Lisa Schwartz

Summer 2011 Fellow

Lisa is a PhD candidate in the Program of Language Reading and Culture, Department of Teaching Learning and Sociocultural Studies at the University of Arizona. She is currently writing her dissertation “Forming a Collaborative Model for Appropriating Youth and Digital Practices for New Literacies Development with Teachers and Latino Students.” The study documents participatory ethnographic research with high school English teachers and predominately Latino students in urban southern Arizona. The interventionist methodology of the research is embedded in an anthropological and cultural historical framework. The work challenges deficit discourses and digital divide narratives for Latino youth by enlisting diversity in adolescent technology access, forms of participation and interests to engage literacy development across multiple discursive and spatial domains. Lisa’s dissertation reflects the accumulation of her experience as a researcher, educator and designer of digital learning environments working primarily with youth from diverse racial, working-class and immigrant backgrounds. Currently, as part of the Wired Up Project at Utrecht University, she is working on a comparative study of immigrant youths’ practices with digital media in Arizona and the Netherlands. She also continues to consult with and assist the participants in her dissertation study on their endeavors with digital stories, wikis and social network sites. In the past, Lisa designed online learning spaces as the Learning Materials Editor and Coordinator for the Tree of Life Web Project (tolweb.org, a collaborative phylogenetic biology website), as an outreach and technology coordinator for the Tucson GEAR UP project, and as a teacher and researcher of secondary school multimedia studies and primary grade science in the Bay Area and Tucson, Arizona.