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Contents
1.
Traveling, Textual Authority, and Transformation:
An Introduction to Critical Digital Literacies
JuliAnna Ávila & Jessica Zacher Pandya
1
Part 1. Disruptive by Design
2. Designing Space for Student Choice in a Digital
Media Studies Classroom
Stephanie Anne Schmier
15
3.
Engaging Urban Youth in Meaningful Dialogue
on Identity through Digital Storytelling
Althea Scott Nixon
41
4. Critical Literacies and Social Media: Fostering Ethical
Engagement with Global Youth
Anna Smith & Glynda Hull
63
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VI
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CONTENTS
Part 2. Teacher Education and Critical Digital Literacies
5. Perforating School: Digital Literacy in an Arts and Crafts Class
Arne Olav Nygard
87
6. Utilizing Mobile Media and Games to Develop Critical
Inner-City Agents of Social Change
Antero Garcia
107
7.
127
Beyond Technology Skills: Toward a Framework for
Critical Digital Literacies in Pre-Service Technology Education
Sarah Lohnes Watulak & Charles K. Kinzer
Part 3. Resisting Dominant Narratives
8. “They Get What They Deserve”: Interrogating Critical Digital Literacy
Experiences as Framed in a Québec Alternative High School Context
Dana E. Salter
157
9.
179
Relocalization in the Market Economy: Critical Literacy
and Media Production in an Urban English Classroom
Cynthia Lewis, Candance Doerr-Stevens, Jessica Dockter Tierney,
& Cassandra Scharber
10. Hacker Literacies: User-Generated Resistance and
Reconfiguration of Networked Publics
Rafi Santo
197
Afterword: So Now You Know. What Are You Going to Do about It?
Margaret C. Hagood
219
Author Biographies
225
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CHAPTER
ONE
Traveling, Textual
Authority, AND
Transformation
An Introduction to
Critical Digital Literacies
J ULI A NNA ÁVILA & J ESSICA Z ACHER PANDYA
There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away,
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry—
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll—
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears a Human soul.
(Dickinson, 1961, pp. 267–268)
“Somebody could drop you off in the middle of nowhere—you can’t read you don’t
know where you at—you’re going to get lost. That’s power—reading and writing,
you got to know that . . . it wouldn’t be like I would be stranded not knowing how
to read so I’m confident.” (Micah, a participant in one of our studies)
We begin at an unusual place to embark on a journey into critical digital literacies: with Dickinson’s poem. This particular poem contains the well-worn and canonical idea that literacy can “take us [to] Lands away,” a romantic notion echoed in a
more pragmatic fashion by Micah when he was asked about the purposes of literacy.
Technology and digital literacies have made it possible to travel farther and faster than
ever before, and we can communicate virtually with fellow travelers in real time; the
human soul is now transported in virtual non-linear worlds. Additionally, digital lit-
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eracies have changed who is considered literate and what counts as text. In this chapter, we use the familiar view of literacy as traveling to examine more novel implementations of critical and digital literacies, and to explore ramifications for the development
of critical digital literacies curricula across educational contexts.
As educators, we want students to be empowered to travel across both formal
and informal learning environments; we also want them to define themselves, and
be defined, as proficient and capable. Traveling with both critical and digital tools can
make one powerful indeed. How have these particular tools changed what it means
to be a literacy traveler, and a critical one at that? To begin to address this question,
in subsequent sections, we define what we mean by both critical and digital as well
as highlight some of the recent scholarship in each area. We also underscore select
challenges in being a traveler of this sort, in this particular era, as we know that (critical, digital) literacy-as-travel is often constrained and regulated. We will then turn
to an exploration of what the intersection of these two has made (and continues to
make) possible as we introduce readers to the chapters contained in this volume, each
of which holds promise for further elucidating the complexities of this subfield.
C RITICAL D IGITAL L ITERACIES : W ORKING D EFINITIONS
T HEORETICAL S TANDPOINTS
AND
Freire’s (2000) work is often cited as an early example of critical literacies praxis—
that is, in practice and in evolution. Critical literacies scholars also draw on Marx’s
theories of power and domination, as well as Foucault’s (1975) understanding of the
ways individuals discipline themselves (see, for example, Morrell, 2008). The main,
underlying goal of critical literacies praxis is twofold: to investigate manifestations
of power relations in texts, and to design, and in some cases redesign, texts in ways
that serve other, less powerful interests.
We refer to critical literacies in the plural because the skills and practices they
entail are multiple and diverse. Critical literacies provide skills and tools to address
social and educational inequalities and assist us in continuing to read the world, a
world that is increasingly digital. In the current moment, we see critical literacies
as engagement with language that requires consumers and designers of texts to not
only decode, encode, and make meaning from texts, but also to interrogate them
(Berghoff, Egawa, Harste, & Hoonan, 2000; Boran & Comber, 2001; Comber &
Simpson, 2001; Dozier, Johnston, & Rogers, 2006; Janks, 2010; Lewison, Leland,
& Harste, 2008; Misson & Morgan, 2006; Muspratt, Luke, & Freebody, 1997;
Stevens & Bean, 2007). Following the four resources model (Freebody & Luke,
2003), we also see critical literacies as those practices and skills that help investigate
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the ways readers use texts and texts use readers. Such interrogations can lead to disruptions of taken-for-granted realities, with, as Luke (2012) writes, “an explicit aim
of the critique and transformation of dominant ideologies, cultures and economies,
and institutions and political systems (p. 5). After one of us discussed critical literacies with an undergraduate class of English Education students, a student asked,
“Should we just question everything then?” Because power constantly shifts in digital worlds, when we as educators teach about and engage in critical literacies in
classrooms, we run the “risk” of empowering students to do just that.
In a similar vein, we view digital literacies as those practices in which people
use technological tools to engage with, respond to, and create, both text-based and
multimodal forms of literacies. Recent research has highlighted the need for educators to bring digital literacies into our classrooms (Alvermann, 2010; Alvermann,
Moon, & Hagood, 1999; Jenkins, Purushotma, Weigel, Clinton, & Robison,
2009; Paris, 2010; Rance-Roney, 2010; Robin, 2008) even though traditional
school definitions of literacies may well be at odds with those that include digital dimensions (Collins & Halverson, 2009; Tarasuiuk, 2010). Digital literacies
have called into question our understandings of acquisition and development, even
as schools continue to hold on to more traditional, and decidedly less digital, definitions. Additionally, we and the authors in this volume acknowledge that critical literacies cannot simply be mapped onto a digital landscape without a careful
revision of assumptions, approaches, and practices (Lankshear, Peters, & Knobel,
1996); this is a road that educators and learners should be traveling together,
toward, perhaps, an inversion of authority (which we will discuss in more detail
in a later section).
Critical digital literacies, then, are those skills and practices that lead to the creation of digital texts that interrogate the world; they also allow and foster the interrogation of digital, multimedia texts. Along with Dockter, Haug, & Lewis (2010),
we theorize that critical digital literacies have the potential to reach learners who
might be otherwise reluctant to engage in print-based critical literacies work.
Critical digital literacies provide opportunities for students to critique the cultural
worlds they inhabit (Gainer, 2010) and to expand their understandings of culture
(Hull, Stornaiuolo, & Sahni, 2010; Myers & Eberfors, 2010), while also revising their
own literacy and academic identities using digital tools (Lankshear, Peters, &
Knobel, 1996; O’Brien, 2003). We believe that there is crucial work to be done at
these intersections, work that builds upon the extensive bodies of critical and digital literacies research briefly mentioned above. The authors of chapters in this collection define critical digital literacies in a variety of ways; each definition can be
situated within our larger, overarching construct of practices that both foster and
afford the ability to design critical digital texts. When educators (and researchers)
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set out to help students become designers of texts, authority and power—who has
them, who deserves them, and where they come from—are often called into question. We turn next to a discussion of the potentials of such unbalancing in critical
digital literacies praxis.
A UTHORITY AND P OWER IN
P ARTICIPATORY C ULTURE
AN I NCREASINGLY
In our brave new participatory world ( Jenkins et al., 2009), critical digital literacies
should, arguably, appeal to a variety of educators because, at its best, it offers alternative methods of teaching, learning, production, and assessment that have the
potential to disrupt traditional banking systems of education (Freire, 2000). Critical
digital literacies offer chances for students and teachers to become designers (Kress,
2010), instead of only consumers, of powerful texts (Gounari, 2009; Janks, 2010)—
one of its ultimate goals. In their analysis of frameworks used by literacy and technology researchers, Warschauer and Ware (2008) offer Castells’ dichotomous future,
in which the privileged “interact” alongside the less privileged, who are “interacted” upon (p. 228). This dire possibility goads those who engage in critical digital literacies—like the authors in our volume—to continue their work.
Administrators and teachers under accountability pressures are often skittish about
allowing what they perceive to be wild and untamable technologies into classrooms (Merchant, 2010) and even, in some cases, after-school programs (Ávila,
Underwood, & Woodbridge, 2008). Who, they worry, will monitor access and use
and exposure? Who will “protect” students from the potential monsters on an
unregulated Internet? Unfortunately, it is these same contexts in which many
underserved children find themselves—without access to the tools of participatory
cultures. Through critical digital literacies, we can reach out to and help empower
traditionally disenfranchised learners.
We also argue that critical literacies educators would do well to integrate the
digital dimension into their work to build upon the practices and engagement that
our learners already utilize as they participate in digital literacies, where they are positioned as creators and authors. Dyson (2010) asserted that
Classrooms too should be defined by such a participatory culture where there is not a linguistically proper “us” and an improper “them” to be fixed. Rather, there is a “we” that
embodies distinctive linguistic and sociocultural histories that intersect to open a classroom
world to the larger society. Such a classroom world requires a particular ideological foundation. (p. 314)
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The “particular ideological foundation” that Dyson refers to can be one built on
the assumptions and practices of critical digital literacies, which lend themselves to
the creation of participatory cultures and equitable spaces where “we” can become literate in increasingly powerful ways, using media and tools that continue to evolve and
become more powerful themselves. Certainly, more than traditional school literacies,
critical digital literacies contain the potential to blur the boundaries between “us” and
“them,” especially when the “us” is the authoritative expert facing the novices. So, from
the first, engaging with learners in digital activities results in a constant shifting of
the position of expert at the apex. Educators and learners often share the roles of
experts and teachers, and when students lead, they define participation itself.
We would like to make a subtle distinction between pedagogy and product
in this regard. Pedagogically, power relationships between learners and teachers
are made fluid in many critical digital literacies contexts—learners frequently outpace teachers, or even arrive knowing more at the outset. For those of us who
enjoy working with critical digital literacies, this may be the most fun part of the
whole process: giving up our positions as knowledge-holders and bankers to
participate, if not as equals, at least as joint seekers of knowledge and joint producers of new media. This reformulation of the learning process as a participatory one is inspiring and attractive precisely because it stands in stark contrast to
the mandated and standardized participation that many of us continue to observe
in formal learning contexts (cf. Burn, Buckingham, Parry, & Powell, 2010; Rubin,
2011; Zacher Pandya, 2011). The role shifts—and shifts in authority and power—
engendered by critical digital literacies praxis lead us to our next related and overlapping standpoint.
T HE P OTENTIAL
FOR
T RANSFORMATION
More than 15 years ago, Peters and Lankshear (1995) asserted that a “transition
from print-based texts to electronic text forms and practices . . . opens up space
for expanded and enhanced practices of critical literacy” (p. 53). However, they
also cautioned that educators would have trouble learning about and subsequently integrating these fast-developing digital literacies into curricula in a
timely way (ibid.). Our own teacher education students provide anecdotal support of this caveat and have often confessed that they feel they can’t keep up with
technology, and so they are hesitant to bring it into their classrooms at all.
Critical literacies themselves can be intimidating to educators, but to couple
them with digital literacies, and ask teachers to figure out how to integrate the
whole complex mess in an educational context that values measurable and testable
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skills (neither of which these are) often leaves us with present and future educators who are reluctant to engage with either the critical or the digital. Part of the
wariness comes, we suspect, from the fact that teachers and learners are likely to
undergo role transformations while implementing critical digital literacies. The
disruption of authority, and the fluidity of the relationship between learners and
teachers (or novices and experts), can unnerve those who usually see themselves
as “experts” (see also Lankshear, Peters, & Knobel, 1996, p. 166).
We have begun to think about the nature and utility of criticism itself in the
transformations entailed by critical digital literacies praxis. Foucault defined criticism as “a matter of flushing out [a] thought and trying to change it: to show that
things are not as self-evident as one believed, to see that what it accepted as selfevident will no longer be accepted as such (Kritzman, 1998, p. 155). He also argued
that “practicing criticism is a matter of making facile gestures difficult,” an act that
“is absolutely indispensable for any transformation” (ibid.). We like to think about
each critical digital literacies context as transformative in a Foucauldian sense—as
“a free atmosphere, one constantly agitated by a permanent criticism” (ibid.).
In the spirit of this kind of criticism, we would like to make difficult, and offer
up for possible transformation, two facile tropes: (1) the role of the expert in critical digital literacies, and (2) the idea that digital tools are inherently empowering. In regard to the first, we know that learners are often more comfortable and
less inhibited when it comes to learning new technologies, and, given the opportunity, they can easily assume the teacher’s role. In terms of the second assumption, we know that simply having technology (such as an interactive whiteboard)
does not necessarily provide a learning experience that is qualitatively different
from one in which the only tools available are pencil and paper. Even though these
may be fairly obvious suppositions, we continue to be surprised at how often we
see the dichotomous models of teacher/student and technology/no technology
remain at the helm in education.
The idea of transformation appears across a range of research on digital literacies (DeGennaro, 2010; Gainer, Valdez-Gainer, & Kinard, 2009; Gee, 2010; Stein,
2004). We would argue, as do the other authors of this volume, that it entails not
just letting students teach us, or each other, in isolated instances, but encouraging
them to forge their own paths to authority—opening up the classroom landscape
so that there’s room for multiple paths to knowledge (Ávila, 2008; Merchant,
2009). Additionally, in terms of which tools we use when, we suggest that “a permanent criticism” is needed: why this tool and to which ends? What does it both
lend and limit in this particular situation? Just as travel can transform us, so too can
assuming a stance of permanent criticism when using and creating digital literacies.
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O RGANIZING C RITICAL D IGITAL L ITERACIES R ESEARCH :
P LAN OF THE B OOK
This book was born out of our joint desire to explore theoretical standpoints that
would help us understand our engagement with, and analysis of, such praxis. Due to
this need, we echo Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear, and Leu (2008), who call for new
frameworks through which to study “the new literacies of the Internet and other ICT
contexts” (p. 12; see also Wohlwend & Lewis, 2011). In our work with youth in different settings on digital projects, one of the most intriguing aspects of working with
critical digital literacies is the generative and flexible nature of the inquiry process
and potential products associated with them. As researchers trained to engage with
the world from a sociocultural perspective, we are interested in complementary
approaches that would enable us to account for social practices, contexts, and, to paraphrase Geertz (1972), the meaning-perspectives of critical digital literacies participants themselves. The many theoretical standpoints taken in the following
chapters—from discourse analysis to multimodal analyses of digital texts—are, we
believe, grounded in the social practices of new literacies, although they also afford
space for primarily textual analyses of critical digital literacies artifacts (cf. Street, Pahl,
& Rowsell, 2009). We invite readers to build on and expand these theoretical framings, and to appreciate, as we do, the way they overlap, coordinate, and enlighten.
On a more pragmatic note, as Luke (2012) points out, “while Freirian models
provide a pedagogical approach and a political stance, an orientation towards ‘voice’
and ideology, they lack specificity on how teachers and students can engage with the
complex structures of texts, both traditional and multimodal” (p. 8). Another of our
primary goals in collating this volume has been to offer specificity, including the use
of blogs (Nygard), iPods and mobile media (Garcia), videos (Lewis, Doerr-Stevens,
Dockter Tierney, & Scharber; Schmier) and digital storytelling (Nixon; Salter;
Smith & Hull). These authors have situated themselves at the intersection of the
digital and critical, and in their own ways, each explores how the increasing ubiquity of digital literacies has affected our definitions of critical literacies. They also
examine how our ever-changing perceptions of critical literacies affect how we
define, teach, and engage in digital literacies.
However, we have organized this book’s chapters into three sections based
neither on the type of media under discussion, nor on the particular theoretical
standpoint(s) of the authors, but instead on three key areas we see emerging in the
field. They are, first, “Disruptive by Design,” a section with three chapters about
youth designing their own critical digital literacies in praxis. Our second section,
“Teacher Education and Critical Digital Literacies” explores our interest as teacher
educators in the many aspects of this particular praxis that draw and, in some
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cases, discourage teachers. The third section of the book, “Resisting Dominant
Narratives,” brings together three authors whose work serves as cautionary tales to
those engaged in critical digital literacies research and praxis.
Disruptive by design
Though the methodological and theoretical standpoints of authors vary, each takes
students’ multimedia products—videos (Schmier) and digital stories (Nixon; Smith
& Hull) as their object of study. Schmier adds to our knowledge base of critical digital literacies in action within formal learning environments as she describes the
process of eighth graders constructing a public service announcement in a journalism and digital media studies class (Chapter 2). While focal students were able to
reconstruct their literacy identities in this activity, it was not a process without tension. While exploring instances of student agency, and places where students performed in ways not anticipated by the teacher, Schmier illustrates class work that
reaches out into and reflects the larger community that students inhabit.
Nixon’s research (Chapter 3) represents a larger project of digital storytelling
with urban youth in an after-school program. Her focus in this chapter is on the
ways that digital storytelling might help children engage in critical dialogue vis-àvis race, ethnicity, and gender. She examines the digital stories, videotaped developmental dialogues, and other artifacts of five children, ages six through ten,
showing how they often appropriated and challenged gendered and raced images
they found in the popular media. Nixon’s chapter serves as an account of how children can be helped to acquire critical digital literacies skills while interrogating the
media images that saturate their lives.
Next, Smith and Hull write from a cosmopolitan, globalized perspective, foregrounding the ethics of authorship and readership as they explore youths’ emerging practices (Chapter 4). They analyze videos made by two American high school
students in a course on cosmopolitanism, in which students joined an online site to
view the videos of, and correspond with, youth in many other parts of the world.
Smith and Hull argue that the students were in the process of developing, and
deploying, a “digital ethic of cosmopolitan practice” (p. 4). Their research illustrates
that we need to teach intentional authoring in multimodal design so that learners
can develop their own senses of who they are in the world in relation to others.
Teacher education and critical digital literacies
While we could have easily categorized each of these chapters in other ways, we find
their strengths in the ideas and examples they put forth about teachers engaging in
critical digital literacies. Issues of authority and power—which we mentioned
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above—underlie these authors’ discussions of how teachers engage in critical digital literacies: Nygard and Garcia describe blogging and gameplay, in Chapters 5 and
6, respectively; while Lohnes Watulak and Kinzer offer a theoretical framework for
critical digital literacies in teacher education in Chapter 7.
To elaborate, Nygard describes the effects of a Norwegian teacher’s blogging
on her students’ development of critical digital literacies (Chapter 5). Using observational data as well as group and individual interviews, Nygard suggests that students felt an increased sense of community, were strongly motivated, and, perhaps
most importantly, saw blogging in class as a serious and meaningful technology of
thought. Nygard’s descriptions offer useful examples for practitioners; however, it
is the students’ discussions of the importance and utility of this kind of classroomand school-based blogging that are invigorating.
Garcia details how he, along with his ninth-grade students, utilized iPods to
construct a scavenger hunt that positioned them, through critical play, as participants
with the power to comment on their school and its position in the community
(Chapter 6). Students worked individually and collaboratively as they took both critical and digital literacies beyond classroom walls. Crossing both “digital and nondigital contexts,” his research exemplifies how educators can utilize digital tools in
accessible ways that ask students to draw from their own knowledge of new media
while still “doing” school.
Lohnes Watulak and Kinzer (Chapter 7) develop and define a theoretical
framework for critical digital literacies in pre-service teacher technology education.
They explore ways to use this framework with existing technology standards to
develop teachers’ critical reflective skills. While the space and genre of pre-service
teacher education will be familiar to many readers, we have not yet seen such a
detailed attempt to integrate critical digital literacies into it.
Resisting dominant narratives
In this last section, we have collected three chapters whose authors resist dominant
critical digital literacies narratives—because, even though it is an emerging field,
there are already dominant narratives to resist.
Salter explores the default, deficit constructions of students and literacies in
alternative school contexts—in this case a high school in Quebec, where she was
engaged in a critical digital literacies project—and argues convincingly that these
taken-for-granted notions of what students (and teaching) ought to be like in such
schools narrow and constrain the possibilities for critical digital literacies (Chapter
8). She urges us to interrogate the frames we bring to these contexts, and to “think
big” about the possibilities and potentials of individual alternative schools, students,
and teachers.
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Lewis, Doerr-Stevens, Dockter Tierney, and Scharber share with readers what
occurs when critical digital literacies are “sponsored” in an English class by a public-relations firm, a seemingly contradictory coupling (Chapter 9). Using the lens
of relocalization, the authors explore what they see as a “conundrum” central to enacting critical digital literacies in schools: schools are part of a global market economy
that circumscribes, to some extent, how learning occurs. Although this complexity
can be circumvented with tools like critical digital literacies, the authors remind readers that it is no easy feat and may require students being agentive in unexpected ways.
In Chapter 10, Santo’s work theorizing the nature of hacker literacies will
open up new vistas. Concerned with acts of agency in a digital participatory world,
Santo introduces readers to what he terms “hacker literacies.” Through illustration
of what some users have done with, and in response to, Facebook, Twitter, and
Second Life, he adds nuance to what it means to participate, actions that then
change the programs themselves. Santo’s research exemplifies that re-mediation in
digital spaces means that users become designers, and who designs and creates occurs
on a continuum with near-constant negotiation.
