Abstract
How can mobile e-learning be used to support and enhance the goals of working with youth aging out of an orphanage. This chapter describes the use of an ethnographic narrative approach to tell the stories of eight young women who were “aging out” from their orphanage where many of them had spent most of their lives. The chapter examined the way in which a collaborative art community could support the participants as they narrated their lives over a 16-month period through photo-journaling and social media outlets. The focal points of this study were community building via art making and building of personal aesthetic, community engagement, reflection on self-identity, cross-cultural art education, and shared experience via photo-art narratives. The authors also examined the role of collaborative art experiences in helping these young women form social connectedness with their peers. The project was also designed to help sustain the girls digitally and virtually in the present and future. The research project studied the identity development and how these functioned within a collaborative medium that supported the young participants as they moved out of their orphanage.
TopPopulation Studied
The children and adolescents who make up the populace of most orphanages have few resources, and often they cannot rely upon family to house and provide for them. When they reach adolescent maturity at the age of 18, these young people are subsequently aged out of their homes and places of education to make room for incoming children. The term “aging out” means that when young people are finished with schooling and residency at the orphanage, usually at the age of 18 to 20 (unless they have special needs), they must leave because they are too old to qualify for care under the orphanage system.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Aging Out: When children reach a certain age, they usually must leave their orphanage, place of education, and home and either get jobs, go to university or figure out some means of survival. Some orphanages help these young people navigate these options but most do not.
Instagram: Photograph and video sharing social media site owned by Facebook.
Double Orphan: Child has lost both parents or been abandoned by both parents.
Narrative Research: The participant’s story as recorded collaboratively by the researcher.
Tablets: Devices such as iPads or Samsung galaxies that are highly portable and allow users internet access, videoing and photographing capabilities and a plethora of applications, many that would be offered on a regular laptop but all consolidated into one small, lightweight, and highly portable device.
Tumblr: Photo and video sharing site that is used for blogging.
Francisca Daughters of Misericordia: Third regular order of St. Francis (Española: Hijas de la Misericordia de la Tor de San Francisco).
Cross-Cultural Art Education: Art education that is taught to students by a teacher or teaching artist from a foreign culture and usually in a foreign language.
Orphanage: A place where children who are either abandoned, taken from their familial homes or whose parents have passed away, come to live usually in a community with many other children, usually run by the church if not state-funded.
Action Research: Research that takes the aim of theorizing alongside the end goal of social action taking place after the culmination of the research project.
Single Orphan: Child has lost one parent or been abandoned by one parent.