Lisa Tripp

My current research focuses on the role of digital media in young peoples’ informal learning and social relationships, and how media authorship and critical media analysis activities can be integrated into progressive education. Over the past 15 years, I have worked as an ethnographer and curriculum/program developer a wide range of action research projects. Below is a short description of some of these projects.

Teaching and Learning with Multimedia in LA Middle Schools

University of Southern California, 2004-2006

From 2004-2006, I led a study that examined how several teachers from five LAUSD middle schools implemented multimedia project-based learning activities in their classrooms and how their students responded to the activities. Teachers participating in the project were part of a professional development program delivered by the USC Institute for Multimedia Literacy in collaboration with the LAUSD Arts Education Branch—the Wallis Annenberg Initiative. The schools were located across LA, representing neighborhoods including Central and West Los Angeles, Watts, San Pedro, and Van Nuys. They are high poverty, low performing schools serving particularly high concentrations of African American and Latino students. The purpose of the study was to investigate how multimedia can be used to enhance teaching and learning and how new computer and media technologies are providing challenges and opportunities for young people to learn and express themselves. Others who collaborated and worked on the project include Mimi Ito, Rebecca Herr Stephenson, and Katynka Martinez.

Digital Media in an Urban Landscape:
Neighborhood Ethnographies with LA Youth

University of Southern California, 2004-2007

In 2004-06, I collaborated on this study with Mimi Ito, Katynka Martinez, and Rebecca Herr, and I’m in the process of analyzing data from the study now. The study sought foundational knowledge of how young people are using new media in informal learning environments. The research aims to understand how young peoples’ use of digital media and communications technologies affects their communication, learning, knowledge, and play. The study involves home interviews with children and their parents, as well as participant observation in school and after-school settings, in several neighborhoods in the Los Angeles area. The study is part of a multi-site research project: Kids’ Informal Learning with Digital Media: An Ethnographic Investigation of Innovative Knowledge Cultures, which is being led by Mimi Ito of the University of Southern California Annenberg Center for Communication and Peter Lyman of the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California Berkeley. The broader study includes ethnographic investigations of both physical sites and virtual places, and centers on modes of informal learning that young people are practicing using new media technologies.

Undergraduate Learning with Multimedia

University of Southern California, 2003-Present

In the 2003-04 academic year I conducted an ethnographic study of undergraduate classes affiliated with the Institute for Multimedia Literacy (IML) at USC. I worked at the IML as a Postdoctoral Researcher with Mimi Ito on the project. The classes I studied attempted to integrate multimedia production, analysis, and critical literacy skills into academic coursework in disciplines such as International Relations, History, and Philosophy. I conducted participant observation in classes and lab sessions, hung out with students while they were making multimedia projects, and interviewed instructors and students. The purpose of the study was to document case studies of learning with multimedia. Recently, I have been examining the data with an eye towards the interactions, activities, and ideological debates that students engage in while analyzing and making media. I am especially interested in how student learning and participation varies across the contexts of the media production process, and how these contexts provide both affordances and constraints for engaging in critical media analysis.

Scholarship in the Digital Age

University of Southern California, 2004

I worked with Mimi Ito to conceptualize and organize the summit, Scholarship in the Digital Age, a public symposium about digital culture and academic practice and a workshop on youth media which brought together scholars such as John Seely Brown, David Buckingham, Michael Century, Milton Chen, Shelley Goldman, Lawrence Lessig, Geert Lovink, and Kathleen Tyner, as well as media education scholars and practitioners from around the country. The summit addressed the current technological shift in modes of cultural production as digital technologies, particularly of the multimedia, interactive and networked kind, are becoming taken up by more and more sectors of society. Rather than take a reactive or defensive stance towards new developments in digital authoring, social software, file sharing, and online reputation systems, the goal was to identify how academic scholarship can both adapt to and inform these broader social, cultural, and technological developments. I am continuing to develop research about youth media and contribute to national efforts to build the field of youth media.

School-University Partnerships and Computer-Mediated Learning

University of California at San Diego, 1999-2002

For several years I worked as a Research Assistant on school-community-university partnership activities at UCSD that were a part of the UC Links network. Most of my work was with La Clase Magica and the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, on research related to literacy, language, and culture, as well as on creating optimal bilingual learning environments for Mexican immigrant children.

My Ph.D. dissertation, Trying to Bend the Bars of the Iron Cage: A Case Study of a K-16 Partnership, drew from this experience and involved a close analysis of a school-university partnership that aimed to improve the academic achievement and university eligibility of Latino students in a high poverty, low performing middle school. The partnership was designed by UCSD’s Center for Research in Educational Equity, Assessment, and Teaching Excellence, directed by Bud Mehan, as part of the UC effort to meet the challenge of developing a diverse student body in the absence of affirmative action. The partnership model emphasized collaboration between the University of California, a community college, and the middle school. My study focused on an after-school program involving computer-mediated learning, multimedia authoring, and collaborative mentoring between undergraduate and middle school students. The program was deeply informed by model educational activities, “The 5th Dimension” and “La Clase Mágica.” I acted as both a participant observer and action researcher on the project, working closely with teachers and students at the school in an effort to both document and help improve the after-school program. My study examined: teacher and student interactions and communication while engaged in the educational activities; ideological and practical challenges involved in the school change efforts; and effective and hopeful lessons from the model.