Hagood, who has long been concerned with critical (2002) and critical digital
literacies praxis (2009), has written the Afterword for this collection. Drawing on
current research about teacher and student technology practices, Hagood ultimately challenges practitioners to consciously explore the destabilizing effects of critical digital literacies on classroom relationships, identities, and instruction. Her
chapter offers a timely reminder: While all educators are losing control in so many
places, current and future Common Core State Standards leave us in control of this
aspect of our teaching. It is up to us to make the most of it.
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PA R T 1
Disruptive by Design
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CHAPTER
TWO
Designing Space FOR
Student Choice IN A
Digital Media Studies
Classroom
STEPHANIE A NNE S CHMIER
On the first day of school, Mr. Cardenas, a teacher at East Side Middle School, gave
his eighth-grade journalism and digital media studies students a homework assignment to come up with questions that they had about the class. The following day,
Rosy was the first to ask her question, which was about what topics they would be
able to cover in their role as journalists.
ROSY:
On the documentary, what topics will we be able to cover?
MR. CARDENAS:
A broad range. It just has to be about [our city] in some way.
ROSY:
But are there like boundaries you can’t cross?
MR. CARDENAS:
Nudity would not be okay and curse words should be kept to a
minimum.
ROSY:
What about how do drugs take a toll on the community?
MR. CARDENAS:
That would be great. That would work for the documentary or
the PSA. . . . I probably won’t ask you to do a pro-drug message. (field notes, 8/30)
The journalism and digital media studies elective that Mr. Cardenas taught was
a different type of classroom environment than most of the classes offered at East
Side Middle School, a Title I school labeled as “underperforming” by the state based
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on student performance on standardized tests. The class was structured in a way that
transformed the classroom into an authentic workspace where Mr. Cardenas and
his students engaged in both traditional and new-media journalistic practices,
designing texts such as the print-based and online newspaper that they titled the
East Side Tribune, blogs, and podcasts. During sixth period, students were journalists, provided with press passes that afforded them freedom to move around the
school to report on issues of interest and importance to the student body, and with
access to a few digital still and video cameras that they used to perform their roles
as journalists. This freedom came with responsibility, as students were required to
make appointments to obtain interviews from their sources, which included faculty
and administration as well as fellow students and community members.
The short exchange between Rosy and Mr. Cardenas quoted above exemplifies how Mr. Cardenas and his students negotiated the topics that students covered
in the texts they designed for the school newspaper they produced and an end-ofthe-year film festival in which they participated. While Mr. Cardenas articulated to
his students that the journalism and digital media studies class was a space for them
to investigate, discuss, and document issues that they thought to be important to
the East Side community, he regularly reminded them that this was a school space,
with certain rules and regulations that they all must follow, himself included. For
example, though Mr. Cardenas made it clear that students would have choice in the
topics that they would investigate and document, discourses circulating within
East Side Middle School mediated not only what topics should not be covered (e.g.,
anything requiring nudity or curse words), but also that texts should espouse a particular point of view in line with acceptable ways of talking and acting at school (e.g.,
an anti-drug perspective).
As I read the space of the journalism and digital media studies class during
the year that I spent with Mr. Cardenas and his students as a participant observer,
I became keenly aware of how the multiple discourses circulating within this
classroom shaped the identities that were performed and the texts that students
produced for the class. For example, the question Rosy posed to Mr. Cardenas in
their exchange about whether it would be acceptable to document what she saw
as the negative effects that drugs were taking on their local community located her
within a working-class discourse, where drugs are seen as contributing to the low
level of economic resources available to some of those who live in her community,
a position that shaped many of the texts that she produced for the class. East Side
Middle School is located in an increasingly gentrified community that is socially
and culturally diverse, with newly renovated million-dollar homes on the hill
overlooking rows of low-income apartment housing below. Despite the diversity
of the community, at the time this study was conducted 90 percent of the students
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enrolled in East Side Middle School came from lower-income households,
whereas students from the Hills predominantly attended one of the private schools
in the area, a tension that was evident in the texts that many of the students produced throughout the course.
Observing and documenting the processes through which students designed
multimodal projects for the journalism and digital media studies class offered
opportunities to learn about the ways they used their bodies, texts, and the school
space to tell the stories of their own lives and their community. This was particularly evident in the final group project undertaken by students in the class, the public service announcement (PSA). The PSA was a group assignment in which
students wrote and performed their message as actors captured on video, and so provided a lens into how students used language, organized space, and moved their bodies to send a message that articulated their perspective on how individuals can work
to improve the community to an audience of their peers.
Thus, the purpose of this chapter is to examine the multimodal literacy performances of Marie and Casey, two students enrolled in Mr. Cardenas’ journalism and
digital media studies class, as they engaged in the process of creating a video public service announcement on teenage pregnancy and abortion. Drawing on ethnographic data from a yearlong study designed to investigate the digital practices and
literate identities of adolescents attending an urban public school, this research
blends post-structural theories of subjectivity and positioning (Blackburn, 2002;
Davies, 1994) with critical discourse (Gee, 2005) and multimodal (Kress, 2003) analytic tools to explore the students’ literacies as multimodal, embodied identity performances. According to Hull and Nelson (2005), multimodal texts such as the video
PSA designed by the youth in this study afford a different kind of meaning making
than the traditional types of school texts that predominate in public school classrooms. From this perspective, allowing youth who are positioned as “low-literate”
based on traditional print-based assessments the opportunity to read and design multimodal texts may serve as a “democratizing force” (p. 253), offering opportunities for
these youth to reposition themselves as authors, designers, and composers. However,
Janks (2000) noted, “design, without an understanding of how dominant
discourses/practices perpetuate themselves runs the risk of an unconscious reproduction of these forms” (p. 178). In other words, merely giving students from traditionally marginalized backgrounds access to digital tools with which to design multimodal
texts in the classroom runs the risk of students using these tools to create content that
mirrors the mainstream media and school-based discourses that position them as “atrisk” for school failure. Therefore, in what follows I explore how Marie and Casey
negotiated school-based discourses and dominant representations of constructs such
as race and gender as they produced their own digital, multimodal texts.
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T HEORETICAL F RAMEWORK
This chapter is grounded in a social practice perspective on literacies that leans on
post-structural theories of subjectivity and positionality, blended with critical discourse (Gee, 2005) and multimodal (Kress, 2003) analytic tools. Here, literacies are
understood as socially situated and discursively constructed practices that vary in
relation to the activity of which it is a part (Barton, 1994; Gee, 1996; Luke &
Freebody, 1997). Just as literacies are discursively constructed, so too are individuals’ subjectivities constructed through their particular life histories and experiences
(Davies, 1994). Bringing Blackburn’s (2002) notion of literacies performances to this
research allows for literacies to be considered “across locations and over time” (p.
313). Understanding literacies performances in classrooms therefore requires attention not only to activities, but also to the ways individuals are positioned and position themselves as they interact within and across particular practices over time. The
research presented in this chapter is thus informed by a view of literacies that
acknowledges the shifting nature of individuals’ subjectivities as they engage in literate practices across multiple social spaces.
Further, I draw on multimodal theories that shed new light on youths’ meaning-making in relation to the texts they produce in school-based settings. Analyzing
texts from this perspective links students’ social practices with their textual representations (Pahl & Roswell, 2006). Thus, this research draws on Kress’ (2003) theory and method of multimodal analysis in order to recognize how the practices of
students in this particular middle-school classroom are situated within a much wider
communicational landscape. Specifically, Kress’ framework requires the consideration not only of how any text is shaped by its material form, but how that form is
shaped by the discourses that surround the literacies event(s) in which the text was
produced. Such an analytic framework is essential for understanding how the discourses that surround particular literacies events in this study shaped and are shaped
by the kinds and types of digital texts that the youth produced throughout the year.
D IGITAL L ITERACIES W ITHOUT
THE
C RITICAL
In their study of youth engagement with digital media, Ito et al. (2009) described
how networked publics such as online social networking sites have provided space
for youth to engage in learning with peers through the production of text, outside the purview of teachers and other adults. Mr. Cardenas’ pedagogical approach
in the journalism and digital media studies class embraced this perspective of
allowing youth space to learn from each other through the production of digital
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texts without adult intervention in the learning process. A social studies teacher
with nine years of experience, Mr. Cardenas began teaching the journalism and
digital media studies elective after participating in a workshop at the American
Film Institute. Over the three years that he had taught the class, he transformed
the workshop curriculum into an entire course, which provided opportunities for
his students to design texts that were particularly meaningful to themselves and
their communities. In the remainder of this chapter, I describe how Mr. Cardenas’
approach played out in the construction of one of the digital texts designed in the
class and discuss implications, including how allowing students to design on
their own, without an explicit critical literacies curriculum, simultaneously empowered students and re-inscribed their positionality as marginal in their underperforming school.
The Public Service Announcement
On a shortened day in April, two months before the end of the school year, Mr.
Cardenas introduced the final project for the journalism and digital media studies
class, the PSA. Mr. Cardenas began the unit by engaging the class in a discussion
of PSA as a genre, as this was their first time designing a PSA:
MR. CARDENAS:
Today we will be starting on the public service announcements.
Do you know what a PSA is?
SABINA:
It prevents you from doing things.
VINCENT:
It informs.
ROSY:
Like DARE. They have bumper stickers and shirts.
MR. CARDENAS:
It has to be a commercial
ROSY:
I didn’t know that . . . It’s Your Sex Life. (Mr. Cardenas makes air
quotes as he repeats the title and writes it on the board) It’s about
sex education.
MR. CARDENAS:
Does anyone know Smokey the Bear? It was popular when I
was growing up. Since the fires last year in Grant Park there is
now a sign with Smokey the Bear at the park entrance warning
about forest fires. (field notes, 4/8)
As this discussion continued, students named PSAs they had seen on channels such
as MTV with topics that included teenage sex, drug abuse, and childhood obesity.
After the class had brainstormed a list of topics, Mr. Cardenas chose students to be
the leaders of each PSA group, then assigned students to groups of four. Topic selection took place directly after groups were assigned. Mr. Cardenas instructed students,
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“Now that you are seated around the room, the leader will be the facilitator of the
groups. In ten minutes, decide on the category [for the PSA].”
Marie and Casey, two focal students in this research, were assigned to the
same group. Marie, who had immigrated to the United States with her family at age
nine from Nigeria, was recognized by Mr. Cardenas as a leader in the journalism
and digital media studies class despite the fact that she was failing in some of her
core-content classes. As such, Marie was chosen to lead her group. Casey, a white
working-class student, was recognized by her teachers and classmates as a successful student both in the journalism class and in her core classes and worked as a coleader alongside Marie throughout the project.
I was particularly drawn to Marie and Casey’s group because of the intense passion with which they engaged in initial planning conversations around their topic.
Their group, which also included a girl named Annie and a boy named Joe, chose
one of the topics that came up in the class discussion, teenage sex. However, they
chose to focus on an aspect not brought up by Mr. Cardenas: abortion. During the
ten-minute discussion, the group agreed that their PSA would portray an anti-abortion message. Casey clearly stated her view by telling the group, “Abortion sucks.”
She shared later in an interview that the selection of their anti-abortion message
was partly due to the fact that both Annie’s and Casey’s mothers had given birth
as teens and had each made the decision not to have an abortion. Casey described
that she believed her mother had made a good decision because otherwise her sister would not have been born (interview with Casey, 6/11).
From the beginning of the project Mr. Cardenas appeared uncomfortable with
the group’s topic choice of abortion, but I never observed him asking them to
reconsider their choice. I noted his concern with the way they were approaching their
topic during their first-day conversation as they discussed including a scene where
the pregnant girl’s unborn baby would come to her in a dream and haunt her. Mr.
Cardenas listened to the group’s idea for the scene and his only feedback was
“Harsh” (field notes, 4/8). This was the first of many times that Mr. Cardenas
would look at me during a conversation with this particular group and ask what I
thought. Most often I would try to engage them in a critical conversation to help
them think about the message they were sending in their PSA. Their responses
always supported their initial design choices, and so Mr. Cardenas allowed them to
produce the text that they had originally pitched to him.
Lights, camera, action
As the assigned leader of her group, Marie took responsibility for writing, drawing,
and coloring the group’s storyboard as they talked through the scenes they would film.
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They began referring to their project as the Abortions PSA, which eventually became
the title of their video. During the first few class sessions of the project, which lasted
six weeks, Marie constantly added, deleted, and modified scenes as the group created
their narrative through discussion, including using speech bubbles to illustrate the dialogue. Once their storyboard was completed and approved by Mr. Cardenas, the group
chose their roles for the project. Annie agreed to play the pregnant girl and Joe agreed
to play her boyfriend. Marie and Casey decided to stay behind the camera, with Marie
taking up the role of director and Casey agreeing to be the cameraperson. The group
then recruited a few other students from the class to fill the remaining acting roles,
including the clinic worker who would counsel the pregnant girl on her available
options. They found another student in the class, Marla, to play the unborn baby in
the dream sequence that they had first discussed on the day the project was assigned,
in which the main character’s unborn baby comes to her in a dream and pleads for
her life, which influences the pregnant teen not to have an abortion.
After completing their script and gaining approval from Mr. Cardenas, the students used their assigned class camera to film scenes at various locations around
campus, including a hallway transformed into a free clinic through the placement
of signs on doors that read “ultrasounds” and “checkups” and a rarely used teachers’
lounge turned into a medical lab for the dream sequence using beakers, food coloring, and other materials gathered from their science classroom. Once filming was
complete, Marie and Casey worked together at Casey’s assigned class computer each
day to import and edit the film. Though there were four members in their group,
Marie and Casey took over full responsibility for post-production, editing their PSA
project while the other two group members moved on to other projects, as Mr.
Cardenas encouraged students to work on various projects as needs arose. Marie and
Casey organized the clips in sequence and added transitions and text slides in
iMovie as suggested by Mr. Cardenas.
The completed PSA began with a text slide that read, “In the next 24 hours
2,795 teen girls will get pregnant” followed by a scene of a teenage girl in a bathroom reading a positive pregnancy text. The pregnant teen then went to a free clinic
for advice but left without knowing what she would do. When she returned home
she fell asleep and dreamt of her baby as an adult. Her baby was in a medical lab
and told her mother that she could have cured cancer had she not been killed before
she was born. When the pregnant teen awoke from the dream, she answered her
cell phone and shared with the caller that she would keep her baby. The final scene
ended with the narrator reciting the slogan “Abort your thoughts, not a human
being” followed by the grown-up baby thanking her mother for loving her enough
not to kill her. Finally, the video contained credits and a montage of outtakes and
bloopers (see Appendix A for a full transcript of the Abortions PSA).
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Both Marie and Casey shared in interviews that they were happy with the final
version of the video that they submitted for the end-of-year film festival, although
they were frustrated that Mr. Cardenas would not allow them to include a scene of
the pregnant teen sneaking out of a room with a boy looking upset about what she
had just done, as he felt that this would be inappropriate for school (interview with
Casey, 6/11; interview with Marie, 6/24). Casey told me that she was surprised when
the video was selected to screen at the festival because of the topic. However, the video
was cut from the film-festival program days before the event, with the students
being told that the film would not show due to time constraints. The film-festival program was full, however both Marie and Casey shared that they believed that time constraints were not the only reason the video was not screened for the community.
Performing discursive space through design choice
As I watched the Abortions PSA group’s filming and editing sessions, I noticed the
care and attention to detail with which they set up every scene. Each design choice
was discussed and negotiated among the group members as they performed their
multiple roles of filmmaker, actor, set designer, student, and friend. The group regularly spent almost the entire class session setting up the scenes and would only need
a few takes at the end of class to capture their work on video. Details, including the
design of the pregnancy test and signs for the free clinic, location where each shot
would be filmed, and the way in which the actors would move their bodies and speak
their lines, were all discussed by group members in detail, with Marie leading the
discussion and making the final design choice as director. Further, each time a mistake was made the group would note whether that “take” would be included in the
bloopers at the end of the piece.
Watching the film, I noted how the filmmakers drew upon multiple modes in
making choices about how to design their text, using written words, images, and spoken language in deliberate ways. For example, for the dream sequence the group
decided to have the pregnant teen walk in to the room silently and fall asleep, followed by a text slide that articulated that the she was having a dream (see Table 1).
As I read the text, I found this design choice by the filmmakers to be significant
in that the pregnant girl does not say anything and is shown as passive and thus as
having no agency, while the grown-up child in the dream is active, a characteristic
that is also conveyed through the addition of spoken language in this scene, giving
the child voice. The spoken-language choices, such as the use of the word “killed,”
invoke a pro-life discourse, establishing the filmmakers’ perspective that a fetus is a
life. In this view, the pregnant girl is not only killing her unborn baby, but all those
who will suffer and die from cancer (whom she will not be able to cure) as well.
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Table 1. Scenes from the Abortions PSA
D ESIGNING S PACES FOR THE C ONSTRUCTION OF N EW N ARRATIVE
IN S CHOOL
Producing hybrid discourses
Producing hybrid discourse based within the Foucauldian (1980) conceptualization
of power as producing discourses and as something that circulates, I drew upon multimodal discourse analytic tools as a way to illuminate the powerful discourses circulating within the Abortion PSA throughout the production process. A close
examination of the PSA project offers insights into the ways that the space of the
journalism and digital media studies class afforded opportunities for production of
hybrid discourses, allowing participants to perform the space as students who successfully completed their assignments while simultaneously designing texts that were
meaningful and important to them.
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For example, Casey and Marie positioned themselves as within the discourse
of school and performed the role of “good student” as they followed Mr. Cardenas’
instructions, stayed on task, and completed each assignment (e.g., topic choice, storyboard, script) as directed without having to compromise the controversial topic
that the group chose for their text. Their text matched closely with the purpose of
the type of PSA students were asked to create, specifically to inform the audience
about actions they could take for the good of the community, thus positioning the
audience, which in this case consisted of students and parents, as responsible for alleviating problems in their community. Often PSAs employ scare tactics to lure
audience members in and get them to take the issue seriously, such as showing
graphic car accidents to prevent drunk driving or a picture of a fried egg to show
what drugs might be doing to users’ brains. The Abortions PSA filmmakers included
such a scare tactic with the dream sequence. That is, they designed a haunting scene
meant to portray the seriousness and finality of abortion in order to capture the audience’s attention in a way that might leave them open to listening to their message
that abortion is not the right choice for a pregnant teen to make when faced with
this difficult decision.
Further, Mr. Cardenas told students that a PSA should have a slogan associated with the campaign, such as “Say No to Drugs,” or “Only You Can Prevent
Wildfires,” both of which place ownership for solving the problem they address with
the audience. The filmmakers of the Abortions PSA took up Mr. Cardenas’ call to
include a slogan in their video. Interestingly, this requirement to include a slogan
led the filmmakers to add the tag line, “Abort your thoughts, not a human being,”
creating a tension in the narrative they designed that focused on the pregnant
teen’s thoughtful decision-making process and the slogan, which suggests that
pregnant teens should not think through their options because the right choice is
always to follow through with the pregnancy. In this way, the Abortions PSA slogan limits the agency of pregnant teens to make decisions that are best for them.
Teens in the audience are told that if they get pregnant, they should not think about
the consequences of a decision to follow through with a pregnancy, despite the enormous implications of such a choice. This illustrates how a focus on teaching standard genres such as PSAs with canned slogans shaped the Abortions PSA by
deemphasizing the decision-making process that the filmmakers highlighted in the
beginning of the piece, thus positioning pregnant teens as agency-less.
This same type of power circulating within school shaped the content of the
Abortions PSA that led to the final narrative the group constructed based within
Mr. Cardenas’ concern over the appropriateness of their content for a school audience and possible push back from the principal or parents about content related to
sexual activity. For example, Mr. Cardenas did not allow the filmmakers to include
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a scene they had filmed showing how the girl became pregnant by being alone in
a room with a boy, even though they sought to show that the girl regretted her
action. In fact, the filmmakers went further in the other direction and ensured that
the scene did not include any physical contact between the two actors at all so as
to make it acceptable for a school audience. Despite these design choices, Mr.
Cardenas told participants that any mention of sexual activity among the teen
actors would be inappropriate, and so the Abortions PSA left out any mention of
how the girl became pregnant, which could have served as a preventive message and
as such would have addressed one of the main goals of the assignment.
Reproducing dominant discourses
Analyzing the discourses used in designing the narrative of the Abortions PSA
brought to the fore how students took up dominant representations of adolescence
and working-class girls that pervaded both the school space and mainstream media
at the time of this study. Specifically, the discourse of adolescence and the tension
inherent in this discourse is evident throughout the Abortions PSA text.
Adolescence is commonly viewed as a biological stage that all youth must go
through in the same extended way in order for them to develop into adults (Lesko,
2001). This stage is characterized by a lack of ability to make mature decisions due
to “raging hormones” (p. 3). However, Lesko articulated how teenage motherhood
creates a tension in this discourse of adolescence in that teen mothers grow up “all
at once” and are not afforded the extended time needed to develop into mature
adults. The Abortions PSA captured this tension in that different modes convey different and even conflicting ideas across scenes. For example, there is tension between
the written statement “After having a dream about her child grown up, she knows
what she has to do,” portraying the pregnant girl as sure of her decision and thus
invoking a discourse of adult responsibility, and the image in the previous scene
where the girl is shown holding her head in her hands as if still grappling with her
choice, thus resisting this early move from teenager to adulthood (see Figure 1).
