Some years ago, Lalitha Vasudevan spent the summer knocking around West Philadelphia with a group of fifth-grade boys, ostensibly making a mock horror movie.
Vasudevan, who was working on her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, had initially planned to write something suitably academic about how her young colleagues saw themselves and how they saw themselves “being seen.”
But the boys — all of whom were African American and none of whom, as she puts it, “viewed school as a place of belonging” — had other ideas. As they experimented with video cameras and recorded the stories of their lives, “very quickly my dissertation became about the kinds of literacy practices that were happening, what kinds of artifacts were being produced,” recalls Vasudevan, now Associate Professor of Technology and Education at Teachers College.
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