Antero Garcia

Antero Garcia is an English teacher at a public high school in South Central Los Angeles. He utilizes his classroom as a hub of youth participatory action research. Antero is also a doctoral student at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA Antero’s research focuses on developing critical literacies and civic identity through the use of mobile media and game play in formal learning environments. Antero was a 2010-2011 U.S. Department of Education Teaching Ambassador Fellow and currently serves on the conference committee for the 2012 Digital Media and Learning conference.

What Antero will be doing at DIY DAYS

Experiential Learning

Join Joel Arquillos (826la), Jamie Salka (Story Pirates) and Antero Garcia as they share how they are utilizing experiential learning to engage students of all ages within and outside of the classroom.

 

DIY DAYS asks

 

What are you currently working on that you’re excited about?

Aside from finishing my Ph.D., I’m currently wrapping up research on an alternate reality game I developed for high school English students called Ask Anansi that guides student critical literacy development and civic engagement through the use of mobile media.

I’m also excited about an upcoming white paper I helped develop called “Service and Activism in the Digital Age: Supporting Youth Engagement in Public Life.” Related to this work I’ll begin researching the potential of civics-based geocaching with youth in New York.

Finally, I’m looking forward to continuing the work I have been doing preparing for the 2012 Digital Media and Learning Conference (http://dml2012.dmlcentral.net/) and contributing to the National Writing Project’s Digital Is resource (http://digitalis.nwp.org/).

What are some of your favorite sites and / or mobile apps and brief why?

My life is organized around the app and website TeuxDeux and I spend an unhealthy amount of spare time scrolling through the pages of unread content I have culled on the Read It Later app.

I’ve been appreciating the way young adult author, John Green has been leveraging social media to engage and inform his audience of readers (http://johngreenbooks.com/) and I routinely learn something new from the Unquiet Librarian (http://theunquietlibrarian.wordpress.com/).

What are you currently watching, reading or playing?

On a longish flight I recently finished reading Cathy Davidson’s Now You See It, Pittacus Lore’s The Power of Six, and started reading Errol Morris’s Believing is Seeing.

I’ve been playing Carcassonne and Pandemic lately. I like both games’ twist on classic boardgame tropes. In between teaching and driving, I’m sometimes (okay pretty often) playing Super Stickman Golf, Trainyard, and Continuity.

For More on Antero and his work visit

Site:The American Crawl