Further, the discourse of adolescence is reproduced in the last 90 seconds of this
four-minute PSA, which features outtakes and bloopers from the students’ filming.
Bloopers and outtakes are a part of a comedy genre and are often shown at the end
of full-length films as well as situation comedies. However, this text is not a comedy and as such the bloopers serve more as an opportunity to laugh after having dealt
with a very serious subject. This suggests the filmmakers’ own tension in their view
of the topic and in their identities as not children and not yet adults, and the juxtaposition of the serious subject matter with the bloopers serves as a way of working through this tension. In this way, the Abortions PSA text is heteroglossic
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Figure 1. Scenes from the Abortions PSA.
(Bakhtin, 1981), featuring both a professional PSA pro-life discourse where one mistake has dire consequences, and a playful teenage discourse where they laugh at their
own mistakes in the bloopers. Thus, we see the filmmakers enacting both a responsible adult discourse where a pregnant woman needs to make the right choice to keep
her baby, and a playful teenage discourse where mistakes serve as an opportunity to
learn. Since this is one mistake that cannot be undone according to the filmmakers, the teen mother moves from teenager to adult the second she reads the positive pregnancy test, thus reproducing the growing-up-all-at-once discourse of
adolescent motherhood (Lesko, 2001).
Similar to the way in which the Abortions PSA takes up adolescence as a discourse, the text that Casey and Marie designed reproduces dominant constructions
of girls as well. Davies (1993) argued that gender is taken up by an individual as one’s
own in ways that are not visible, and thus students can import sexist narratives that
reproduce and confirm the oppressive world in which they live. The PSA designers take up such a gendered discourse in their positioning of women as solely
responsible for unplanned pregnancies. This is evident in their decision to exclude
the father of the conceived child beyond the first scene they had planned and were
unable to include, which was meant to show the pregnant girl walking out of the
room looking upset, while the boy was not given any lines or directions; thus positioning him as needing only to be present for the act that got the girl pregnant but
not for the consequences. Further, there are no other male characters in the piece,
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thus positioning unplanned pregnancy as a female problem and the choice of
whether to terminate or follow through with the pregnancy as solely the mother’s
decision as well. In this way, they absolve men from the responsibility for childcare
and rearing. Since the pregnant mother’s decision to keep her baby has consequences
for her future success in school, absolving the boy means that he can continue his
education and be successful in ways that the girl cannot.
Finally, the Abortions PSA seemed to be shaped by dominant representations
of social class, though class was never specifically mentioned in the piece. It was evident to me, however, in the scene of the pregnant teen visiting a free clinic for advice
on what she should do. In the scene, there is a disaffected clinic worker who communicates the type of limited substandard care available to those who can’t afford
to purchase quality healthcare. The clinic worker describes the pregnant girl’s
options, mentioning the option of keeping the baby first, subtly communicating that
this is the right choice. This scene also pushes back against common conceptions
of free clinics as places solely for abortions through an image showing that ultrasounds and checkups are provided, things that pregnant woman who cannot afford
medical insurance would be able to receive at a free clinic.
The clinic scene is reminiscent of a similar scene in the movie Juno (Drake &
Reitman, 2007), a popular film at the time, about a teenager who gets pregnant and
decides to go through with her pregnancy. The main character Juno was from a
working-class family and decided to give her baby up for adoption to a family that
appeared to be upper-middle class where her baby could have access to resources
that she was not in a position to provide. Juno’s social class position in the film is
quite similar to the position of the students in this study. Both the narrative of the
film and the narrative of the Abortions PSA perpetuated the notion that poor and
working-class teens are more likely to become teen parents than their wealthier
peers, just as their parents had, thus positioning them as responsible for failing to
move up the socioeconomic ladder.
Further, PSA as a genre assumes a singular public good, often rooted in middle-class values. For example, there are several PSAs that portray literacy problems
as resulting from a failure of parents reading books to their children. Interestingly,
the public good portrayed in the Abortions PSA is that a decision against abortion
saves a life, a position that crosses social class lines.
Troubling the empowerment of students through digital media
Hull and Nelson (2005) posited the inclusion of digital multimodality in schools
may provide space for diverse views and values to be incorporated into the design
of our changing world in ways that the predominance of linguistic texts have
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tended to shut down. Their multimodal analysis of a digital multimodal story
began to uncover some of the meanings and powerful semiotic potential that such
forms of design may offer. Engaging in multimodal discourse analysis of the
Abortions PSA highlighted ways in which the affordances of the digital, multimodal
PSA video assignment did in fact allow Marie and Casey to position themselves as
authors, designers, and filmmakers in powerful ways. Further, the youth constructed
a persuasive and complex narrative, which is particularly significant in this school,
where a singular focus on standardized test scores as the sole measure of students’
literacies skills position a majority of students at East Side Middle School, including Marie, as in need of remediation due to a perception that they lack the ability
to write persuasive essays. Finally, a close examination of the Abortions PSA videotext highlighted how the filmmakers simultaneously took up and resisted schoolbased and mass-media discourses that position them as at-risk for school failure.
For example, the two filmmakers articulated the importance of their main character being an honor student because they wanted to show that even good students,
as they considered themselves to be, make poor decisions that can lead to serious
consequences for their success in school and later in life.
While the filmmakers resisted the positioning of teen pregnancy as something that doesn’t happen to well-behaved students like themselves, they readily took
up the mythologized (Barthes, 1972) view of celebrity and teenage pregnancy
prominent in the media, and referenced popular films such as Juno, which features
a lead character who decides not to have an abortion and still successfully stays in
school and maintains her relationship with her boyfriend. In particular, the
Abortions PSA video ends with the teen mother happily sharing the news with her
friend over a cell phone that she will keep her baby. This decision came after
receiving little support or guidance from the free clinic that she visited in order to
get help. The filmmakers do not, however, address the consequences of this decision in terms of how it will affect this teenager’s life, and merely portray her as a
heroine for making the right decision not to have an abortion.
As Janks (2000) argued, merely giving students access to tools with which to
design texts without an opportunity to deconstruct dominant discourses can lead
to their unconscious reproduction. The ways in which the filmmakers performed
the space of the journalism and digital media studies classroom seem to imply that
this is the case for the youth in this study, who are often positioned at school as
at risk for failure due to their cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. For this
particular assignment, as was the case with other projects throughout the year, the
students did not have the opportunity to critique other PSAs or films with similar content, which may have facilitated their ability to think critically about the
narrative that they chose to construct. Further, while both Mr. Cardenas and I were
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at times uncomfortable with some aspects of the narrative of the Abortions PSA,
especially the failure of the filmmakers to address the serious consequences and
implications of the decision that this young woman made, the power dynamics circulating in the classroom made it difficult for us to articulate our concerns to the
students in a way that helped them to think critically about their choices. Despite
repeated attempts by Mr. Cardenas, discussions quickly shut down as he struggled
to find the “right” language to articulate his perspective to students without
imposing his own ethical and political views, which he feared might inhibit their
creative process or dissuade them from telling a story that was important and
meaningful for them. Mr. Cardenas’ struggle here resonates with descriptions of
teachers new to the implementation of critical literacies described by Lewison,
Flint, and Sluys (2002), specifically in the difficulty he encountered when faced
with addressing politically charged issues and questions. From this view, Mr.
Cardenas might have benefited from having a group of peers with whom he
could discuss the issues that were arising in the class and how he might work
through them with his students.
As such, this research points to a critical need for the type of multiliteracies pedagogy advocated by the New London Group (1996), wherein students and teachers engaged in multimodal design create communities of learners who critically
inquire into the historical, cultural, and social nature of particular systems and
practices in order to transform knowledge for their own purposes. By implementing such a pedagogy in a digital media studies program such as the classroom
under investigation in this study, students might be afforded significant opportunities to critique dominant and marginalizing discourses in order to reconstruct new
narratives and position themselves as authors and designers of their own social
futures (New London Group, 1996).
C RITICAL L ITERACIES
IN THE
M ULTIMODAL C LASSROOM
The Abortions PSA exemplified what I observed throughout the year I spent with
Mr. Cardenas and his students, specifically the multiple ways in which students drew
upon the affordances of the multimodal space of the classroom to design a variety
of texts, many of which spoke back to some of the restrictive and regulatory discourses of gender, social class, and adolescence that circulated across the multiple
social spaces of their lives. However, some of the texts participants designed, including the Abortions PSA, also used language that reproduced some of the powerful
gendered and classed discourses against which they often spoke both in and out of
the classroom. The experiences of the youth in Mr. Cardenas’ classroom and the texts
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they designed underscore the importance of engaging students in critical literacies
work in multimodal classrooms. Through the process of engaging in critical conversations, youth can become more conscious of some of the powerful discourses circulating in the spaces in which they consume and design texts, thus limiting the
potential for the unconscious perpetuation of dominant and restrictive discourses.
Critical literacies stem from a politicized understanding of language, literacy,
and texts ( Jones, 2006), and focuses on teaching students to understand and negotiate relationships between language and power ( Janks, 2000). Janks identified four
interdependent components necessary for critical literacies work in multimodal
classrooms: domination, access, diversity, and design. In reference to domination,
learners are taught critical language awareness and that all texts are constructed from
particular points of view that can maintain and reproduce relations of domination.
To do so, learners deconstruct the language in the texts they consume and produce,
asking questions about whose perspectives are centered as well as who is being
empowered or disempowered through language in texts. What Janks refers to as
“access” requires teachers to make available dominant forms of language and literacies for students, while simultaneously providing opportunities for the recognition
and legitimization of diverse types of texts, including multimodal forms, which compromises the diversity component of critical literacies pedagogy. Finally, design is
an essential component in providing students opportunities to reconstruct the narratives they deconstructed through their critical readings, using a range of modalities to write new narratives and construct new discourses.
Throughout my time in the journalism and digital media studies classroom, I
encountered moments when Mr. Cardenas engaged students in some aspects of the
type of critical literacies pedagogy that Janks (2000) described. The most prominent
aspect of critical literacies pedagogy I observed in the journalism and digital media
studies class was access to dominant forms of language and literacies, which included
reading and discussing articles in the major local newspaper that the class received
each day. Mr. Cardenas regularly used the newspaper as a teaching tool, and students
examined the genres and types of language utilized throughout different sections of
the paper, using them as models for the articles they wrote for the East Side Tribune.
Students were also regularly exposed to dominant forms of texts on the Internet,
including videos designed by students and professionals. When watching videos that
he had chosen as models of exemplary work, Mr. Cardenas would spend time
pointing out the features of the texts that contributed to the filmmakers’ effectiveness in portraying their messages, such as strategic use of slow motion, background
music, or subtitles. Students often modeled their own texts after the examples that
Mr. Cardenas provided, while other times they chose to design their texts in their
own ways. By allowing students to make their own design choices using a variety
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of modes, Mr. Cardenas engaged students in the diversity aspect of critical literacies pedagogy that Janks (2000) depicted.
However, I also witnessed what I perceived as missed opportunities for critical conversations to take place throughout my time in the journalism and digital
media studies class. For example, though students spent time throughout the course
reading articles in the local newspaper, the focus was usually on the structure and
genre as opposed to analyzing and critiquing the power, language, and perspectives
of the pieces. Also, though students did view each other’s texts in order to provide
feedback, the focus of these peer interactions was usually on aesthetics. Finally,
though students were at times encouraged to design texts around issues of social justice, they were rarely prompted to deconstruct or evaluate the power, positioning,
and perspectives on display in the texts designed in the class. As such, I read some
of the texts that students designed for the class as reproducing dominant discourses
in the way Janks (2000) illustrated. For example, most of the PSA projects reified
representations of urban youth as more likely to become drug addicts, school
dropouts, and teen parents.
As the description above illustrates, the lack of critical conversations in the journalism and digital media studies class was a powerful silence, of which I was a part.
By this I mean that I had opportunities to share my thoughts about incorporating
critical literacies pedagogy into the journalism and digital media studies classroom, but did not offer my suggestions to Mr. Cardenas despite his invitations to
recommend ideas that could improve the instructional experience for students in his
classroom. I made the choice not to offer suggestions because it was not part of my
role as a researcher, creating a tension that permeated my work throughout the year.
Janks’ (2000) paradigm for critical literacies work speaks to the incorporation
of the type of multiliteracies pedagogy advocated by the New London Group. In
multimodal classrooms such as the journalism and digital media studies class,
incorporating critical literacies work can support teachers and students in designing texts for social action, thus limiting the possibilities that students will reproduce
dominant constructions of class and gender as the filmmakers did in the PSA projects. However, it is important to note that this work is difficult and not a matterof-fact process.
The story of the Abortions PSA shows how providing students access to dominant forms of language and literacies, recognizing and legitimizing diverse forms
of literacies and texts, and providing opportunities for students to design texts
around topics important in their communities, allowed for the youth in this study,
who have in the past been positioned as low-literate based on their social, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds, to reposition themselves as authors, designers, and successful students. It is important to note here some challenges to implementing
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critical literacies pedagogy into multimodal classrooms that became apparent to me
as I read the space of the journalism and digital media studies classroom. First, time
is always a factor in schools, especially those with strict curricular mandates and pacing plans. Engaging students in critical conversations around texts takes time, and
the benefit of these conversations cannot usually be measured easily by a single item
on a test. Instead, teachers will need flexibility in their schedules and to become
familiar with ways to analyze critical elements in the texts that students design for
their classes. Through this process, teachers will be better prepared to access and support students’ facility with deconstructing and reconstructing power, positioning, and
perspective in texts. Further, engaging students in conversations around power,
positioning, and perspective in the classroom can raise issues that teachers may feel
uncomfortable discussing or fear will cause concern from administrators or parents.
For example, a critical conversation about the perspectives centered in the Abortions
PSA most likely would have brought forth religious and moral ideas that I felt
uncomfortable discussing, partly due to my concern over the power I hold in the
classroom as an adult, as well as the differences I recognized between some of my
thoughts on this issue and those of the filmmakers. Thus, implementing critical literacies pedagogy into multimodal classrooms requires significant professional development to help teachers navigate conversations in ways that open up, as opposed
to shut down, diverse perspectives, as well as ways to address concerns that arise from
parents and administrators who themselves may be uncomfortable with particular
issues and perspectives being discussed in the classroom.
Acknowledgments
The researcher would like to thank the National Academy of Education and the
Carnegie Corporation of New York for their generous support of this research.
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Transcript of the Abortions PSA
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R EFERENCES
Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Barthes, R. (1972). Mythologies. New York: Hill & Wang.
Barton, D. (1994). Literacy. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell.
Blackburn, M. V. (2002). Disrupting the (hetero)normative: Exploring literacy performances and
identity work with queer youth. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 46(4), 312–324.
Davies, B. (1993). Shards of glass: Children reading and writing beyond gendered identities. Cresskill, NJ:
Hampton Press.
Davies, B. (1994). Poststructuralist theory, gender, and teaching. Melbourne, Australia: Deakin University
Press.
Drake, J. (Producer), & Reitman, J. (Director). (2007). Juno [Motion picture]. USA: Fox Searchlight
Pictures.
Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977. New York:
Pantheon.
Gee, J. P. (1996). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourse (2nd ed.). New York: Falmer Press.
Gee, J. P. (2005). An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.
Hull, G., & Nelson, M. E. (2005). Locating the semiotic power of multimodality. Written
Communication, 22(2), 224–261.
Ito, M., Baumer, S., Bittanti, M., boyd, d. m., Cody, R., Herr, B., et al. (2009). Hanging out, messing
around, and geeking out: Kids living and learning with new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Janks, H. (2000). Domination, access, diversity, and design: A synthesis for critical literacy education.
Educational Review, 52(2), 175–186.
Jones, S. (2006). Girls, social class, and literacy. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Kress, G. (2003). Literacy in the new media age. New York: Routledge.
Lesko, N. (2001). Act your age! A cultural construction of adolescence. New York: Falmer Press.
Lewison, M., Flint, A. S., & Van Sluys, K. (2002). Taking on critical literacy: The journey of newcomers and novices. Language Arts, 79(5), 382–392.
Luke, A., & Freebody, P. (1997). Shaping the social practices of reading. In A. L. S. Muspratt &
P. Freebody (Ed.), Constructing critical literacies (pp. 185–225). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.
New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard
Educational Review, 66(1), 60–92.
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CHAPTER
THREE
Engaging Urban Youth IN
Meaningful Dialogue ON
Identity THROUGH Digital
Storytelling
A LTHEA S COTT N IXON
I NTRODUCTION
This chapter focuses on the digital storytelling practices of Latino, African
American, and Pacific Islander children in an urban, after-school club in Southern
California. Specifically, this research shows how digital storytelling, as organized
through collaborative, joint activity between children and undergraduate students,
can be a critical digital literacy practice to support meaningful dialogue around sensitive issues of identity, race, ethnicity, and gender. Digital storytelling blends
image, sound, print, and other communication media in a dynamic, real-time environment (Center for Digital Storytelling, 2011; Lambert, 2010; Lundby, 2009).
Children use different media to help them tell a story about an important aspect
of their lives. This multimodal practice provides children, who are at a developmental age when issues of identity are salient, the opportunity to be expressive using not
just written or oral modalities but also incorporating multiple media to reflect on
questions of who they are and what is important to them.
Researchers have studied identity from several different theoretical perspectives,
including consciousness (Dennett, 1991), modernist and postmodern (see Kellner,
1995, for a discussion), psychological (Erikson, 1970; Marcia, 1980) and sociocultural theories (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998). From a sociocultural
perspective on identity, there are different versions of the self-performed (Goffman,
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1959), enacted, and lived in moment-to-moment interactions: “Identities are lived
in and through activity and so must be conceptualized as they develop in social practice” (Holland et al., 1998, p. 5). Digital storytelling is one such practice in/through
which youth can construct identities as they tell their personal stories (Davis,
2004). Children in this study created digital stories about their lives and interests
and provided narrative descriptions of themselves as they participated in figured
worlds, the socially and culturally constructed worlds in which particular identities
are lived: “Figured worlds could also be called figurative, narrativized, or dramatized
worlds . . . [where] many of the elements of a world relate to one another in the form
of a story or drama, a ‘standard plot’ against which narratives of unusual events are
told” (Holland et al., 1998, p. 53). The figured worlds of these youth included, for
example, their lives at school, in their neighborhood, in society, and online communities. Identities are formed as youth participate in these figured worlds, and their
digital stories narrated this process.
There is a long-established research tradition of studying identity through
narratives (e.g., Ochs & Capps, 1996, 2001; see also Holstein & Gubrium, 1999;
Mischler, 2006; Rymes, 2001; Sfard & Prusak, 2005). Recently, researchers have
argued that identity is not only understood through the expression of storytelling,
but that identity is the personal narrative: “Lengthy deliberations led us to the decision to equate identities with stories about persons. No, no mistake here: We did not
say that identities were finding their expression in stories—we said they were stories”
(Sfard & Prusak, 2005, p.14, emphasis in the original). Yet words cannot communicate everything about identity because words do not represent the repertoire of
lived experiences in practice (Wenger, 1998).
Studying identity through narratives has limitations if the stories or words are
the only focus; however, it is important to understand that narratives include much
more than words since “[n]arratives are not usually monomodal, but rather they integrate two or more communicative modes. Visual representation, gesture, facial
expression, and physical activity, for example, can be combined with talk, song, or
writing to convey a tale” (Ochs & Capps, 1996, p. 20). There are not only speakers
and hearers of stories, but also bystanders and addressed and unaddressed recipients
of narratives (Goffman, 1981) who use gestures, body position, gaze, and intonation to co-construct stories collaboratively (Goodwin, 1986). In digital storytelling,
children use these multiple modalities as they tell stories to each other, but they also
incorporate additional modalities with the use of different technologies.
These technologies offer a variety of “mediational means or cultural tools that
people employ to construct their identities in the course of different activities and
how they are put to use in particular actions” (Penuel & Wertsch, 1995, p. 91). Digital
storytelling has the potential to provide youth with opportunities for new sense-
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making of who they are, using digital stories that incorporate images, text, and sound.
This sense-making is not additive; instead, it is qualitatively different:
“Multimodality can afford, not just a new way to make meaning, but a different kind
of meaning” (Hull & Nelson, 2005, p. 225). Through the multimodal sense-making of digital storytelling, youth create new meaning as they are pushed to talk, think,
and engage in identity play.
In addition to studying children’s identities through the digital stories they tell,
identity can be understood through social categories of race and gender. Recent
research on identity in the context of new technologies has focused on how these
institutional categories of identity get expressed within the domains of technological innovations, such as chat rooms and video games (Tynes, Reynolds, & Greenfield,
2004) or through digital artistic production (Sandoval & Latorre, 2008). The utopian
rhetoric of a colorblind Internet challenges the salience of race, class, and gender in
this domain; however, although many of the physical cues (i.e., skin color, clothing)
children regularly use in the real world are not present in digital worlds, social categories of identity are indeed relevant (Smith & Kollock, 1999). Gender, for example, continues to be important in digital worlds through the use of language that is
indexing particular social meanings (Ochs, 1992) and gendered activities (i.e., boys’
use of violent video games and girls’ use of computer games with friendship themes)
(Kafai, 1998). This study shows how the literacy practices of digital storytelling are
gendered and raced, as children take up these new technologies.
Only recently have researchers (e.g., Davis, 2004; Hathorn, 2005; Hull &
Nelson, 2005; Myers & Beach, 2004) begun to study literacy and identity through
storytelling that includes these additional media. In the age of new technologies used
by growing numbers of children and adolescents (Lenhart, Madden, & Hitlin,
2005; Rideout, Foehr, & Roberts, 2010), it is important to understand the richness
and depth of expression the many tools afford youth and how the literacy practices
of digital storytelling encourage or constrain identity expression. I refer to this
process as “mediation”: a major tenet of Vygotskian sociocultural theories (Vygotsky,
1978) and cultural-historical activity theories (Cole & Engeström, 1993; Cole &
Levitin, 2000) of learning and development is the concept of cultural mediation.
