| This study examines how youth are able to pursue interest-driven learning and practice-linked identities connected to digital media making with the help of individuals in their lives. Engaging in digital media making is an important route to developing important 21st century skills, empowered civic identities, and lifelong learning; also reports indicate that individuals from non-dominant communities are less able to derive such benefits. While research in the learning sciences, community psychology, sociology and other related fields widely agree that learning and development is enhanced through social support stemming from both family and non-family individuals, most studies examining social support for digital media making have tended to focus on one context or one provider group---for example, researchers have defined specific learning roles played by either parents at home, online mentors that were part of a social networking site, or educators operating in a school-cum-out-of-school environment. Taken as a whole, these studies provide an adequate grounding concerning the types of support that youth may require for digital fluency and media making, but leave open an opportunity to more fully capture social support provision as a holistic, dynamic, learning context-spanning phenomenon. The present study seeks to address this gap by investigating how adolescents navigate relationships in a variety of settings---including their home, school, and afterschool environments---to recruit and leverage the kinds of support they need to further their digital media making interests. Through a qualitative, interview-based study of teenagers recruited from out-of-school technology-oriented programs in New York City, I provide descriptive and explanatory evidence to (1) characterize how youth conceptualize the array of resources and supportive adults and peers available to them---their social learning ecology, (2) identify signaling practices they have utilized to recruit and leverage this support, and (3) explain how youth's support-generating signaling practices and aspects of their social learning ecologies may have implications for continued engagement in interest-driven learning activities. Such information may inform the design of more equitable learning environments that facilitate the development of long-term learning trajectories through involvement of a wider circle of potential resource providers. |
