News/Research

Announcing the 2019 Lyman Fellowship Recipient

03 Mar, 2019

Announcing the 2019 Lyman Fellowship Recipient

BCNM is excited to announce Cherise McBride (Education) has been awarded this year’s Peter Lyman Fellowship for her dissertation "Becoming Designers of Digitally-Mediated Learning: A Situated Model of Digital Pedagogy."

The Peter Lyman Graduate Fellowship in new media, established in the memory of esteemed UC Berkeley Professor Peter Lyman, provides a stipend to a UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate to support the writing of his or her Ph.D. dissertation on a topic related to new media. The fellowship is supported by donations from Professor Barrie Thorne, Sage Publications and many individual friends and faculty.

Cherise McBride’s dissertation project is an exploration into how teachers enrolled in a graduate-level technology course came to understand, reveal and apply sociocultural knowledge in their designs of digitally-mediated learning. Using data from a larger research project entitled “Developing the Digital Pedagogy of Pre-Service Teachers,” the dissertation explores teacher learning from a sociocultural perspective (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 1994; Sannino & Engeström, 2010) and offers a model for culture knowledge as a salient knowledge domain in designs of digitally-mediated learning (Mahiri, 2011).

Cherise’s dissertation study applies qualitative methods including multi-sited ethnography and digital ethnography to trace the meaning-making practices of teachers as they engaged in multimodal composing, participatory networks, and learning design in a community of learners. Preliminary findings suggest a model of digital pedagogy that centers the lived realities of students, critical literacies, and robust understandings of the affordances and constraints of technological tools in sociocultural contexts. These findings contribute to the literature in a way that resists the notion of digital tools in urban schools as digital panacea (Philip & Garcia, 2013), and instead illuminates the role of pedagogy, sociopolitical context, and critical digital literacies in teachers’ agentive roles as designers of mediated learning. Findings from this study will have implications for literacy scholarship, research on digital technologies, and teacher education research and practice.