There are multiple components to this definition, but the basic premise is that individuals interact with the world through the use of cultural artifacts, ranging from
basic material constructions like tools to elaborate symbolic constructions like language and online media the children find during digital storytelling.
This interaction with artifacts affects how individuals think about the world and
act on the world. Moll (1998) argues that cultural artifacts are used so frequently
in our everyday activities and thought processes that it is easy to forget their influence on us. Yet all human activity in the cultural world is mediated by artifacts, and
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artifacts change how we view the world and develop cognitively (Cole & Derry,
2005). I studied how the tools and media of digital storytelling helped mediate discussions around identity. Also, while the focus of this study is on digital storytelling,
it is important to not lose sight of the whole ecology, the contexts in which digital
storytelling is embedded, that make possible the potentials of digital storytelling.
This study focuses on both the benefits and limitations of digital storytelling on
youth identity play within the settings of a media-rich learning environment, and
how digital storytelling, as a digital literacy practice, can be a tool for helping children engage in critical dialogue around issues of race, ethnicity, and gender.
M ETHODS
Setting and participants
This study takes place at Las Redes After-School Club, located in Southern
California. Las Redes, originally directed by Dr. Kris D. Gutiérrez, is part of a growing network of Fifth Dimension sites in California, across the United States, and
internationally (Gutiérrez, Baquedano-López, Álvarez, & Chiu, 1999; Nixon &
Gutiérrez, 2007). Researchers at the Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition
started the first Fifth Dimension site in San Diego, California (Cole, 1996), as a
design experiment (Brown, 1992; Collins, 1992) based on Vygotskian (1978) perspectives on learning and development and cultural-historical activity theory (Cole
& Engeström, 1993; Cole & Levitin, 2000). Guided by these theoretical orientations, elementary school children at Las Redes learn through participation with
undergraduate students enrolled in colleges and universities, using goal-directed
activity in game playing with different technologies. Digital storytelling is one
such technology practice begun at Las Redes with the goal of encouraging meaningful and empowering multimodal literacies praxis for the students.
Las Redes is an imaginary world, called a tertiary artifact (Wartofsky, 1979),
where play is one of several leading activities (Griffin & Cole, 1984) for learning
and development. At Las Redes, children imagine a world in which they suspend
their disbelief of the existence of a wizard “El Maga,” who is said to have created
the after-school program. The wizard communicates with the children via online
letter writing and encourages them to reflect on their learning during game-playing activities. As children play games in the imaginary world of Las Redes, they also
suspend their understanding of what experts and novices look like and act like.
Children teach undergraduate students, and each other, the rules of the game, how
to use new technologies (such as those in digital storytelling), and how to use new
strategies in their game playing. In this way, Las Redes is an envisioned space of
unconventional learning and untraditional roles.
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The demographic background of participants at Las Redes is important, considering that “digital storytelling involves access to a medium which was very
recently unavailable to low-income individuals [and] youth” (Davis, 2004, p. 1). The
participants at Las Redes included children, ages five to eleven, from a predominantly low-income and working-class community. Approximately 50 children out
of slightly more than 1,400 students in the elementary school attended Las Redes
after-school club. They were either chosen by the principal or joined the program
through word of mouth from family members and friends who had been past participants. Of these 50 children, approximately 20 participated in digital storytelling. A core group of 10 to 12 children participated daily, and the others moved
between digital storytelling and other game playing at the after-school program.
More girls (almost 60 percent) than boys participated. At the elementary school,
95 percent of the students were Latino/a, 2.5 percent African American, 1 percent
Pacific Islander, and 1.5 percent “Other.” However, to create greater ethnic and racial
diversity at Las Redes, there was a greater representation of African American and
Pacific Islander children. At Las Redes, slightly less than 90 percent of the children
were Latino/a, approximately 10 percent were African American, and a few of the
children were Pacific Islander or Chinese. This study focuses on the core set of children who most regularly participated in digital storytelling, and the digital storytelling work of five children: Maya (a 6-year-old Latina girl), Eva (a 9-year-old
Latina girl), Corey (a 10-year-old African American boy), Ryan (a 9-year-old
Latino boy), and Teresa (a 10-year-old Pacific Islander girl).
Undergraduate students attended Las Redes as part of their undergraduate
Education Studies Minor class assignments. Each academic quarter, approximately
30 undergraduate students worked with the children in helping them create their digital stories. The majority of the undergraduate students were women and each quarter roughly equal numbers of Latino/a, European American, and Asian students
participated, with a few African American students. There was a Latina coordinator
at Las Redes, who oversaw the general club activities and El Maga’s role, and I (an
African American woman) was the digital storytelling coordinator at the after-school
club. I designed the digital storytelling learning environment and oversaw the collaborations between the undergraduate students and children. As a researcher, I was also
a participant-observer who interviewed the children and collected the following data.
Data sources and analysis
To study digital storytelling at Las Redes, there were a variety of data sources. The
data analyzed in this chapter include digital stories (a set of two- to three-minute digital stories); video data recorded of the children creating their digital stories and being
interviewed; cognitive ethnographies (Hutchins, 1995) the undergraduates wrote
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about their collaborative, joint activity with the children; and letters the children wrote
to and received from the wizard, El Maga. Across the school year, 55 videotapes were
collected (each tape holds 60 minutes), 20 digital stories were created, and hundreds
of cognitive ethnographies and letters were written; however, this chapter focuses on
five children’s digital storytelling work and their corresponding videotaped interviews
and activities, letters, and cognitive ethnographies specific to those five children.
The data sources included activities that were already a part of the after-school
club. For instance, undergraduate students wrote cognitive ethnographies for their class
requirements. The cognitive ethnographies showed the undergraduate students’ perspectives on digital storytelling. Considering distributed cognition, it is important that
studies are “collaborative in that they depend on the knowledge and co-work of practitioners” (Shavelson, Phillips, Towne, & Feuer, 2003, p. 26). This is important because
to understand practice, researchers need to include practitioners in their studies
(Erikson & Gutierrez, 2002; Feuer, Towne, & Shavelson, 2002; Pellegrino & Goldman,
2002). I addressed this need by including observations made by the undergraduate students who helped implement digital storytelling at Las Redes. Undergraduate students
wrote their cognitive ethnographies after each visit to Las Redes (once or twice a week,
depending on the number of units they were in enrolled in).
Also, it is a long-established practice that children write letters to El Maga every
day. Most often, their letters include what they did that day at Las Redes. El Maga
usually responds with questions about what they learned, and why they liked certain things. These letters are written in an online discussion board as well as on paper.
This study highlights a salient exchange of letters with El Maga about their digital-story composing, providing a perspective on how children themselves think about
the process.
The digital stories children and adolescents created show how the participants
expressed their identities through the literacy practices of digital storytelling. Also,
because identity is expressed in the stories we tell about ourselves as well as through
the activities we engage in, video data captured moment-to-moment interactions
throughout the digital storytelling process. For instance, video showed how they collaborated and helped each other or even had conflict or competition in their activities (M. H. Goodwin, 1990, 1998).
To understand participants’ decision making, motivations, and rationales for creating the digital stories using particular themes and tools, recordings included a
developmental dialogue—a conversation about their meaning-making and new
understandings—with them throughout the process. As they were working on
their digital stories, I moved around the room with a video camera to sit next to them
and talk through their ideas, focusing on the artifacts (such as pictures and music)
that they incorporated into their digital stories. I asked them questions about these
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artifacts (e.g., why they selected the artifacts, what the artifacts meant to them, and
how the artifacts tied into their digital stories). The data were collected to answer
the following research questions:
1. What are the benefits and limitations of digital storytelling on youth
identity play within the settings of a collaborative, media-rich learning environment?
2. How can digital storytelling, as a digital literacy practice, be a tool for
helping children to engage in critical dialogue around issues of race,
ethnicity, and gender?
To answer these questions, the data were analyzed in an iterative, non-linear
process. First, macro-level analyses of identity themes and multimodal literacy
practices/tools used across digital stories were conducted. Second, the ways in
which conversations around identity, race, ethnicity, and gender unfolded throughout the digital storytelling activity were analyzed, with a focus on multimodality as
a method and text within the social organization of learning of digital storytelling
activity. Third, digital storytelling artifacts, such as writings and images, undergraduate students’ cognitive ethnographies, and children’s letters to El Maga that documented their perspectives on the digital storytelling activities, were coded to show
children’s identities, interests, voice, and interactions with their co-participants.
Lastly, activity logs of the video were created to document students’ sense-making
processes as they researched—via online websites, multimodal media, and among
themselves—their self-selected topics for their digital stories.
T HE M ULTIMODALITY
OF
R ACE , E THNICITY ,
AND
G ENDER
Examining gender identity through
new media practices of digital storytelling
The children at the after-school club examined intertextual, complex understandings of identity through their own and others’ practices around media representations. Gender was evident in the types of digital stories girls and boys created. Of
the total digital stories selected to analyze, which were representative of the body
of digital storytelling work done at Las Redes, 80 percent of the girls wrote about
their family and personal life aspirations, and 80 percent of the boys created fictional
tales of adventure. This gender difference in digital storytelling themes is consistent with studies of gendered literary socialization and genre of reading preferences
of young children (Mohr, 2006). However, it is much too simple to understand gen-
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dered practices through digital storytelling themes alone, or in isolation from the
ways in which race, ethnicity, and gender were also at work in these narratives. The
following is a prototypical example of how images of gender, race, and ethnicity in
popular media were appropriated, as well as challenged, by youth and adults at Las
Redes, and how this created a site for a cross-age exchange of ideas. This exchange
led to a more critical analysis of the social construction of gender in popular media.
While participating at Las Redes, the children introduced me to the popular
culture group RBD/Rebelde, whom a few girls wanted to write about in their digital stories. Rebelde is both a musical group and a telenovela or Spanish soap opera.
The group originates from México but is televised in the U.S. Many of the girls at
Las Redes watched Rebelde at home and at times with their mothers. As one
undergraduate co-participant noted,
A lot of the girls in the class like Rebelde. . . . At home [Susana’s] mother is into it too. In
a way Rebelde is a way for Susana to connect what is seen at home with what girls talk about
at school. (Amy, field notes)
I documented that the children at Las Redes brought Rebelde stickers, pictures,
DVDs, CDs and other collectibles from home. These media became shared artifacts among not just the Latino community at Las Redes, but also among several
African Americans. For instance, an undergraduate co-participant documented
the popularity of Rebelde among African American girls at Las Redes. He noted,
I remember once in the beginning of the quarter, Noreen told me that she watched RBD
by satellite with subtitles in English. Ever since, I have been very interested to discover why
the African American community at Las Redes, specifically the girls Noreen, Charlotte, and
Tracey would take interest in an otherwise Mexican pop-culture phenomenon. They all collect stickers. Write letters to El Maga requesting pictures. They know all of the characters’
names. They even like to listen to their music despite the language barrier. (David, field notes)
Although the Rebelde media indexed particular ethnic codes about being
Latina, these digital-storytelling media and codes were taken up in hybrid ways
across ethnic groups. Undergraduates documented non-Latina children incorporating images from the Rebelde website into their digital stories, even though they
spoke no Spanish. The children learned with each other and shared their knowledge about Rebelde. These conversations occurred spontaneously in the everyday
activities of the children. For instance, an undergraduate described the scene at the
school when he arrived at the beginning of site:
When we walked into the school, I noticed all the parents standing, waiting for their kids
by the gate, and as I turned around, there I saw a lot of little kids running, jumping on each
other, play fighting, talking about Rebelde (OC: which I still do not know what it’s about),
and just walking home. (Renato, field notes)
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The repeated mention of Rebelde in undergraduate field notes about children’s
digital stories and discussions in the undergraduate course illustrate the popularity
of Rebelde among children, although many adults at the after-school club (myself
included) were not initially aware of the fandom. Thus, a valued practice of the children and the adults’ curiosity to learn more about what excited the young girls provoked interaction and conversation in which children shared with each other their
interests and adults learned more about the cultural worlds of the children. By drawing on children’s interests and out-of-school literacy practices, strong relationships
between adults and children formed.
Although there were clear affordances in encouraging children to incorporate
valued media practices in digital storytelling, such as Rebelde, such media often may
promote static or problematic notions of gender identity, for example. Here we begin
to see the constraining sides of technology as well.
Gender and sexuality were salient in the media images and songs from Rebelde.
The soap opera had a large storyline about high school girls and boys singing in a
group, being close friends, and dating each other. The girls were hyper-sexualized
in short skirts and shirts, similar to the “naughty schoolgirl” outfits made popular
by the outfit Britney Spears wore in her music-video debut. Several children at Las
Redes, mostly girls, wanted to find online images of Rebelde and create digital stories about why they loved the group and why Rebelde was important to them.
The children’s interests in Rebelde media merged into their digital-storytelling
work. One example comes from Maya, a 6-year-old girl at Las Redes, who wrote
a simple explanation in a digital story of why she likes Rebelde. She wrote, “Rebelde
is pretty because she always paints herself around her eyes. She is also pretty because
she is nice to her friends, Mia and Lupita. They are always together so they won’t
get lost.” This narrative shows Maya’s understanding of a dual nature of beauty: physical appearance and interpersonal, social behavior. Yet the physical appearance
important to young Maya was not what many adult participants at Las Redes valued in the images. Maya didn’t write about Rebelde’s clothing or dress but focused
on her eyeshadow. Similarly, the social behavior of Rebelde, which Maya appreciated, is reflective of Maya’s experiences as a young child. Being nice to friends and
sticking together so no one will get lost is something that Maya did each day at this
site. She stuck by her older brother, who was 9 years old, and at the end of the day
waited close by him so that they could walk home from school together. Maya’s own
experiences served as the interpretive lens for making sense of Rebelde.
Yet, Maya’s interests in Rebelde conflicted with the undergraduate students’ concerns about Rebelde’s attire and the hypersexual images conveyed by the group. Even
though the children and undergraduates were usually more aligned in their joint
activity, their relationship allowed the undergraduates to point out problematic
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notions the children held and to write about these concerns in their field notes. As
one undergraduate reported,
I moved on to observe a group of three girls who were working on their project very intently.
As I came closer I noticed that they were making their digital story on a Mexican pop music
group called Rebelde. When I asked them who those people were, all three girls seemed kind
of surprised that I had no idea about this group. Then one of the girls proceeded to explain
that they are really popular in Mexico and that all of them are really pretty. She told me that
their show comes on Univision and that I should watch them next time. (OC: By observing the scantily clad pictures of the singers I wasn’t too sure if they were good examples of
role models and someone these kids should be looking up to. But it seemed that their
clothing did not bother the kids at all). I thought so because when I asked her what she liked
about them so much she told me that she thought they were all really pretty and cool looking. (OC: So I think without even realizing these kids are attracted to the physical appearance of these celebrities. So I don’t think it’s a good idea to promote such celebrities who
instill superficiality in these kids). (Sam, field notes)
We see in this field note a generational gap but also different conceptions of gender at work. For example, the children were surprised at the undergraduate’s lack
of cultural knowledge about the popular group Rebelde. Also, although the children
saw Rebelde as “cool” and “pretty,” the undergraduate thought the members of
Rebelde were bad role models because of their mode of dress, which encouraged
superficiality.
The example of Rebelde made visible that there was not an uncontested object
shared by all participants. The staff and undergraduates were in a double bind. On
one hand, children were encouraged for drawing on their valued practices and agentive behaviors of choosing their own topics for digital storytelling; but at the same
time, adults felt that there were also opportunities for developing critical thought
around one’s meaning-making practices. Undergraduates, like Sameera above, as well
as the wizard, wrote about Rebelde. Through letter-writing to the children, El Maga
tried to remediate digital-storytelling activity around Rebelde to include social
thought on Rebelde’s mode of dress and effects of the television media. As El Maga
wrote in response to Maya’s letter about her digital-storytelling activities,
How are you? I am doing good. I didn’t know that you liked RBD. They are really cool. I don’t
like all the things about them though. I like their songs and the way they sing. I don’t like the
way they dress because they don’t wear a lot of clothes. I think it’s ok not to like something
100%. What do you think? Do you like everything about them? What do you think TV does
to us? I think that it hypnotizes us. It makes us forget about a lot of things and it shows us a
picture of something that is fake. Then we believe that it is the truth. I like RBD even though
I know that some of it is fake. What do you think? Do you think that the girls and boys in
RBD are always that happy? I think they are like everyone else and that they get mad, sad,
and happy too. Well, I have to go now but please write back soon. Adios. El Maga.
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In this letter, El Maga is critical of the way Rebelde members dress while also
acknowledging that Rebelde has nice songs. However, while reflecting on both the
strengths and limitations of Rebelde, El Maga neglected to write about both mediating aspects of television media. The response that television “hypnotizes us” and
is “fake” shows a one-sided analysis of television media, in general, and the popular television show Rebelde in particular. In doing so, El Maga was able to encourage social critique by asking the children to think about the media they use, but also
could at times shut down conversations about the children’s digital-storytelling interests by conveying strong opinions that did not encourage critical analysis of the
media, multiple perspectives, and joint problem solving.
Encouraging social critique through joint problem solving required a critical
analysis of both the enabling and constraining aspects of mediation through
Rebelde. There needed to be a balance between discussing with children the limitations of Rebelde, why Rebelde reproduced gendered and sexualized stereotypes,
and discussing the strengths of these media in children’s lives by listening to the children’s voices about why they liked Rebelde.
I had conversations with some of the girls at Las Redes about Rebelde, and
through digital storytelling, I learned more about the importance of Rebelde from
the children’s words. Digital storytelling required children to talk about images, and
rich conversations around these images occurred during production time. For
instance, a developmental dialogue with Eva, a fourth-grade girl, documents her
sense-making around her digital story on Rebelde and why Rebelde is important
to her. As illustrated below, unlike the undergraduates—who focused on the outward image of Rebelde, including their mode of dress—Eva never mentioned how
the characters dress or their outward, physical appearance in our entire conversation. Instead, she reflected on Rebelde’s interpersonal relationships and their singing,
music, and dance.
A LTHEA :
So tell me a little bit about your digital story.
E VA :
Um, I’m doing the digital story about Rebelde. It’s my favorite
telenovela.
A LTHEA :
Why?
E VA :
I don’t know. It has a lot of cute music. I like some of the characters, how they act and everything.
A LTHEA :
Which are your favorite characters?
E VA :
My favorite characters are Mia, Roberta, um Diego, and Miguel.
A LTHEA :
Why?
E VA :
They act good.
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A LTHEA :
What ’s good? What do they do?
E VA :
A little bit about the novela is some, Mia and Miguel like each
other and, but there’s a new girl that entered to school, so then
she wants to take away Miguel f rom Mia, and that ’s a little bit
sad.
A LTHEA :
Yeah.
E VA :
So Roberta used to not like Diego but now they got used to each
other and they like each other.
As documented in the interview transcript, Eva shared with me the love interests
among the main characters of Rebelde and how two characters in particular are best
friends. As a pre-teen, issues of dating and friendships are salient to Eva. Peer affiliation is a leading activity for youth Eva’s age (Griffin & Cole, 1984). The social
aspect of peer relationships in Rebelde was motivation for Eva to engage in the multimodal literacy practices of digital storytelling. In Eva’s words, she “tried to make
it like a film” (transcript continued below), and her engagement in story development centered on the social networks of friends in Rebelde. As part of this social
network, the friends of Rebelde sing together, and in Eva’s words, the show “has a
lot of cute music” (line 45). Eva values the musical attributes of Rebelde, as further
illustrated in the next part of her conversation with me. The interview highlights
Eva’s appreciation of Rebelde’s singing, dancing, and music. She repeated many times
that she likes Rebelde because “they just express their music,” and she wanted to “put
them singing” in her digital story:
E VA :
And so they sing, sing, dance. They just express their music. They
express their things. (Starts scrolling through pictures.)
A LTHEA :
Awesome. Are they on these pictures?
E VA :
Lemme show you. (Scrolls through iMovie project.)
A LTHEA :
(Points to an image.) What ’s that?
E VA :
That’s Mia. These are all (Points to members of Rebelde individually) This is Miguel, that’s Mia, this is Roberta, and this is
Diego.
A LTHEA :
How did you get the pictures?
E VA :
Well, I just went to www.Rebelde.com. You see something like that.
(Motions with her hands at the screen.) And then you get the
pictures of them. You just search them, you make your folder, and
you put them and drag them all in there. (Makes gathering
motion with hands.) And that ’s how I got all of this.
A LTHEA :
So what’s happening down here? (Points to project timeline.)
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E VA :
Well, here. Lemme show you f rom the beginning. (Drags timeline
to the beginning.)
A LTHEA :
What ’s happening here?
E VA :
(Points to screen.) What I, what I tried to do something here is
that I tried, I tried to make it like a film. Like I tried it with
Rebelde. And then I put, tried to put all the characters like Mia,
Roberta, Diego. And here I put all of them. Here I put the two
best f riends. (Points to screen.)
A LTHEA :
Um hmm.
E VA :
I put them right here, all of them.
A LTHEA :
Um hmm.
E VA :
I put them singing.
A LTHEA :
Um hmm.
E VA :
I tried to put all types of pictures f rom them singing.
| 53
Eva also likes to sing herself, and as she told me her favorite Rebelde songs, she
sang a few lines of music (transcript continued below). When asked if she would
like to sing for her digital story, she smiled and said yes. In the days that followed,
Eva sat with her best friend at Las Redes (who was making a digital story about
High School Musical), and together they sang quite loudly and confidently in front
of the computer to an audience of anyone who walked past them.
