Cultivating Disciplinary Futures in a School‐Based Digital Atelier

For two years we have observed in an after-school space staffed and resourced to support students’ elective learning called the Digital Atelier (DA) at Mullen High School (all school and student names are pseudonyms), a neighborhood school on Chicago’s southwest side. While recent models of interest-driven youth learning (e.g., connected learning; Ito et al., 2013) have paid close attention to designing such online and physical learning environments, examples are primarily located outside of schools (e.g., YOUmedia at the Chicago Public Library). The DA at Mullen offers a unique opportunity to consider teaching and learning within an elective learning space located inside a school. In this column, we articulate the ways that practices observed in the DA point to possibilities for finding and building interest-driven digital pathways to cultivate young people’s disciplinary futures. Our focus is on the ways that mentoring practices in this liminal learning space can inform disciplinary teaching and learning in other contexts.