heritage, male, 30-40, married (partner head of

English at local secondary school), part-time employed youth and community worker

E White, British, female, 30-40, single, 4 children, employed by housing association, studying DipHE in community development

G Black, Kenyan, male, 60-70, retired Kenyan civil servant, studying theologyJ White, British, female, 20-30, single, unemployed (partial disability)H Black, British, immigrated from Africa as a child, female, 30-40, single,

mother of 2 (35 wks pregnant)K Black, Ivorean, immigrated as a student, male, 40-50, married, 2 children,

PO clerk, MScP Black, British, 1st gen WI heritage, female, 30-40, mother of 1, unemployed,

IT centre volunteerS White, British, female, 20-30, single, mother of 1, unemployedT Black, British, female, 30-40, 1st gen WI heritage, unemployed, ex athlete

(British youth pentathalon champion)

Counting and dividing (n=11)Superficially representative sample?Information emerged from life stories

• Gender– Female 7– Male 4

• Colour– Black 7– White 4

• Heritage– English 4– African3– WI 4

• Age– 20-30 2– 30-40 5– 40-50 2– 50-60 1– 60-70 1

• Employment– No 5– P/T 2– Yes 3– Retired 1

• Edu<FE: 1, some F/HE: 5, 1st Deg: 2, PG: 1; uk:2The already educated continue to participate in PCDL

A I was really kind of always having this dream about having some amazing job one day and never really actually having one. And I think that that happened because um I left school when I was 14 and I had like .. a bit like school phobia and I used to have panic attacks and not go into classrooms. And that was why I didn’t do really well when I was at school. And then … they got me on to an A-level course which I had to abandon because I was pregnant with my first child. So that was when I was 18.

…and when I realised that I could not write a letter I felt quite awful I thought how can I ever be somebody that does jobs and works and stuff so um It’s kind of interesting to remember that but I do remember sitting, sitting and staring at that screen thinking that I can’t write this letter I really can’t do that [laughs] I’m useless, I’m no good, I’m never gona make it.


K My sole purpose for being here was to study all the way to post doctoral level because my father, my father, this was how he seen things … so I embarked onto a long project with financial support from home because that was tradition until I sent to him a letter and said to him: look, I am a grown-up man, you have to understand that things aren’t as they were; we suffered a heavy currency devaluation; therefore there was no need for you to stretch your financial means and send me money; not just that, I could fly by myself.

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IT Practices• Getting online for browsing and email

– Facebook has become recently popular

– Limited online gaming

– Shopping: mostly window shopping and price comparison

• Printing

• Extensive, informal learning support

• Semi-formal awareness raising or skill development courses

– Digital photography and video production and editing

• Introductory formal qualifications

• Substitute for broken equipment at home

– Crucial back-up resource

• Support for children’s safety online

New conceptualisations

• Third generation activity theory (3GAT), the explicit synthesis of

– Activity theory

– Third-space theory: critical discourse analysis

– Actor network theory

(Engeström 2001)

Framework for analysis 1

Funding policy• Adult Community Learning is not currently to be included in the

demand led funding models although there is no clarity about what is meant by ‘community learning’” (Slowey 2007)

• “Funding of Personal and Community Development Learning (PCDL) will remain outside these funding models for the time being.” (Learning and Skills Council 2007)

• “Leitch Review of Skills has recommended that all publicly-funded adult vocational skills in England, apart from community learning and programmes for those with learning difficulties and/or disabilities, should go through demand-led routes by 2010.” (Learning and Skills Council 2007)

– Note the collocation of community learning with “programmes for those with learning difficulties and/or disabilities.” The third leg of this stool is prison-based learning and the rehabilitation of offenders

Who is policy for?

• Policy enacted not from concern for the excluded

– except to the extent they can be reformed, remediated – socially integrated – through training

• The principal audiences for policy are voters and employers

– The excluded are

• a social disorder cost to the taxpayer

• a supply of compliant workers to an insecure labour market

• People see themselves in the mirror of policy as problems to be solved for and by others, rather than agents of their own world

VoicesH The other thing I was going to say, I suppose, is that

I’m here but I don’t know how much that’s got to do with the IT Hub or even the learning champions.


P I like community learning because it fits around people and whatever’s going on with them, you know what I mean. Universities and colleges are, you know: this is what we got to offer, take it or leave it, whereas with the learning champion type of stuff we’ve been talking to people: what do you want. It can be so varied, you know what I mean?

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Tentative thoughts

• Conceptualising community IT centres as places where formal education and “learning” takes place is at least problematic

• Funding based on simplistic models of education may serve to embed social divisions

• Seek community development or local economic development support not linked to educational attainment

• Assisted or supported voluntarism may be a way forward: provide facilities in a location where multiple agencies and social enterprises operate

Education

Community IT Centre