A LTHEA :
Do you like to sing, too?
E VA :
Yeah. (Nods head.) Some of my favorite songs were “Es Así, Así
Es,” “Un Momento,” “Y Soy Rebelde” (Sings the song titles) and
those, those are my three favorite songs f rom the whole thing.
A LTHEA :
Would you like to sing on your digital story?
E VA :
Um. (Nods.)
A LTHEA :
Awesome! You have a good voice. That would sound nice!
The incorporation of cultural media in the digital-storytelling activity gave children like Eva the opportunity to engage in meaningful literacy practices that mixed
popular culture with her interests in relationships, music, and dance. These cultural
practices might have been censored in formal educational environments (Lewis,
2001; Revilla, Wells, & Holme, 2004), but at Las Redes, while El Maga and some
undergraduate students initially wanted to censure Rebelde media, these controversial media were introduced, challenged, and expanded on by the participants. The
media and practices of digital storytelling, like all practices, were therefore both
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enabling and constraining. The media of Rebelde enabled Eva to express her love
of music and to consider story structure and character development, as Eva
explained, “to make her story into a film.” It enabled children to bring their home
experiences to the after-school club, and groups of Latina and African American
girls came together and created hybrid media practices.
Examining race and ethnicity through
new media practices of digital storytelling
The centrality of child-driven interests and teaching and learning opportunities in
the digital-storytelling activity created the space where undergraduate students
positioned the child as someone with knowledge on important subject matter to be
discussed. To further elaborate this pattern of analysis, Corey, an African American
fifth-grade boy at Las Redes, had open conversations about race with a Latino
undergraduate student, Jesús, who documented this interaction in his field notes.
Jesús explained that while Corey was working on the computers creating his digital story, Corey showed him a personal website he designed. On this website, Corey
wrote, “I’m African American and proud of it.” The technologies and learning
contexts of digital storytelling provided the opportunity for Corey to talk with Jesús
about why being African American was important to him. Corey shared with Jesús
the cultural practices of African ancestors and the relevance of the African American
leader Rosa Parks to issues of prejudice. Jesús noted,
Corey showed me and read to me what he had written on his info link. The very first sentence read “I am African American and proud of it” . . . I [asked] him if he [would] tell me
more about his culture. . . . After this I asked him if he knew who from the African
American community had recently died. He answered and said that Rosa Parks had died
recently adding that she was an inspiration to everyone. I then asked Corey to tell me about
why Rosa Parks should be an inspiration and he told me that she had sat where only white
people were allowed to sit and refused to get up. I [asked] him if he knew the history that
had led up to this and [he] told me that all white people weren’t bad but some of them were
prejudiced. Having heard Corey use the word prejudice, I asked him if he knew what the word
meant and he blew my mind by saying that prejudice was prejudging someone based on the
way they look. (By this point I wondered if I was talking to the next Martin Luther King
Jr.) ( Jesús, field notes)
Digital-storytelling technologies, as in the case of Corey and Jesús’ collaboration, provided the tools to promote rich conversations on racial pride, identity, and
prejudice. Corey paused from working on his digital story to show Jesús his website. This pause was a rupture in the digital-storytelling activity—a valuable rupture
made possible by the flexibility of rules and the centrality of child-directed goals of
digital storytelling—and Corey was able to share with Jesús his understanding of
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these complex issues. Corey took a nuanced stance on prejudice by acknowledging
its relationship to the challenges Rosa Parks and other African Americans faced and
also by explaining that “all white people weren’t bad but some of them were prejudiced.” Jesús was impressed by the discussion and promoted this dialogue. In this
space, the dialogue with Corey and Jesús was mediated by the technologies and
learning contexts of digital storytelling that gave Corey the opportunity to showcase his website and knowledge of African American cultural history and racial prejudice, a conversation that spoke of race and its importance to Corey’s identity and
sense of pride. Digital-storytelling technologies and the social relations the activity promoted enabled meaningful dialogue around such critical issues.
Digital storytelling resulted in digital literacy practices that supported meaningful discussions of race and ethnicity but also engendered critical dialogue around
topics of prejudice and racism. Teresa, a fifth-grade student from the Pacific Islands,
sat at a computer to find images to go along with her digital story about her interest in wrestling. She came to the after-school club wearing a t-shirt with images of
WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc.) and her favorite wrestler, John
Cena. She wanted to create a digital story about how she and her brother are
wrestling fans. While searching for online images for her digital story, Teresa found
pictures of WWE professional wrestlers JBL ( John “Bradshaw” Layfield) and Rey
Mysterio. Teresa worked alongside an undergraduate co-participant, Celia, who
came to the after-school club as part of her education minor class observations to
work with children creating digital stories, among other activities. Teresa explained
to Celia that she did not like JBL because he was a “racist.” In this moment of digital-storytelling activity, Teresa had a conversation with Celia about what racism
meant to her and how it related to the popular media of the WWE she valued. As
Celia noted,
Then [Teresa] came across a picture of JBL and Rey Mysterio and she told me that she does
not like JBL. I asked her why and she said “He’s racist against Mexicans. He does not like
Rey Mysterio because he won the championship and he said that Mexicans win everything
and that Americans don’t win.” [ JBL reportedly called a SmackDown wrestling crowd a
bunch of “fruit pickers” in 2005, and when they responded by calling him names, he answered
that he doesn’t “speak Mexican” (Wrestle Zone, 2005)]. (OC: I was in shock that she used
the word “racist” and I wanted to hear what she thought that word meant. I wanted her to
elaborate more on this word.) She said that it means that “Someone is against [a] certain culture and I don’t like people that are racist.” I asked her what was her reaction when she heard
what JBL said, and she said that she was shocked and that he should not have said that, she
said that “A match is a match, he shouldn’t have thrown in something about race.” (Celia,
field notes)
As evidenced by Teresa and Celia’s interactions, the technology and media practices of digital storytelling supported discussions about race and racism, as did the
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social relations encouraged by this kind of joint activity of undergraduates working
alongside children with a shared goal. Through the technologies made available to
the children and the social relations formed between the co-participants at Las
Redes, digital storytelling promoted this meaningful discourse to help extend children’s understandings of race and racism. Children have experiential knowledge of
forms of racism at young ages and recognize this behavior in others (Quintana &
McKown, 2008). Digital storytelling drew upon this knowledge, and the conversation between Teresa and Celia documents the importance of participation in
meaningful conversations where children can openly discuss their understandings
of racism.
Using the technologies of digital storytelling as tools for meaningful discussions,
the children at Las Redes shared their experiential knowledge and perspectives on
race and racism with the undergraduates, as shown in the examples with Corey and
Teresa. Although the children initiated these conversations, it is important not to
minimize the roles undergraduate students had in mediating these types of discussions. For instance, one undergraduate, Isabel, shared with a fourth-grade student,
Ryan, the cultural origins of the Anime drawings he was using for his digital story.
She wrote,
I told him, “Oh, you chose an Anime character!” He then said: “What is Anime?” (OC: I figured that since he had chosen an Anime character that he would have known what Anime
was. To be honest, I was kind of shocked that he liked the character so much to put in his
story, but did not know the type of animation that he was looking at. But, I stepped back
and realized that I should not assume that he knows something just because I know it and
have been exposed to information about it.) Given this, I then explained that Anime was a
form of drawing that came from Japan, and gave him examples such as Pokemon and Yu Gi
Oh! (OC: I know this because I have a 9-year-old brother who is into those shows.) In order
to not confuse him, I told him that Anime was made up in Japan, but that anyone could draw
it whether they were Japanese or not. And then he said, “Oh, so, like you learn from the Japan
or the Chinese, I mean Japanese, to do this and then you can do it too?” (OC: Here I realized that Ryan learned that just because something comes from one place and is used by certain groups of people, that it does not mean that someone else somewhere else cannot use
it also.) (Isabel, field notes)
In sharing with Ryan that Anime originated in Japan, Isabel also explained that anyone could draw it. Ryan immediately drew from this explanation that cultural
practices can be shared by different groups of people, regardless of their ethnicity
or nationality. This is an understanding that Gutiérrez and Rogoff (2003) argue is
oftentimes misunderstood by researchers who equate culture with race or ethnicity. Yet through discussions around his digital-storytelling activity, Ryan gained new
knowledge about the meaning of the cultural practices of which he had become part.
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C ONCLUSION
The tools of digital storytelling, as well as the social relations that this type of activity promoted, provided the space and opportunity for youth to engage in meaningful practices to represent and extend their understandings of complex issues with
which they grappled personally and intellectually. There were both affordances
and limitations of these media practices for non-dominant youth. Developing a more
expansive technological toolkit has both enabling and constraining dimensions
that re-inscribe as well as challenge static notions of identity. Through the remediation of their newly acquired media tools, youth engaged in meaningful examinations of gender, race, and ethnicity, topics too often ignored or sidestepped in
learning environments (Lewis, 2001; Revilla, Wells, & Holme, 2004).
In the organization of learning in the digital-storytelling activity, the children
were the central decision makers in choosing a story around their interests and ideas.
This agentive role is important for the process of self-representation. The children
constructed texts that represented themselves, their life interests. As with most
efforts to introduce student-directed elements into education, there is a tension
between the interests of the student and the constraints of the educational environment. Digital storytelling can be a powerful tool for engaging urban youth in discourse about identity, but only if the environment allows them to bring in elements
that may initially not be seen as fitting well (e.g., the telenovelas). Many servicelearning efforts contain the implicit assumption that university students are going
to be teaching K–12 tutees (as do many of the Fifth Dimensions sites around the
world), but there is also an assumption that there will be mutual learning by university students; each is a tutor to the other on different aspects of what is to be
learned. The traditional hierarchy of adults as teachers and children as students also
did not exist in the digital-storytelling learning environment because today’s youth
are “digital natives” (Prensky, 2001a, 2001b) who bring their own areas of expertise
with new-media practices to the activity. Digital youth are resources in this technology-based learning environment, and children worked together through joint
activity and collaboration.
The social relations the digital-storytelling activity promoted enabled meaningful dialogue around such critical issues such as race, ethnicity, gender, and power. Using
the media of digital storytelling as tools for meaningful discussions, the children shared
their experiential knowledge and perspectives on these issues. Children deepened their
understandings through this firsthand interaction and discussion around their interests, with adults mediating these types of discussions. Undergraduate students,
researchers, and program directors listened to, challenged, and encouraged the children to expand and question their understandings of messages in media.
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Images of gender, race, and ethnicity in popular media were appropriated, as well
as challenged, by youth and adults at the after-school programs, creating a site for
a cross-age exchange of ideas. This exchange led to a more critical analysis of the
social construction of gender in popular media. Youth participated in intertextual,
complex discussions of race, ethnicity, gender, and power through a critical examination of their own and others’ practices around media representations. The tools
of digital storytelling, as well as the social relations that this type of activity promoted, provided the space and opportunity for youth to engage in meaningful
practices to represent and extend their understandings of complex issues with
which they grappled personally and intellectually. A critical examination of gender,
race, and ethnicity is oftentimes ignored in public discourse and traditional educational settings (Lewis, 2001; Revilla, Wells, & Holme, 2004), but this practice was
promoted and valued at Las Redes and in the digital-storytelling activity.
By making race and the intersections of race, ethnicity, and gender central to
the study of digital storytelling, children’s practices may challenge the utopian
rhetoric of a colorblind Internet, a rhetoric that wrongly states these social categories
of identity are no longer relevant in digital worlds (Smith & Kollock, 1999). In doing
so, these practices also introduced a conversation that critical race theorists argue
is often missing in education research (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 2006). It is important to focus on the consequences of new media and digital literacies on youth identity play within a framework that addresses these critical issues, in order to
understand the diversity of participation and representation in digital worlds.
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CHAPTER
FOUR
Critical Literacies
AND Social Media
Fostering Ethical Engagement
with Global Youth
A NNA S MITH & G LYNDA H ULL
In an era when digital information and communication technologies proliferate, so do opportunities for social interaction and communicative exchanges across
localities and nation states (Appadurai, 1996). Via digital means we are now easily able to compose in multiple modes and, with access to the Internet, to do so in
response to and in collaboration with international others. Such practices are, in fact,
increasingly viewed as central rather than peripheral to literacy (Andrews & Smith,
2011). Critical reading implies a reader’s active response, as Rosenblatt (1938/1995,
1978/1994) long ago taught us. The interpretation of written language and image
resides at the intersection of text, the reader’s personal experiences with other
texts, and the social world. In a digital age, a reader’s response can become manifest materially (cf. Coiro & Dobler, 2007). When readers engage with a blog, for
instance, they are able, indeed expected, to click on links, add comments, and
reblog or remix content. Such response is a customary, expected part of the reading experience. Thus, the reciprocal relationship between reading and writing
becomes tighter in the digital sphere, making authorship more obviously tantamount to readership, and vice versa.
New digital configurations of people and ideas have the potential as well to shift
social power relations. Previously only those with knowledge of coding languages
and access to servers, or even further distant, those with access to publishing companies and their processes, could contribute to and critique the existing bodies of
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knowledge in a given field. Although inequalities certainly still exist and proliferate (Hargittai & Hinnant, 2008; Schradie, 2011), the capability to be producers and
critical consumers of knowledge is now more widely available. Through social
media outlets, more people of diverse ages, nationalities, genders, and socioeconomic
positions produce news, comment on social issues, and even stage revolutions.
These new configurations, in turn, necessitate a new ethic of exchange with distant,
unknown, imagined others (Appiah, 2006). Critical reader-writers must orient
themselves to take into consideration not just the interpretations they have intended
as authors, but also the possible interpretations of audiences previously unimagined
and out of reach. Thereby the rhetorical framework of composing not only widens
but shifts as compositions wind their way through media and audiences. Writers not
only design their meanings via multiple modes (cf. Kress, 2003; New London
Group, 1997), but for unknown audiences who have the capacity to respond directly,
becoming genuine interlocutors. These new configurations of digital reader-writers and audiences require new critical and creative dispositions toward reading and
composing in the digital age.
Hull and Stornaiuolo (2010; Hull, Stornaiuolo, & Sahni, 2010) have suggested
that the new ethic of digital literacies is “cosmopolitan” practice—reflexive and
hospitable dispositions and habits of mind necessary for ethically motivated rhetorical and semiotic decision making in relation to wide, interactive, and potentially
global audiences. In doing so, they drew on research with youth engaged in social
interaction and the exchange of arts-based artifacts on a global social network,
Space2Cre8. With colleagues and participants from India, South Africa, Norway,
Great Britain, and Australia, as well as U.S. sites in California and New York, they
described how youthful exchanges on this network are mediated through a developing cosmopolitan ethic—a growing common understanding of how to effectively
interact and exchange meanings and artifacts across linguistic, worldview, and geographic boundaries. Such an ethic includes, importantly, sensitivity to the range of
possible interpretations and responses to their own and others’ postings. As youth
begin to compose self-reflexively, revising their profile pages and creating movies and
other artifacts to share, and imagining others’ possible interpretations of their work,
they develop “hospitable” stances in their reading of and composing for their distant audiences. As an important part of this process, youth participate in a collective mentorship method by which they share and appropriate productive practices
of critique and commentary as a community.
We find cosmopolitanism, with its emphasis on inclusivity and mutual respect,
a generative framework for thinking about the ethics of authorship and readership
in a digital and global world. In a nutshell, cosmopolitanism is the idea that one can
become, indeed should aspire to be, a citizen of the world, able to embrace local ties
and commitments, but also to extend well beyond them, engaging a wider human
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community, even across divides of seemingly irreconcilable differences. Scholars from
a range of disciplines have explored the implications of cosmopolitanism, often in
order to respond to conditions associated with globalization and the recognition that
ours is an interconnected and interdependent, if conflicted, world. Such implications
are far reaching and require, some have argued, a “cosmopolitan turn” in all of the
social sciences and humanities (Beck & Sznaider, 2006). In education, cosmopolitanism has been taken up primarily by educational philosophers, who have recently
begun to formulate cosmopolitan-minded frameworks to underpin conceptions of
teaching and learning appropriate for a global age. Rizvi (2009), for example,
explores how we can frame education so as to provide students both a knowledge
about global transformations and also an ethical orientation towards them. He
thus calls for “cosmopolitan learning” that fosters “a critical global imagination” (p.
265). (See also Hansen, 2010; Papastephanou, 2005.) Our own work, drawing on
the concept of hospitality as a crucial cosmopolitan disposition for critical readerwriters in a global and digital age, is one answer to Rizvi’s call.
The notion of hospitality has long been part of philosophical thought around
cosmopolitanism (e.g., Derrida, 2002; Kant, 1983), for as a phenomenon it brings
to the fore the nature of our relationships with guests, outsiders, foreigners, and others (cf. O’Gorman, 2006). For example, according to communications theorist
Silverstone (2007), cosmopolitanism requires us “to recognize not just the stranger
as other, but the other in oneself ” (p. 14). He continues: “Cosmopolitanism implies
and requires, therefore, both reflexivity and toleration. In political terms it demands
justice and liberty. In social terms, hospitality. And in media terms it requires . . . an
obligation to listen, an obligation which . . . is a version of hospitality” (p. 14). As a
metaphor for communicating respectfully across difference in a global age, we find
the ideal of hospitality to be rich with possibility. An obligation to listen implies a
thoughtful openness to possible meanings in a pluralist sense, and an acknowledgment that we can’t assume what to expect in terms of others’ reactions and intentions. Indeed, we may not always be cognizant of our own intentions and reactions,
which makes being open to and adept at critical reflection not only about others’
meanings, but also about our own actions and motives, all the more important. To
be a hospitable reader, writer, and viewer is thus to tolerate the discomfort that comes
with honestly engaging with another around the uncertainties of attempting to
understand and to be understood.
In this chapter, we foreground the composing processes and media exchanges
of youth in one U.S.–based site on the Space2Cre8 network in relation to their
developing digital ethic of cosmopolitan practice. At this New York City site, youth
were introduced to the Space2Cre8 social network during a four-week alternative
college-preparatory summer academy, which not only fostered cosmopolitan practices via participation on the network, but also offered cosmopolitanism as a philo-
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sophical concept at the center of the academy’s curriculum. This double emphasis
on cosmopolitanism through formal study and discussion in tandem with the practice of cosmopolitan values on the network is unique among the current sites,
which typically provide opportunities only for the latter. The compositions that we
discuss in this chapter are drawn from two cohorts of 25 youth who attended the
program in sequential years. These young people were incoming juniors and seniors
from high schools in New York City’s Bronx borough. They traveled from the Bronx
to New York University for the summer program—in effect, journeying across cultural, geographic, and economic boundaries. The academy was funded externally as
a community center–university collaboration set to improve college preparation in
terms of traditional school reading, writing, and critical thinking. Students were
selected to participate by the community center, and in year two, many participants
were acquaintances of the first cohort, as the first-year cohort encouraged their
friends to participate during year two. The youth had a variety of interests and future
aspirations; several looked forward to futures in film (production and acting), athletics, or criminal justice. They also shared, with many high school students, limited practice composing long-form academic texts. Most reported never having
written a full essay independently, and thus, one of the aims of the academy was to
demystify academic writing both by providing practice in its traditional forms, as
well as by bridging to and from multimodal composing. Anna, co-author of this
chapter, served as the director of the program and the instructor of the 21st-century composition course in the summer academy. To devise an alternative approach
to college preparation for high school students, she along with the other instructors and researchers at this site designed three college-level courses to be taught by
professors and graduate students. These courses mediated students’ experiences
learning to read and write college texts, while engaging them in a philosophical
exploration of college as a cosmopolitan experience—not unlike the participants’ current experiences living in the 21st century in an urban center.
In addition to participating in an international digital exploration of cosmopolitan practice, youth at this site studied the concepts of cosmopolitanism
through multiple modes of philosophic inquiry. As part of the program, youth read
and discussed Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Appiah, 2006) in a
seminar, while also drawing and analyzing neighborhood maps, blogging about digitally created belief collages, writing college application essays exploring the connection between their personal experiences and their values and beliefs, and
designing “cosmopolitan conversation” digital stories (Hull & Nelson, 2005) in
their 21st-century composition course. Like youth at other sites around the world,
these young people interpreted, critiqued, and posted creative and critical compositions; polled and chatted with one another; and experimented with representations
of self through the construction and maintenance of an online profile.
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C OSMOPOLITAN C ONVERSATIONS
This chapter focuses on processes of composing and the circulation of “cosmopolitan conversation” videos through Space2Cre8. In the composition course, the youth
initially discussed images from blog posts and profile pictures posted by distant others on Space2Cre8. They considered how they interpreted these images and how
to critically read images in blogs and posts. Then Anna provided the youth a series
of compositional challenges. As a pedagogical approach to giving assignments,
these challenges were designed to build on the youths’ existing knowledge and
experiences in ways that left compositional and rhetorical choices up to the youth.
In the first of these challenges, youth composed their own image-based blog posts
on the topic of the seminar course—how our values and beliefs are deeply rooted
in our personal experiences—and experimented with a variety of design techniques
introduced in the composition course, such as juxtaposition, color, visual metaphor,
and foregrounding/backgrounding. They then invited other participants on
Space2Cre8 to respond with their own interpretations. Finally, students were given
the challenge of composing a digital story with the Space2Cre8 global audience in
mind, a movie in which they would explore the intersections of personal values, goals,
and experiences (about which they had already blogged) with issues in wider society and the world (which they had been discussing in the seminar course). In this
way, youth put into practice the concepts of cosmopolitanism that they had been
studying—such as how we engage with strangers whose backgrounds, values, and
points of view likely differ from our own.
