Current Summary

This study will investigate and document the social construction of technological expertise, gender, and identity within teenagers' non-school communities. The primary purpose is to explore the construction of technological expertise. This study will focus on teenagers’ perceptions of their expertise in their site of learning (non-school setting) as a source for agency compared to traditional school settings, and their descriptions of how their expertise was obtained, developed, shared, and communicated. This study will ask how gender features in the construction of technological expertise in these non-school communities, as well as explore the capital and agency possessed by these non-school ‘experts’.

The field of practice with which this project is concerned is expertise, learning, and technology use in teenagers' home, leisure, and out-of-school use of technologies. This study will identify and describe the construction of expertise within non-school experiences, drawing on research literature on the construction of gender, the attainment of expertise, and issues associated with the field of technology within society.

An ethnographic, participant observer approach will be used to gather data for in-depth case studies, of which data collection is likely to include open-ended interviews, field notes, observations, the researcher’s journal, and audio taping - the resulting artefacts of which will be examined and deconstructed. Interviews will be conducted with participants to understand and explore teenagers’ perceptions of the agency and value of non-school ‘experts’ and construction of ‘expertise’.

It is anticipated that “new knowledge” that comes from this study will contribute significantly to the field of technological expertise and gender, as well as having implications for learning and teaching in the classroom and beyond, within an increasingly digital culture. This study will define technological expertise, technological interest, and technological engagement through documenting how teenagers’ expertise was and is understood, developed, informed, shared, and communicated, which will lead to sophisticated understandings that is needed in these areas.

From the research findings, implications for new educational spaces within a digital age will be identified.