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If an objective of public higher education is to engage with a diversity of communities, then coursework should be less insulated within classrooms. This work describes and analyzes a university course design that supports undergraduate students to experience learning as relational and transformational via Site Visits within various communities. We focus on “technological assemblages” as a way to understand students’ reorientation to the process and purpose of learning (and teaching). We analyze experiences within the course as moments of disorientation, reassembly and stabilization in which students use their mobile devices, bodies and interactions-in-place to understand familiar locations as socially and historically contingent sites of learning (and teaching). We argue that this instructional model does important work of putting students at the nexus of building relationships between the university and other community settings around the city. 

In a new era of digital media and democracy, there is widespread concern that technologies have incapacitated us from learning and teaching across diverse communities and perspectives. While this notion may ring true in certain contexts, this paper describes a study, “Mobile City Science,” that designed a novel learning experience in which educators and young people used mobile and place-based technologies to document and analyze the diverse perspectives of community members living in rapidly changing urban areas. The objective of this work was to teach young people digital literacies associated with “city science,” an emerging interdisciplinary field that creates data-driven approaches to complicated community issues. Participants were videotaped as they collected and analyzed information about a specific neighborhood using wearable cameras, GPS devices, heart rate monitors, and a GIS software. Early findings show that Mobile City Science uses technology to engage people with diverse perspectives around a community scale problem.