In their videos, the youth were asked to demonstrate their ability to think deeply
about the important issues of our world, to reflect on the perspectives of others, and
simultaneously to consciously maintain or adjust their personal worldview, beliefs, and
values. They were also asked to make mindful design choices, planning visual and
audio effects to communicate their intended meanings. To begin their compositions,
the youth critically viewed and discussed two videos posted on Space2Cre8 by others in the global community. Practicing reflexive and hospitable readings of the
videos, they juxtaposed their own interpretations, the possible intentions of the
authors, and the possible influence of design elements on both. After responding to
the videos and discussing their initial reactions, they reviewed the cosmopolitan
conversation video challenge (see Figure 1), and watched the two videos a second time.
First they viewed a video created by Bakhti, a 17 year-old girl from an extraschool site in India, and a frequent contributor to Space2Cre8. Bakhti’s video
included photographs from her daily life—of family, work, and school—with a
voice-over that described aspects from each of these realms, including her father’s
alcoholism and the lack of a “proper kitchen” in her home (see Hull, Stornaiuolo,
& Sahni, 2010). After viewing this video, the New York youth sat silently for a
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moment and then went on to comment about how they had been struck by her
straightforward and honest discussion of her economic status (which required her
to work to support for her younger siblings) and familial situation (the death of her
mother and neglect by her father). In fact, several participants mentioned how surprised they were that she was open about topics that they would have kept private.
One student mentioned that he appreciated Bakhi’s revelations, for without them he
would have not known how much they had in common, and in this way, she had
engaged him by making a connection across boundaries of country and culture. Next,
the youth watched a video made by a group of students in Norway in a school-day
program. This video showed several images of homeless people, overlaid with a
musical track with a sad tone. It concluded with a scrolling message and matching
voice-over about why and how people should care for the homeless, to wit, a kind
of public-service announcement. The youth mentioned that the music changed how
they viewed the pictures, evoking emotional responses that allowed them to picture
themselves in similar situations, and though they found the video impactful in this
way, they felt the voice-over sounded “scripted,” making it also seem a little preachy,
or in their words “too much.” In these ways, this video reminded them of ones they
had previously made in school about social issues, such as drug abuse and dropping
out. The participants were finally given the challenge to take on the social issues that
matter to them and to a global audience—such as homelessness in the video from
Norway—and to do so in a way that was sensitive to their own experiences so they
could engage others as powerfully as Bakhti from India had engaged them.
Figure 1. Cosmopolitan Conversation Video Challenge Description.
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M ETHODS
OF
D ATA C OLLECTION
AND
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A NALYSIS
In addition to using the results of an automated tracking system that recorded the
activity on the social network, we conducted open-ended and focused thematic coding of daily observational field notes (Dyson & Genishi, 2005) to explore how participants took action through talk, enacted identities, and negotiated joint activities.
Daily saves of raw media and written compositions were made throughout the
month-long academy to capture the sequence of participants’ design choices.
Documents, which were the result of academy activities, were also collected, such
as student-drawn maps of what the youth considered their local neighborhoods
before the academy, and reflection on and revision of these maps at the end of the
academy. Students filmed commentary regarding these revisions. (See Appendix A
for Eva’s maps and commentary.) We also conducted and analyzed pre- and postacademy interviews, and we asked the students to capture commentary on their written and designed products via video. We have done verbatim transcripts of these
recordings. Reproducing participants’ language as accurately as possible, we have not
changed their speech or writing to match standard conventions.
As the youth neared completion of their cosmopolitan conversation videos, we
conducted composing-process interviews (see Appendix B for this protocol). In these
interviews, we asked youth to share their intended audiences, messages, and tone;
what design strategies they employed; their composing and collaborative processes;
and the reactions they expected from those on Space2Cre8. We also asked them the
origin of their initial ideas and feelings for their video; what changes, if any, they
considered while composing the film; and what they viewed as the resulting effect
of the video. We then watched the video each had created frame by frame, discussing
compositional choices. Multimodal transcripts of these interviews were constructed,
drawing on Hull and Nelson’s (2005) analytic. That is, in a three-column chart, we
aligned scene-by-scene the screen shots of the videos in one column; notes about
to other modes that youth employed in their designs such as sound, transition
effects, text, etc., in the second column; and the transcript of the composing interview that referred to the scene in the third column. The transcripts helped us to
uncover how students’ multimodal compositions conveyed meaning through different semiotic systems such as image, sound, and language.
A UTHORING C OSMOPOLITAN P RACTICES
Our analyses shed light on the nature of individuals’ engagement with cosmopolitan practices—their semiotic, linguistic, and social choices, intentions, and aspirations with global others as made manifest through a social network, Space2Cre8.
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The interactions with and reactions to peers both distant and local influenced the ways
in which the youth took up, resisted, and negotiated cosmopolitan practices on- and
offline. Reactions to each other’s activity online varied, especially initially. One youth,
Cody (student names are pseudonyms), did not want to interact with someone he had
never met in person. Even when instructors assured him that they personally knew
that the youth from the various countries actually existed and were in fact who they
said they were, he refrained from engaging, emphatically stating, “They could be anybody.” It was only after a Skype video phone call with youth at the London site, for
which Cody was asked to be the spokesperson for the New York site, that he watched
the videos that youth from the London site had made and posted on Space2Cre8.
Then he responded with verbal comments, but not online. In contrast, another participant, Ally, readily interacted with international youth, each day choosing a different country in which to locate youth on the site and to whom she would then post
comments. She structured her cosmopolitan conversation video—an illustrated
poem—to resemble a video she had seen on Space2Cre8. Students articulated a similarly wide range of influences on how they interacted with and reacted to others. As
a result of reading and discussing the texts of the course, youth reported a change in
how they approached international and local peers with whom they disagreed, as well
as how they approached strangers with whom they imagined they might potentially
disagree. Youth also professed that the choices they made in their interactions online
and how they interpreted the posts of others were influenced by what they had
learned about design elements and multimodal meaning-making.
Drawing on our analyses of youths’ engagement with distant others, we call for
an ethical turn in digital literacies studies in order to acknowledge and support
dimensions of authorship in a global age that require the exercise of empathy and
“hospitality” (Silverstone, 2007; cf. Hull & Nelson, 2009). We believe that such a
turn is paramount now because of new global formations, opportunities, and challenges, and we hope that it offers a fresh direction for critical literacies studies,
engaging the implications of the digital compression of space and time. The youth
in our project demonstrated that, not only was authorship for distant audiences central to critical digital literacies, it was key to the development of their own cosmopolitan ethical dispositions. We describe two such youths’ composing processes,
which were representative of the larger group in terms of how they described the
roles that designing and composing played in their growing understandings of cosmopolitanism and the ethical turns they attempted in interacting with local and distant others. First, we examine Tyson’s authorship and the role that reading, writing,
and video production played for him in developing a cosmopolitan understanding
of the concept of “struggle.” We then explore Eva’s experience of authoring a film
that she entitled Making Conversation. In her words, this project had an “awesome”
impact on how she interacted with others both on- and offline.
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Dimensions of authorship in developing critical digital literacy
Tyson, an African American high school junior, was one of several youth whose
composing practices illustrate the role that authorship plays in the digital age—particularly the role it plays in developing both conceptual understandings and critical dispositions. Tyson came to the academy well versed in video production. He and
several of his peers had taken at least two courses—one in school and the other in
an after-school program—on movie making, employing software such as iMovie and
FinalCutPro. On the second day of the academy, after viewing posts from each of
the participating countries on Space2Cre8, he asked to borrow a video camera for
the weekend; he returned not only with footage, but an edited video that he had
completed independently. The video was entitled Tyson’s City and included recordings of major tourist attractions, which he labeled “random footage,” and scenes from
his neighborhood, including his house, the community fire station, and streets. Over
these clips he laid snippets from popular music tracks. He offered to post his video
on Space2Cre8 in order to introduce others to the academy.
We share Tyson’s early video activities to suggest that, like increasing numbers
of youth, he was a fluent composer across multiple platforms and with multiple
modes. However, he was not immediately prone to authoring critically—that is,
intentionally, through a composing process of reflexive, ethically motivated semiotic choices and revisions to create a multifaceted product for a potentially global
audience (cf. Warschauer & Matuchniak, 2010). For instance, other than sharing his
initial video the first week of the program, Tyson posted only twice to the site—both
times pictures of his favorite rapper, Drake, without commentary or attention to the
critical designing challenges he had been given. In fact, he explained that when he
began creating his cosmopolitan conversation video, in which he explored the concept of struggle, he was disengaged: “At first, like as I was making it, I wasn’t really
serious about it. I just wanted to do it just to do it. But then like I started to get more
serious. I put more thought into it.”
It is this very “seriousness” and “thoughtfulness” that we’d like to explore. Tyson
explained several ways that the viewing and compiling of his and others’ media
shaped and reshaped his understandings and feelings about the concept of struggle.
In fact, Tyson initially intended to produce a video about “my money issues.” He
searched and downloaded several photos on Google Image that showed stacks of
money and people with large lottery checks. Having already learned how to compose
videos, he initially thought he’d make short shrift of this assignment. It was the process
of composing the cosmopolitan conversation video for an international audience that
allowed Tyson to revisit his initial idea through iterations of reading, writing, designing, and contemplating. In revisiting his original plan, he further developed both the
theme of the video as well as his own engagement in cosmopolitan practices.
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The first major shift in Tyson’s video came after he viewed Bakhti’s video. When
Tyson initially watched Bakhti’s video, he didn’t participate in the discussion surrounding it. However, when challenged to consider a wider audience than those he
had previously made films for, namely the international audience on Space2Cre8,
he broadened the topic from “money” to “struggle,” stating that he knew that everyone could relate to struggle, because he had seen this engagement in relation to
Bakhti’s video. With this larger concept in mind, for several days Tyson sat still in
front of a computer screen at the academy. Occasionally he worked on a different
project, photoshopping a picture of a favorite music artist or assisting other youth
with technical aspects of their videos. Tyson knew about struggle and wanted to
express the struggle he had experienced in his life—and address it in a way companionable to Bakhti’s video, too. However, he was unsure about execution.
Tyson seemed thwarted until he remembered the notes he had written while
reading the seminar course text, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers
(Appiah, 2006), in preparation for leading a discussion on his assigned chapter. He
had been struck by a particular passage in Appiah’s text that he felt validated what
he knew about struggle: “So, let’s start with the sort of core moral ideas increasingly
articulated in our concept of basic human rights. People have needs—health, food,
shelter, education—that must be met if they are to lead decent lives” (p. 162).
Through this quotation, Tyson had found the way to organize his video. He inserted
a slide that listed the four basic needs articulated by Appiah and immediately set off
composing the rest of his video. Tyson’s finalized video included these major sections:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Title and topic slides “Struggle in Everyday Life”
Introduction of basic needs from Appiah
Slides of people struggling with hunger in past times
Slides of people struggling currently with homelessness in US,
Pakistan, Haiti
Slides introducing money as the “main struggle”
Transition slide: “People don’t just struggle in America”
Clip from Bakhti’s video with overlay “Let’s get Bakhti’s point of
view”
Conclusion and credit slides
Although Tyson created his video quite quickly once he formulated a way to
organize it, his conception of “struggle” continued to expand in dimension and
nuance over several iterations of reading/viewing and writing/composing, as displayed
in Figure 2. (We don’t mean to imply that this figure is inclusive of all of the influences on Tyson’s processes; rather, it highlights the processes that Tyson mentioned
in his interview and those that were discussed in the composition course as noted in
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field notes.) Figure 2 can be read as composing actions occurring over time from left
to right; however, the figure has dashed lines to further emphasize that this is not a
causal relationship of one idea leading to another—rather, it was a recursive process
for Tyson, one of layering meaning. For instance, Tyson never abandoned his focus
on money as a central issue. In fact, he used the same images of money that he found
early on, but during the composing process, these photographs took new conceptual
shape. Rather than remaining his personal issue, he communicated poverty as historically and globally at the root of each of the basic needs in current society.
The two arrows in Figure 2 are placed where Tyson identified a direct link
between composing and reading—when one activity led to another. In these explicit
ways, Tyson demonstrated the reciprocal relationship between reading a philosophical text and composing his film. In reading about basic needs, he brought the thinking he had been doing around “struggle” through authoring his video to his reading,
and then brought the categories of basic needs from the reading to the organization
of his video. Tyson would be the first to say that he had difficulty understanding the
course text and that the content he used in composing was one of the few sections
of the text that he felt he could grasp. We would also argue that his understanding
of the concept of basic needs was far more nuanced after composing than it was when
he first became acquainted with it through Appiah’s (2006) text.
The concept took on an emotional dimension through Tyson’s inquiry. He gave
special attention to finding music, the song “Angel” by Sarah McLachlan, to use as
background. This song, he remembered, had been deployed in a television commercial about adopting shelter animals. It was the saddest song he could think of, and
he made it a point to time his slides to match the phrasing of the song, in order to
influence the viewers’ interpretation of the images—to feel about the pictures as he
did, sad and serious. He saw his video as something to be taken seriously, and he
wanted to communicate that he was someone who should be taken seriously as well.
When we asked him what he would like people to think and know after seeing the
movie, he said, “I may goof around a lot, but I am serious at one point.”
After viewing his creation a few times one day at the academy, Tyson asked if
he could get a copy of Bakhti’s video. He said he needed to show—not just state—
that the issues he was addressing were worldwide, and he thought Bakhti’s video had
done that powerfully. Thereafter he included the portion of Bakhti’s video in which
she describes her living conditions, which he overlaid with the text: “Let’s get
Bakhti’s point of view. . . .” Tyson believed not only that her video would “sum it up,”
but he also hoped that Bakhti would receive the message that she was not alone:
“She’s probably going to think that she’s probably not the only one who has those
kinds of problems, because it happens all around the world.” Tyson saw his video
as a visual conversation response and starter. He wanted to put his work in conversation with Bakhti and her work, explaining: “I tried to connect it to somebody that
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Figure 2. A Learning Map of Tyson’s Processes.
I
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could actually talk to because she’s on Space2Cre8. She made a video about where
she lives at and how they struggle. Like they actually have a house, like a house, but
they don’t got things like we’ve got in this country. . . .” He also wanted the video
to be in conversation with the author of the course text, indicating that he would
like for Appiah to see how his written ideas had been represented in movie form.
In composing his video we see that Tyson was not only applying critical lenses
to the text after reading, he was demonstrating the reciprocal processes of critical
authorship and readership. He authored a cosmopolitan understanding of struggle—
interpreting through composing and layering concepts and media in such a way as
to find an entry point into the conversation with others about struggle. In a sense,
he authored a “serious” self—as a critical composer who can speak to a range of distant others, from Bakhti in India, for whom he felt much empathy, to Appiah in the
U.S., with whom he contemplated having a “serious” conversation about complex
philosophical ideas.
Developing cosmopolitan practices through critical authoring
Eva’s experiences with composing similarly shaped her understanding of the concepts she studied in the academy. Additionally, like many of the other youth, composing also afforded Eva an opportunity to try on cosmopolitan ethical practices
both locally and globally. For Eva, this experience resulted in an “awesome” change
in the way she saw and interacted with others in the world.
At the beginning of the academy, Eva, a Latina high school junior, felt ambivalent—at best—about interacting with unknown others. She explained, “Like before
when I would get on the train [the New York City subway], I would try to avoid
everyone, like, as much as possible, ’cause you know I always thought that people were
kind of mean and stuff.” Eva didn’t avoid interaction only on the train. For the first
two weeks of the academy, she sat quietly through all three courses, rarely making
a comment. When she interacted with instructors one-on-one, she often shrugged
her shoulders rather than speaking. On Space2Cre8, she posted or otherwise interacted only when she was asked to do so.
Like Tyson, Eva began making her cosmopolitan conversation video in response
to the videos she had viewed on Space2Cre8, and did so without an articulated aim
or outline. Eva explained, “At first it was like, I didn’t have any, like, ‘this is what I’m
going to do,’ ‘this is what I’m going to do,’ it was just—make videos and something
will come.” She checked out a video camera one weekend to record random footage.
On Monday morning as she waited for her train to come, she saw a man playing a
guitar in the station. She had seen him almost daily playing music for spare change,
as do many musicians along the subway lines, but had usually paid him no attention. This time she remembered the neighborhood map (see Appendix B) she had
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drawn and labeled with places and people in order to analyze who she considered
to be “neighbors” and how she defined “neighborhood.” This memory prompted her
to realize that although this man did not show up on her map, he was actually part
of her daily life. Yet, because she had deemed him different—a white man in a predominately Latino and African American neighborhood—she had ignored him, and
if anything, thought he was “weird.” Practicing self-reflexivity, she considered the
cosmopolitan ideal that as a global society, we can no longer pretend that others don’t
exist, and she really listened to his performance for the first time and recognized that
he was a good musician. She approached the performer with her camera, told him
she was doing a class project, and asked him if she could interview him about his
life. He agreed, and they talked until her train came. Over the next two days, she
had conversations with the owner of the taco truck she frequented. She also talked
to a woman she often saw on her train. She then talked to people in the academy
whom she realized she had essentially—up to that point—ignored.
After watching the raw video footage she had collected, Eva eventually spliced
clips of these conversations together in an order that would show the range of the
interests of others around her, as well as the patterns of similarities in their interests—even across what initially might be seen as differences in race, language, age,
and gender. In Figure 3, we provide a transcript of the interview snippets that constitute her video.
It wasn’t until Eva neared completion of the video that she realized that she had
been practicing the cosmopolitan practice of hospitality, especially as exemplified
through conversation and dialogue—Appiah’s dominant metaphor for a cosmopolitan ethic. That is, she had stopped ignoring her fellow human beings, and she had
developed a curiosity about and respect for the diverse interests of others. She
explained:
I didn’t notice until yesterday that I’m talking to these people. You don’t see it in the video,
but they’re having a conversation with me. I’m not just coming up to them and just like “Well,
what do you do?” I didn’t want to do that. I’m not a reporter. I’m talking to these people, which
is awesome. These are conversations [pointing to her video clips on the screen]. Real conversations. They’re not just questions I go up to ask random people. That’s why the title is
called “Making Conversation” [shows title screen of the video] because this is conversation.
This is what realness is.
This discovery was the most exciting moment of the academy for Eva. She explained
the change of mind she had experienced this way:
Before when you would get on the train and you don’t talk to anyone you don’t really learn
anything. You don’t really experience anything. . . . Even a friend you haven’t talked to for a
long time—if you actually talk to them it could be a good experience. It could be a life
changer. It’s how I changed.
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Figure 3. Transcript of Eva’s Cosmopolitan Conversation Video.
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Like Tyson, Eva gained a more sophisticated understanding of a concept, ‘conversation’ as she composed her video. In addition, she concluded her reading of the
seminar course text by daring to differ with its analysis of globalization. She
explained how her composition demonstrated the antithesis of the popular idea that
the ‘world is getting smaller’ through globalization and technology:
The world’s not getting smaller, it’s getting bigger. . . . So when we go up to him [pointing
to video] or him, or her and you just talk to them that brings us closer. You might not notice
it but it does . . . when you cross each other’s boundaries. . . . When you actually start to listen to the other person then it’s like, ‘Oh there’s a whole new world that I didn’t even know.’
That’s how the world grows [motions smaller and larger].
Eva had realized that engaging with others is not just a cosmopolitan practice, but
an orientation towards others, a critical habit of mind, that results in an expanding
understanding of the world and a new worldview.
In the crossing of boundaries, Eva grappled with notions of congeniality versus
collegiality. When the academy began, Eva did what she was asked and was kind to
others. However, she learned how to engage with others with cosmopolitan hospitality, “Like you have your idea and they have their own idea. And you guys both,
whether you feel strongly about it or not, you have your ideas and you try to defend
your ideas as much as possible.” Eva adds texture to the idea of hospitality—that it is
more than being open-minded and respectful of others. Rather, it involves a reflexive
and critical accounting of a person’s assumptions and ideas paired. In the final weeks
of the academy, she not only spoke up, but also started to guide her peers’ discussions
by posing questions about the content of the courses and challenging others to explain
the opinions they posed. Eva had decided that she would not only share her video, but
use it to begin these same kinds of conversations locally and globally, off- and online:
Mainly I want to know what people in India are passionate about or people from the Bronx
that I’ve never met. It would be awesome to know, you know? Like when they tell me their
passion I could tell them my passion and we spark up a conversation from there. It would
be awesome to have more friends.
After the academy ended, Eva independently posted survey questions about
schooling in the differing countries. She felt it wouldn’t be enough to just understand what students at her school felt about their education, but that her understanding could benefit from global influence. Explaining what had changed for her over
the academy, she noted that not only was she more comfortable with the group, but
that she left feeling confident in discussing ideas, feelings, and thoughts with those
she would have previously ignored or avoided.
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F INAL T HOUGHTS
Engagement with media creation at critical points in Eva’s and Tyson’s creative processes
influenced their conceptual explorations of ‘struggle’ and ‘conversation’ in ways that
expanded their previously held notions. Their learning was mediated by on- and offline
iterations of integrated reading, writing, designing, and discussing. For both Eva and
Tyson, critical digital authorship was instrumental to comprehending traditional print
texts, as well as reading their social network and interpreting distant youths’ artifacts.
Based on the work of Eva, Tyson, and their cohorts, we encourage classroom and
out-of-school teachers interested in guiding other youth in the development of their
critical print and digital literacies to consider the significant role that content creation,
or authorship, plays in concept building and learning. In this digital age, traditional content creation, such as book reports, unit projects and essays, cannot be merely digitized
and relegated to the end of a unit as capstone demonstrations of content mastery.
