Digital Scaffolding with Youth-at-Risk: Challenges, Achievements, and Suggestions
Abstract: Scaffolding has been a successful pedagogy for many years, just like the new pedagogy of digital literacy. Nonetheless, the combination of scaffolding with digital literacy for youth-at-risk challenges teachers’ classroom management. Many researchers have connected both cognitive and socio-emotional capacities with the resiliency of youth-at-risk. While different interventions suggest cognitive and socio-emotional approaches, they do not address new literacies and technology access. Our grounded theory research explored a month-long digital literacy class of high school students from foster homes who needed to cope with technological challenges as well as cognitive and socio-emotional ones. We found four different behaviors that suggested a way to map students’ cognitive and emotional capacities. At the same time our findings helped us create a taxonomy for digital scaffolding (TDS) for educators to use in schools. The presentation will describe the findings and its applications for yo