Rather, as demonstrated by these youth, students’ learning is mediated by the active role
of authorship within reading, and recursive reading within multimodal designing. As
Tyson demonstrated with his use of “sad” music, intentional choice of images paired
with words, and a remix of Bakhti’s video, teachers can design instruction to challenge
the dominant role of static print in literacy instruction. Tyson designed and communicated with each of these modes individually, as well as in concert on the screen. Each
of these literacy skills is necessary for navigating learning in the 21st century.
Finally, we would not have learned about the youths’ sophisticated and layered
meanings, nor their complex designing and concept building processes, without a
“listening” orientation toward the youth (Schultz, 2003), itself a cosmopolitan practice. By this we mean taking a curious, receptive, and responsive stance when engaging with youth and their compositions, listening for patterns in their thinking and
feelings with sensitivity to the social, cultural and communal aspects of their experiences (see also Andrews & Smith, 2011). By creating space and time within the
academy for youth to discuss their work and processes in depth with their instructor, Anna, and with the research team in interviews, we learned of their growing confidences and academic risk-taking, which informed our understanding of their
learning. Writing conferences are not a new method of instruction, so in addition
to tuning their ear for evaluation and instruction within conferences, we suggest
teachers take on the practice of hospitable conferencing, engaging in the same cosmopolitan practices discussed in this chapter.
Beyond this, critical digital composition leveraged opportunities for the youth
to try on new critical ways of being in the world—both on- and offline. Reading,
writing and engagement with others—distant and near—are tightly woven in the
21st century. The practices of digital spaces are not relegated to cyberspace. New
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configurations of people and ideas online are representative of the same offline, and
the ethics of critical engagement in a digital age exists both on and offline. Eva and
Tyson experienced what it means to engage in deep inquiry into concepts, and developed the confidence and the hospitable literacy practices needed to engage in critical conversation about nuanced concepts with others—even those who seemed very
different at the onset.
Curricula and pedagogies built around literacies in this age must be designed for
an era characterized by access to and democratization of tools, people, and ideas in
digital spaces. The recently released Common Core State Standards Initiative (2010),
which was designed for college and career readiness, offers an entire appendix dedicated to defining, describing, and giving examples of ‘complex’ texts, but still only asks
of students to write traditional genres of narration and argument—with no nod to
complexity of text or process. Not only do we see this as not representative of the writing/composing necessary for college, career and the 21st century in general, we
would argue that youth need experience composing across modes of communication,
with others who are distant and unknown, and similar focus on the composing
processes—particularly critical-–which we have argued have an ethical component
around exchange with these distant and unknown others. Imagine approaching a distant, unknown author, such as Homer with the same hospitality, openness to another
worldview, experiences, and communication patterns—as well as confidence that these
differences can be overcome—that Tyson and Eva developed in only four weeks of
critical digital engagement. These are the kinds of writing/composing experiences that
we believe should be typical in the 21st century college-bound classroom.
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
We gratefully acknowledge the support given for the EXCEL Academy @ NYU
by the Teagle Foundation; the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and
Human Development; and the Philosophy Department in the College of Arts
and Sciences at New York University; and our community partners at the Children’s
Aid Society. Many thanks go to fellow members of our EXCEL Academy @ NYU
faculty and research team: Joseph McDonald, J. David Velleman, Matt Hall, Tim
Fredrick, Dee Anne Anderson, and Laura Davis, as well as members of our wider
research group and Kidnet team, including Amy Stornaiuolo and John Scott. We
also gratefully acknowledge the support for the wider Kidnet/Space2Cre8 project
from the Spencer Foundation. Please see www.space2cre8.com for more information about the project and a demonstration site for the social network itself. Finally,
we thank editors Jessica Zacher Pandya and JuliAnna Ávila for their helpful comments on our chapter draft.
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A PPENDIX A
Eva’s Neighborhood Maps and Commentary
Top: Eva’s Neighborhood Map before the Academy
Bottom: Eva’s Revised Neighborhood Map after the Academy
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Transcript of Eva’s Revision Commentary
[Eva holds her map to a camera and points to parts of the map as she explains her
revisions.]
I added people. And look, there’s a key. These are [referencing the map key]
Spanish people; these are Black people; these are Middle Eastern people;
Indians and White people. Notice there are no White people, and rarely
any . . . Middle Eastern. Notice there are no Indian people living in buildings. They are just working in the stores. Cosmopolitanism has made me
real aware of who’s around me. Here’s [pointing to each building] grocery
store, parking lot, grocery store, garage, parking lot, furniture store, apartment building, apartment building. That’s basically it, you know. It’s a little home for me. That’s it. All I added was people.
A PPENDIX B
Composing Interview Protocol
At each of the sites on the Space2Cre8 network, youth design multimedia and digital products (see Hull & Stornaiuolo, 2010; Hull, Stornaiuolo, & Sahni, 2010). They
share these in various ways across the network. At the beginning of their projects,
as they near completion, and/or once the digital products are totally finished, students are interviewed about their composing processes, purposes, and products.
These interviews are video recorded digitally, making them a source of data for our
ongoing research. Additionally, the interviews serve pedagogical purposes as 21stcentury writing conferences as they involve detailed discussion of online, digital, and
multimodal literacy practices. Drawing from the protocol below, the conferences
engage youth in reflective dialogue focused on the processes through which they are
rhetorically framing their compositions for intended and potential audiences both
local and global (Andrews & Smith, 2011).
1) Ask participant what his or her digital story/product is about.
2) With participant, view video without stopping.
3) Following the lead of the student, ask a series of questions about the
composing processes and rhetorical decisions made by the student,
including:
a. How did you begin to make this? What did you do next?
b. Where did you get the idea for this story? What inspired
you?
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c.
Would you say that your movie has a message? If so,
what is it?
d. Who did you have in mind when you made this movie
(i.e., audience)? Who would you like to see it? Why?
Have they seen it yet? Why/why not?
e. How do you hope people see you after seeing this movie?
f. Have you talked to anybody about your movie? Have
you made any changes after talking to that person?
g. Did you work mostly alone or with someone?
h. Will you post it on S28? Why/why not? Did you think
about the kids from India, US, Norway, SA when making the movie? What do you hope they think about the
movie?
i. How did you make your movie (i.e., the process)? Did you
think about any design elements? How did your movie
change over the course of making it?
j. How did your ideas change while making the movie?
How did you feelings change as you are making the
movie?
4) Watch the digital story again frame-by-frame, discussing the composing and semiotic decisions that were made, including:
a. How did you choose that image (or that scene)?
b. How did you make the pictures, words, music, etc., match
(i.e., work or fit together)?
c. Why did you put that (picture/music/voiceover) in that
spot in the movie?
5) Finally, ask if the youth is satisfied with the product as is, probing for why
and asking if they would change anything as a result of this conversation.
R EFERENCES
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Appiah, K.A. (2006). Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a world of strangers. New York: W.W. Norton.
Beck, U., & Sznaider, N. (2006). Unpacking cosmopolitanism for the social sciences: A research
agenda. The British Journal of Sociology, 57(1), 1–23.
Coiro, J., & Dobler, E. (2007). Exploring the online comprehension strategies used by sixth-grade
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Common Core State Standards Initiative. (2010). The Standards. Retrieved from www.corestandards.org/the-standards.
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Routledge.
Dyson, A. H., & Genishi, C. (2005). On the case: Approaches to language and literacy research. New
York: Teachers College Press.
Hansen, D. T. (2010). Cosmopolitanism and education: A view from the ground. Teachers College
Record, 112(1), 1–30.
Hargittai, E., & Hinnant, A. (2008). Digital inequality: Differences in young adults’ use of the
Internet. Communication Research, 35(5), 602–621.
Hull, G., & Nelson, M. (2005). Locating the semiotic power of multimodality. Written
Communication, 22(2), 224–62.
Hull, G., & Nelson, M. (2009). Literacy, media, and morality: Making the case for an aesthetic
turn. In M. Prinsloo & M. Baynham (Eds.), The future of literacy studies. Houndmills, UK:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Hull, G., Stornaiuolo, A., & Sahni, U. (2010). Cultural citizenship and cosmopolitan practice:
Global youth communicate online. English Education, 42(4), 331–367.
Hull, G., & Stornaiuolo, A. (2010). Literate arts in a global world: Reframing social networking
as cosmopolitan practice. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 54(2), 84–96.
Kant, I. (1983) Perpetual peace and other essays (T. Humphrey, Trans.). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Kress, G. (2003). Literacy in the new media age. London, U.K.: Routledge.
Leander, K. M. (2009). Composing with old and new media: Toward a parallel pedagogy. In V.
Carrington & M. Robinson (Eds.), Digital literacies: Social learning and classroom practices (pp.
147-164). Los Angeles, CA: Sage.
New London Group. (1997). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard
Educational Review, 66, 60–92.
O’Gorman, K. D. (2006) Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of hospitality. Hospitality Review, 8(4),
50–57.
Papastephanou, M. (2005). Globalisation, globalism and cosmopolitanism as an educational
ideal. Educationl Philosophy and Theory, 37(4), 533–551.
Rosenblatt, L. (1938). Literature as exploration. New York: Appleton-Century; (1995). New York:
Modern Language Association.
Rosenblatt, L. (1978). The reader, the text, the poem: The transactional theory of the literary work.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press; (1994). Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press.
Rizvi, F. (2009). Toward cosmopolitan learning. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of
Education, 30(3), 253–268.
Schradie, J. (2011). The digital production gap: The digital divide and Web 2.0 collide.” Poetics,
39, 145–168.
Schultz, K. (2003). Listening: A framework for teaching across differences. New York: Teachers
College Press.
Silverstone, R. (2007). Media and morality: On the rise of the mediapolis. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Warschauer, M., & Matuchniak, T. (2010). New technology and digital worlds: Analyzing evidence of equity in access, use, and outcomes. Review of Research in Education, 34(1),179–225.
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PA R T 2
Teacher Education and
Critical Digital Literacies
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CHAPTER
FIVE
Perforating School
Digital Literacy in an
Arts and Crafts Class
A RNE O LAV N YGARD
I NTRODUCTION : T HE D IGITAL C LASSROOM
In the 2000s, Norwegian school authorities introduced a new curriculum for the
entire compulsory education system. Among the changes was an intensified focus
on “digital skills” across all disciplines. Partly as a result of this, all high schools in
Norway made laptop PCs mandatory, with subsidies to make this feasible for all
students. Adding to this, the same authorities, in order to accommodate the needs
and demands of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s
“New Millennials” (OECD, 2008), established a system for producing and purchasing digital teaching material, the National Digital Learning Arena (NDLA). This
is organized as a website for teachers and students, and its aim is to accommodate
all teachers’ and students’ textbook needs across all disciplines. In other words, during the last five years there has been a massive focus on what can be described as
the “digital turn” in how the Norwegian school system organizes knowledge as it
attempts to take an active part in this process in order to face the digital future.
In Norway, the schools’ focus on digital issues, and especially the introduction
of individual student computers, has fueled several debates across a wide spectrum
of interests and actors, contributing to the public discourse about the use of computers in the classroom. On the one hand, passionate teachers promote the possi-
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bilities of the new medium, both as a way of inspiring students and as a way of
enhancing learning, backed up by equally enthusiastic academics and writers making grand claims about the positive effects of digital media and young people’s ability to use computers to learn in new and improved ways (Prensky, 2001; Tapscott,
2009). Along the same lines, others argue that the PC and the web have the potential to improve pedagogy and make learning better, more fair, individualized, informalized, and better organized (Selwyn, 2010, p. 12). On top of this, a massive
hardware and software industry eagerly promotes the computer as a tool for efficiency and improved pedagogy.
On the other hand, the issue of banning access to websites such as Facebook and
YouTube in schools is frequently on the agenda. Teachers regularly step forward with
their accounts of loss of control in a classroom of computers, and the widespread use
of social media among students is often said to be at the root of this problem. Again,
to the rescue come developers of software, with programs that promise to reestablish
order and control in the classroom, for example by monitoring students’ activities on
their PCs or checking class work for copy-pasted text from sources not properly
accounted for. Also, arguments about an intellectual decline due to widespread media
use are often put forth, with the screen said to promote superficial reading and to disturb concentration, in addition to making it easy to cheat and do homework by means
of the copy-paste function (Keen, 2007; Rothenberg, 1997). Furthermore, teachers’
unions protest the introduction of digital teaching aids and the lack of teacher influence over how the money for textbooks and teaching aids in general is spent.
In the present chapter, I will give an account of material from a study of a group
of Norwegian high school students using computers as a vital part of their everyday classroom activities. As the discussions above reflect, the domain of digital literacy in education is subject to intense discussion. The arguments often range
between what Neil Selwyn calls the “booster” and “doomster” traditions of arguments, where technology itself is the agent of either positive or negative change
(2010). In this “essentialist” account of technology, interest focuses chiefly on abilities in the medium in itself, without paying attention to the actual settings in which
the technologies are used. Similar “essentialist” accounts may be found in traditional
views on reading and writing: in what Street (1984) calls the “autonomous model”
of literacy, where literacy is seen as a set of skills or cognitive aptitudes, essentially
tied to a person’s intellectual makeup (p. 1). Indeed, one feature of many of the discussions concerning the new tools for literacy in the classroom is the lack of attention to sociocultural factors and the context in which the technologies are used.
In other words, there is a “distinctively technocratic air” to discussions about
contemporary schooling, and critical accounts of actual uses of digital technologies
in schools are rarely given (Selwyn, 2010, p. 20). In this study, my aim is to take a
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critical approach to the various classroom practices involving literacy, taking my theoretical perspectives from the New Literacy Studies (NLS). The NLS understands
literacy as various practices that are given meaning in concrete social and cultural
contexts. According to Street (1984), studying literacy entails turning away from the
idea of literacy as a set of skills or cognitive aptitudes in a person. Instead, Street proposes an “ideological model” of literacy, where literacies are embedded in different
ideologies and have consequences only as they act “together with a large number of
other social factors, including political and economic conditions, social structure, and
local ideologies” (Gee, 2008, p. 80).
A N E THNOGRAPHIC P ERSPECTIVE
Studying literacy as it unfolds, looking at specific literacy events and how they are
embedded in contexts, can be done at various levels. One characteristic uniting many
researchers of literacy practices is a focus on ethnography as a methodology (Heath
& Street, 2008; Street et al., 2009, p. 193; Tapscott, 2009). One dilemma in using
ethnography in the field of language and communication is that one may want to
adopt ethnographic approaches without necessarily wanting or even needing to
become an anthropologist in the traditional sense. According to Street et al. (2009,
pp. 193–194), Green and Bloome (1997, p. 183) addressed this dilemma by distinguishing between several different approaches to ethnography. The approach in the
present study resembles what Green and Bloome describe as “adopting an ethnographic perspective,” which means studying particular aspects of the everyday life
and cultural practices of a social group, but not in the extensive manner of the traditional, comprehensive ethnographic study (Green & Bloome, 1997, as cited in
Street et al., 2009, p. 193).
I observed and interviewed a group of 12 students in the third year of a nonvocational high school program in a small-town school, Southwest High (all names
of persons, schools, and places in the following are fictional), on the west coast of
Norway. My initial approach to this research project was open in the sense that I
started observing these students without any clearcut research questions, in a way
resembling the grounded approach of Glaser and Strauss (1967). I knew one of the
teachers at Southwest High, Anne, both as a former colleague and later as a student,
having at various points discussed her teaching and how she had discovered the
method of using blogs in class. My curiosity was triggered by Anne’s ideas of turning the computer into a tool for production and sharing, making the students’
classroom activities a matter of participating in public life with ideas, opinions, and
criticism via their blogs. As mentioned in the introduction, the recent digital turn
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in Norwegian schools has been subject to a lot of debate and criticism. Anne gave
the impression of having specific ideas about how to overcome what other teachers saw as obstacles to learning due to computer use, such as lack of attention and
concentration or misuse of the computer by cheating on tests and copy-pasting
homework. In addition, she had a distinct critical approach to her teaching in that
she wanted to enable her students to develop their own voices, so to speak, and participate out in the open with their thoughts and ideas.
I observed Anne’s class as they used computers and the web extensively as part
of their organized schoolwork over a period of three months, from January through
March 2010, taking field notes during observation. I also took a few pictures of different literacy events in class, mainly to aid my memory while working with my field
notes, and I gathered and used as background material the blog texts that the students had produced during that school year.
In group and individual interviews, I particularly wanted the students to talk
about values and attitudes related to uses of literacy and technologies of literacy in
the different situations they encountered: in class and during breaks, after school
when doing homework or other activities, related to particular hobbies, their personal lives, and so on. I was interested in these students’ literacies, given that they
are representatives of a generation strongly associated with digital literacy. I also
wanted to know how they experienced using social media and blogging as part of
their curriculum. I knew of Anne’s opinions and ideas on using computers, and I
had observed the class at work, but I wanted them to discuss these matters among
themselves in order to find out how they evaluated these activities, their opinions
on social media use in school versus in their private lives, their thoughts on doing
school out in the open versus the more traditional approaches of other teachers in
different subjects, and so on.
I decided on group interviews mainly to bring out other aspects than what individual interviews would have yielded, aiming to gain access to the discourse of the
group and perhaps also reducing my influence as a literacy researcher; in addition, this
also gave me the opportunity to listen in on discussions among the group members
(Gentikow, 2005). Even so, I decided based on the group interviews to interview three
of the students individually. These were students who stood out from the rest either
because of strong opinions on the use of digital tools in class and digital literacy in
general or based on other information on which I wanted them to expound.
Southwest High is a school in which I myself had worked as a teacher from
2002 until 2007. I therefore knew the buildings, the different education programs,
the school administration, and most of the teachers. This familiarity made it easy
for me to establish this particular school as my site of research. As mentioned, I also
knew Anne as a former colleague. In addition, I had been teaching students of pre-
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cisely this age group for approximately 14 years. Although the field notes and
interviews are my primary sources, I consider these background data important
sources for my research as well. Anderson (2006) describes this approach as “sociological involvement in settings close to [one’s] personal li[fe], arenas with which
[one] ha[s] a significant degree of self-identification” (p. 375). My background in,
and knowledge of, both the school system and the actual school I studied, and thus
my ties to a profession that for a good part of my adult life has been linked to my
professional and personal identity, fit with the perspectives of what Anderson
(ibid.) calls “analytic autoethnography,” and my accounts from the classroom and
this particular school reflect that stance.
Being primarily interested in this class’s discourse rather than in individual perspectives, I did not analyze my data with relation to variables such as gender,
socioeconomic status, and so on. Although Norway is a financially well-off and relatively egalitarian nation, questions related to inequality and discrimination are far
from irrelevant, albeit probably different in a number of otherwise comparable
countries. Still, all the high schools in Norway (with a few exceptions not particularly relevant to this argument) are governmentally funded, as are largely all the students’ teaching aids, such as the laptops they use, their textbooks, etc. All the
students had similar access to computers and the Internet, attended a public school
of good reputation to which they had been admitted on the basis of their grades
from junior high school, and showed no particular signs related to their socioeconomic status or background that were of relevance to my study.
The following account will be an attempt to present my material in what
Geertz (1973) calls “thick descriptions” to go beyond a mere “I-am-a-camera”
description of phenomena and bring out the patterns of specific actions in their contexts (p. 6; see also Heath & Street, 2008, p. 41). I will first describe Southwest High
and Anne’s path toward the operationalization of her particular ideas about literacy in class. I will then move on to give an account of my analysis of the material
from my observations and interviews of the students.
I DENTITY
AND
D ISCOURSE
AT A
N ORWEGIAN H IGH S CHOOL
The group I observed consisted of students in the third year of a non-vocational high
school program in a small-town school on the west coast of Norway. All of the students were between 18 and 19 years old at the time of the observations and interviews. Although their education program gives general eligibility for university-level
studies, this particular school has its roots in vocational education programs for
design, arts and crafts, and in recent years also media and communications. Various
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school reforms had changed the disciplinary makeup of the school, but there
remained a distinct feeling of being a “creative” school, perhaps “the” creative school,
among both the staff and the students, distinguishing them markedly from other
schools in the district. This sense of identity resembles Gee’s notion of membership
of a capital “D” Discourse as opposed to small “d” discourses. While small “d” discourses generally refer to matters of language in use, language alone is rarely used
to enact activities and identities. In addition to language use and the small “d” discourses, “D”iscourse is made up of socially recognized ways of acting, feeling, using
things, symbols, tools, and technologies and even using your body, clothing, and gestures at the right times and places (Gee, 1999, p. 7; Lankshear, 1999).
The students in this school, then, have traditionally been identified not only by
their curricular interests, but also by other discursive features linked in different ways
to their aspiring professional identities. In addition to a general occupation with arts,
one such feature is their appearance: clothing and hairdos, identifiable to an extent
where students and teachers from other schools, and even parents and other people from the local environment, are often heard referring to “those Southwest High
students,” acknowledging that there is something typical or particular that links them
to this particular school. There has also been a general interest in humanitarian issues
among the students, and the school has held annual exhibitions to which friends,
parents, and locals have been invited to sell their own art to raise money for a particular institution in a developing country. These things add up to create a schoolwide identity.
By the time of my observation period, the school had been through various
national reforms and new curricula, and was about to merge with another local
school and establish itself as a new and far bigger school with a new name in newly
built premises, expanding from 300–400 to 800–900 students. At the time there
were mixed feelings about this, and some teachers expressed a distinct fear of losing the school’s particular identity. In the early years, the school provided mostly
vocational training, educating printers, photographers, illustrators, and the occasional
art student, in addition to providing opportunities for supplementary studies to qualify for higher education. At the time of my study, for political reasons, most education programs had become general, non-vocational programs, at the expense of
the “creative” subjects, which were allocated less time compared with earlier years.
Still, students were able to choose optional classes such as Print and Photography
and Visual Arts and Culture, alongside the common core subjects, such as mathematics, foreign languages, history, and Norwegian. Despite the fact that their education had less of an arts-and-crafts profile than earlier programs, the students
seemed to have chosen the program out of an interest in visual arts and to a certain
extent seemed to have ambitions of making a living from or studying related sub-
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jects, such as photography, for example, after high school. This identification with
creativity and working with artistic subjects, a strong reason why the students chose
Southwest High in the first place, may account for some of the negative attitudes
evident in my data toward more traditional academic subjects such as mathematics, Norwegian, and history.
A NNE AND H ER W AY
TO E MPOWERMENT
INTO
B LOGGING : F ROM E LECTRIFICATION
The person I primarily communicated with during the period of observation was
Anne, the students’ homeroom teacher and also the teacher of the Print and
Photography class. As mentioned earlier, I knew Anne as a former colleague, and
at the time we worked together she was curious yet hesitant about using digital technology beyond what her subject and everyday life in school demanded, such as software for manipulating digital images, using the school’s learning management
system to distribute messages to students, and checking her emails.
When I met Anne a few years later, she enthusiastically explained to me how
she had discovered blogging as a way of enabling her students to publish their pictures to a wider audience than just incidental passersby at the school, and how fun
this was for her and her students. This immediately caught my interest, because
Anne’s approach as she explained it stood in stark contrast to the predominantly
technocratic perspectives on digital literacy in schools dominating the discourse in
the field.
Commonly, in order to legitimize their existence in school settings, digital
media are conceived of as a tool for enhancing or increasing efficiency, saving time,
or improving pedagogy and learning (Lankshear, 1998, p. 6; Selwyn, 2010, p. 13).
Anne, on the contrary, seemed to take as her point of departure an interest in what
she perceived as positive effects on her students and the way they approached themselves and their academic work. Although she worded her thoughts differently, she
essentially described to me the way she had found literacy practices and tools that
enabled and empowered her students to be critically aware users of language and technology in an intelligent manner in the public sphere. This point might seem trivial,
but in my opinion it is an important one, representing a shift away from the efforts
to make new technologies work under the conditions of the old ones—as it were,
attempting to electrify the book and the blackboard—approaches McLuhan (1962)
refers to as “the horseless carriage syndrome” (p. 130). In many respects, and perhaps
paradoxically, it was in the Print and Photography class, a predominantly visual
subject, that these students practiced literacy in an empowering and critical way.
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O RGANIZING L EARNING : A NNE ’ S C LASSROOM A CTIVITIES
Anne’s students were part of a larger group of 29. However, it was only in some
classes that all of these students were together. In most of the practically oriented
classes such as Print and Photography, a maximum of 12 students were together,
and the group was reconfigured in other classes, depending on the students’ individual choices. During my visit, the students took part in different activities and
projects in and out of the school premises, which made a rigid schedule for my
observations difficult, if not impossible. In addition, some of the assignments
they were given required them to be outside the school premises. My observations
are therefore scattered across my scheduled three months, and across the classes
available for me to observe.
Since it was Anne’s activities linked to her use of blogs as part of the regular
school tasks that encouraged my interest, I prioritized this subject during the observational period and when interviewing students. They were also blogging in a different but related class, Visual Culture, which I also observed. For practical reasons,
and due to my knowledge of Anne and her specific ideas about blogging in class,
however, the bulk of my data is from Anne’s classes. Still, through observations across
disciplines and comparison of Anne’s classes with those of other teachers, a few
interesting tendencies emerged.
Learning activities and physical organization of the classroom
First, Anne’s teaching had a different physical organization than the classes of
other teachers. Whenever the students worked on their computers writing up a blog
assignment or with practical exercises (e.g., making a sculpture or taking pictures),
they would be wherever it was natural for them to be: at their desks, outdoors, in
the photo room, or on the floor. However, whenever Anne wanted to talk to them,
either to discuss a practical matter or to present new material, she usually gathered
everybody on the other side of the classroom, away from whatever they were working on and, perhaps most importantly, away from their computers. Anne’s students
were probably no less prone to be distracted than other students with computers in
front of them, but they were rarely given the opportunity to drift away. In other
classes, for example, Norwegian, most activities during a class, typically listening to
a lecture, reading a text, and working with exercises from the textbook, took place
at students’ desks. Attempts were made to regulate the use of computers during lectures, but some students used their PCs for note taking, which made it difficult to
control how the PCs were used.
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Learning activities, timeframes, and goals
Second, whenever they were given an assignment that demanded prolonged activity at the desk, typically either touching up a picture on the computer or writing a
blog post documenting their work, students were given clear goals for their work
and equally clear time limits. In addition, they were aware of how and when their
work was going to be assessed. Although I observed that they touched base now and
then with their social networks online, they rarely drifted away for long stretches
of time. This is strikingly different from the kinds of work students did and the kind
of engagement I observed in other classes, particularly in theoretical subjects such
as Norwegian and history. There students often worked on assignments with no clear
goals in regard to when they were supposed to hand in the finished product or even
if and how it was going to be assessed.
Blogging and epistemological shifts
This observation relates to the third point, which is to do with the status given the
actual product or artifact that the students produced as part of their schoolwork. Anne
used the students’ individual blogs as hubs for various learning activities in school,
largely organizing day-to-day activities according to the status of this blog. Everyone
had their own blog linked to the other blogs in class, and Anne’s own blog also linked
to the students’ blogs on a “blogroll,” a collection of links to all the blogs. She also
frequently linked to her students’ blogs from her own blog texts, pointing to and highlighting different students’ work and guiding the attention of her own readers toward
her students’ texts. Most of what the students did during Anne’s classes had to be displayed, depicted, summed up, or reflected upon in a blog post; the actual assignment
handed in was normally a blog post, either as a blog-only assignment or as reflections tied to real-world products they had made, for example, sculptures or installations. The blogs were not hidden behind passwords, but were part of the real-world
blogosphere; each student’s reflections and arguments were visible, transparent, and
open to scrutiny, comments, and criticism from anyone.
The students’ response to this way of organizing teaching indicates that these
texts had a different status from, for example, the essays that they regularly handed
in to other teachers. In terms of organizing and guiding how the class worked, students had to work efficiently in order to meet Anne’s deadlines for a given task.
Otherwise they risked having to publish substandard work on the web. Given the
nature of the blog, this is something most of the students in this class hesitated to
do—as one of the students pointed out, “No one wants to be the one who performs
badly [on the blog].”
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In other words, this way of organizing knowledge—opening up the text for
scrutiny, trusting students to contribute to a public discourse in a given subject, and
helping students to be confident with these textual practices and tools for literacy—
struck me as a notable departure from the literacy practices these students were
accustomed to in most other classes. This way of conceiving of what learning is and
where it happens suggests an epistemological shift away from the ways of doing
school most of them were accustomed to; from the private texts, or as a student
expresses it, “the forced texts of [the school subject] Norwegian,” destined only for
an eventless life in the teacher’s drawer, to the exposed and vulnerable contributions
to public discourse, open for comments and scrutiny.
L ITERACY
AND
B LOGGING
FROM
S TUDENTS ’ P ERSPECTIVES
The students’ accounts of and reflections on their blogging practices seemed to reveal
an awareness of a different kind of literacy activity, or what I saw as a critical digital literacies awakening during my observations of classroom activities. The findings from my interviews with students more or less highlighted the same
phenomena across all groups, including in individual interviews, where students
spoke about their personal blogs and assessment in greater detail. Their reflections
about their blogging activities centered on several topics. I am aware that my material allows a great many approaches, but I have chosen to organize the interviews
using the following categories, which are all, in one way or another, related to the
students’ own accounts of blogging:
I.
Community and sharing: related to the network of blogs in this particular class and the way this network is utilized for literacy and learning;
II. Motivational factors: how the activities related to the blogs and the
ways these activities are organized motivate the students in different
ways; and
III. Organizational factors: how students used the blogs as a way of personally organizing their knowledge.
Community and sharing
One of the consequences of establishing blogs and organizing student work around
blogs, with a rigid culture of publishing regularly and on time, was that Anne and
her students established a sense of community related to their use of blogs. Whatever
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they were working on, be it work in progress or finished texts, they published it on
their blogs. All students linked to each other’s blogs, as well as to the teacher’s blog,
which again included links to all the students’ blogs.
On a positive note, this meant that they could consult each other for inspiration during class while working, to look for ideas or inspiration or to learn something new. Here are some quotes from one of the groups:
STUDENT 1:
You can show the others what you are working on . . .
STUDENT 2:
…and then you can look at what the others are doing, which I
think is very exciting.
STUDENT 3:
…get some ideas.
STUDENT 2:
yes, be inspired by the others.
Student 1 elaborated on this in one of the individual interviews: “I look at the
others, how good they are…learn much from it…when you look at the others, you
learn new methods, [how to] take pictures, new ideas, and…at least I learn a lot.”
On a negative note, the fact that they published openly to the web meant that
most of them did not want to publish work that was not up to their standards, since
they knew their texts would be read not only by the teacher for assessment, but also
by students and other people interested in their blogs. This is one student’s take on
this: “Everyone sees what we do…the entire school year. And that’s rather…personal.
If you’re not that interested in the subject, you might not get good results…[and in
that case] it’s not a good thing that everybody can see it…You don’t want to be the
one person in the class doing badly.”
The students also highlighted Anne’s blog as an important contributor to their
sense of community. Anne kept both a personal and a professional blog, using her
professional one as a way of organizing the rhizome of texts in this class. Her professional blog performed several functions in this class: linking to the students’
blogs, discussing different matters relating to the subject, linking to interesting
articles or inspirational websites, and posting assignments for students. She also
had a feature called “Photo of the Week,” where she highlighted a photo by one
of the students.
The students frequently touched upon Anne’s blog in the interviews, giving the
impression that they read her blog regularly. One student complained that Anne’s
blog was updated so often that it was difficult to find what she was looking for at
any given moment. However, she also commented that she often consulted Anne’s
blog in connection with assignments and exercises they were given, because Anne
published a lot of useful links, how-to videos, and other material related to the task
at hand. Another student commented that she liked to “see who’s featured in ‘photo
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of the week’. . .[Anne] picks one [photo] out, and it’s fun to see who’s been picked
out, because it’s often one of the best ones. . . .”
In other words, this group of students had established a community of sharing
and inspiration that they themselves thought highly of, according to the interviews
and as confirmed by my observations of social interaction in the group. This communal or collective aspect of blogging in particular and social media in general is a
much-described and much-discussed phenomenon in the literature on digital media
(e.g., Rettberg, 2008, p. 57). In addition, there is a large selection of literature on the
profound changes in society associated with changes in the media landscape, referred
to in the introduction to this chapter. Nevertheless, I would like to underscore that
I hesitate to link the sense of community in this particular classroom to the more or
less deterministic discussions of the digital media’s role in changing the ways we think
and learn. The uses of digital technology in this classroom were largely designed
around certain ideas and values tied to literacy and learning, deliberately guided by
the teacher, and I have found nothing in my material to indicate that these students
were particularly more “digitally native” than, for example, their teacher, Anne. When
it comes to their propensity to take up new technologies and new ways of working
and thinking, I find it likely that the differences within the group of students in this
class were just as large as those within the group of teachers who were teaching them.
Motivational factors
In addition to highlighting the communal aspects of blogging, the students frequently highlighted other characteristics of the blog that motivated them, both
related to genre-specific and material factors and to the way their blogging activities were organized. As mentioned earlier, they frequently discussed the external
motivation of knowing that they had to publish their work out in the open: “…and
they [the teachers] can check immediately if we have done something…and it’s the
same in ‘Visual Culture’ [another student confirming], she’s checking it constantly,
how we’re doing on the blog.”
One student emphasized how writing for an audience is more exciting than the
regular way of writing for the teacher: “…at school, no one else [but the teacher] reads
[my texts], so it really doesn’t mean all that much.” The same student also stated, interestingly, that she had learned a lot from having to explain matters to other people,
unlike in writing situations where she would just be writing for the teacher.
Several statements contrasted writing on a blog with “regular writing,” describing blogging as different because it opened up new ways of expressing themselves.
They used terms and expressions such as “more personal,” “free,” and “shorter” to
describe blog writing and mark its distance from the other subjects in school. One
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student stated, “…when I write on a blog, I feel that I can let my fingers fly.…I write
what I think, because that’s what I’m supposed to convey.”
This sense of distance from other subjects is linked to the language students
used when blogging, which they commonly described using expressions such as “not
preoccupied with rules and grammar,” “less formal,” “shorter,” and a language that
is “oral.” The language of ordinary school, academic writing, was described in terms
of constraints and rigidity, an obstacle to their thoughts, whereas the blogs allowed
a “truer” kind of writing. Students described the language they used in their blogs
in the following ways:
STUDENT 1:
…personal . . .
STUDENT 2:
…oral language, perhaps? That it is more oral . . .
STUDENT 3:
…yes, much more oral
STUDENT 2:
…more of my own opinions
STUDENT 3:
…yes, I don’t review my writing errors as much [on the blog]
INTERVIEWER:
You don’t?
STUDENT 2:
Not on the blog, not as much as I do when writing Norwegian
essays.
INTERVIEWER:
Even if it is supposed to be published out in the open?
STUDENT 3:
Yes, actually, I still review less . . .
INTERVIEWER:
…but you still feel that it is…[good enough or sufficient]
STUDENT 3:
Yes, because I feel it’s a bit more like oral language, kind of, it’s
not as structured as in [the school subject] Norwegian, where
you have to consider how to build a sentence, [on the blog, I]
write what I think.
Their thoughts on writing in this way were linked in many respects to
Southwest High’s somewhat “creative” identity, as discussed earlier. These particular blogs were perceived as an arena for a different kind of writing than in the general, academic subjects:
STUDENT:
[the blog] is more oral-like . . .
INTERVIEWER:
Why?
STUDENT:
It is open, for everyone.…I don’t know.…I feel that a blog is
supposed to be more personal.
INTERVIEWER:
Even if it is a school blog?
STUDENT:
Even if it is a school blog.
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Regarding other subjects in school, another student said, “usually, there are rules
for how you are supposed to write, but on the blog, nobody is there to tell you that
you’re supposed to write just like this, you’re supposed to choose freely and the idea
is to get other people interested in reading, because that’s the idea with blogging,
to get other people to read your blog.”
Perhaps one of the most important motivational factors was the teacher and her
role. The students repeatedly mentioned their teachers, particularly Anne, as an
inspiration for their blogging. Apart from the fact that Anne was depicted as a proficient and knowledgeable teacher, they reported that they regularly read her blog.
Although I have no direct statements to back this up, I assume from what the students said that they found inspiration in the way she used her blog, and that her digital-text practices functioned as models for their own.
Still, quite a few statements from the interviews related to Anne’s overall attitude toward her subject and the way she organized her teaching and prepared for
the different activities. The students pointed out that she was always well prepared
and organized. Further, the students emphasized that, compared with some of their
other classes, Anne’s lectures were shorter and almost always followed by some kind
of practice: “…and the instant we’re done [with the lecture] we are doing it [i.e.,
some kind of practice linked to the lecture].”
On a side note: Blogs and language
Although not strictly a topic for this chapter, I would like to comment briefly on
the students’ own descriptions of the language they used in their blogs. As mentioned
above, some of the students characterized their blog writing as a departure from the
academic language of school into what we typically would recognize as the kind of
language used in synchronous communication genres in digital media: texting,
online chatting, etc. There is no shortage of criticisms of writing in school where it
is permitted to use features such as emoticons, abbreviations, and the kinds of oral
attributes that my informants report using. My claim on the basis of this particular study is that there are indications that the writing of blog texts, especially when
contextualized and operationalized the way it was done in this class, helps the students establish particular identities as writers. In turn, establishing an identity as a
writer using literacy in this way and with these effects might spill over in a positive
way on their use of written language in other contexts with other demands. Knowing
that you are a good writer in one context may make you believe you can be a good
writer in another context, even if being a good writer means different things in those
contexts. Again, although it is important not to be naïve about the effects of establishing writing habits in total opposition to the established norms in school, it is
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important to be critical of ideas that the medium might impose bad habits on the
user—ideas reminiscent of the “essentialist” accounts discussed earlier. For a linguistic account of these questions, see Crystal (2006).
Organizational factors
One of the patterns emerging from my analysis of my material had to do with the
way Anne prepared her classroom activities for ways of organizing knowledge
around the blog technology and the effects this had on her students and their
learning processes. As mentioned in the previous sections, this enabled the students
to share and cooperate in meaningful ways through the network of blogs, and it
motivated the students to work differently from what they were allowed to do in
other classes and other literacy technologies.
But the students also discussed how the blog approach helped them organize
their own personal learning. Barton (2007) outlines eight different features of literacy in different situations and uses in life. Among them is using literacy “as a symbolic system used for representing the world to ourselves. Literacy is part of our
thinking. It is part of the technology of thought” (pp. 35–36). As we have seen, the
blogs seemed to have significance to the students as their personal tools for organizing knowledge, making sense of the world around them. The blogs were part of
their “technology of thought.”
This was also true on a concrete, material level. In addition to using the blog
as a medium or genre for personal reflection and using the class community of blogs
as a source for learning, sharing, inspiration, and motivation, students characterized
the blog as a good technology for keeping track of their own progress and ideas.
Having everything on a blog was a good way of structuring both their ideas and their
work. They had access to everything on the web regardless of their physical whereabouts, and they were able to keep a copy of everything they handed in for assessment, which was otherwise not normally the case: “Everything is in one place and
it’s easier to…it is nice to be able to reach it from home as well, and…that we can
keep it, because often, we are not given back the work we do on exams. Now we have
[access to it all the time].”
This also meant that they were able to work from other places besides school.
Many of their assignments, such as taking photographs of landscapes and structures,
could not easily be done in school. Several blog assignments were done outside of
school, often directly linked to geographical or physical places of significance to the
task they were working on. In this context, the students associated characteristics
of the blog medium with different possible ways of organizing their knowledge, and
emphasized this as something that worked to their advantage.
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C ONCLUDING R EMARKS
As Erstad (2010) asserts, media issues have increasingly become a defining factor
dividing generations, resulting in a public discourse on young people and the conception of them as particularly competent in using digital media (p. 58). Young people are accordingly given labels such as “screen agers” (Rushkoff, 2006) and “digital
natives” (Palfrey & Gasser, 2010), and the OECD uses the term “new millennium
learners” to indicate that future generations will require different learning strategies,
where digital media play an important role (2008). At the core of this is an idea of
children and young people as experts in the digital field, the “natives,” whereas the
teachers are the “immigrants” without real possibilities for learning either the skills
or the language to become properly integrated in the digital world (Prensky, 2001,
p. 2). This opposition lies at the heart of the discussion on digital technology in
schools, and it reflects how many teachers see themselves in relation to digital
technologies and learning.
Although my material suggests that digital media play an important role in the
lives of these particular teenagers, the interviews also indicate that the picture is more
complex than that suggested by the great-divide accounts of generational differences
or the impression we get from insider/outsider dichotomies such as “digital
natives/digital immigrants.”
The myth of the outdistanced teacher
From my study, it is not entirely evident that the teachers are busy keeping up with
the students in the digital domain. Although some teachers are reluctant to use computers in class, many of the things the students value about using computers are
things they have learned from teachers in school. One of the students reported that
a former teacher spurred her into blogging even before she came to Southwest High.
As we have seen, students refer to Anne as an inspiration when it comes to digital
media use, mentioning how her blog is constantly updated and interesting to follow, but mainly because they find her inspiring as a photographer and a professional
with a passion for what she does. What makes this particularly interesting is that
it blurs the boundaries between disciplines and technology, or between having discipline-specific knowledge and using digital tools. Anne does not come across as one
of those overly tech-savvy teachers eager to put every new gadget into use in the
classroom. Her main interest and passion is photography and the visual arts, and the
teaching of those disciplines. Still, much of what she does in the classroom revolves
around her use of technology, but the technology is deliberately used to expand and
enhance her discipline-specific teaching.
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Anne emerges in many respects as a trustworthy role model for a certain kind
of critical literacies praxis or “Bildung” where the digital tools tie in naturally with
the subjects she teaches. She actively participates in the blogosphere, highlighting
students’ work, sharing links and other material that she finds, setting an example
of a kind of digital proficiency beyond the technical aspects of digital media usage
that too often dominate discussions of computer use in the classroom. This is
interesting in itself, as an indication of what it is possible to achieve with technology in school when it is properly organized and contextualized.
In addition, it is interesting to see these findings in relation to the more academically oriented subjects, in particular Norwegian, and how the students explicitly contrast Anne’s practice with the practices in these subjects. Norwegian is a
subject that is tied to the notion of “Bildung”; the modern ideal of the critically literate and empowered student, being literate beyond the mere technical aspects of
reading and writing. Moreover, the national curriculum gives Norwegian a particular responsibiliy for this critical literacy education, as the core subject for developing the students’ “voice” as writers. In this study, however, critical literacy teaching
normally associated with core subjects such as Norwegian is practiced more or less
exclusively in Anne’s Print and Photography class.
The myth of the digitally innovative teenager
Much of the writing about “digital natives” postulates today’s teenagers as having a
particularly active role in digital media, even being innovators of new practices
(Erstad, 2010, p. 58; Prensky, 2001). However, when my informants talk about
what they do outside of school, what strikes me is how similar they are to those of
the generation before them, that is, today’s 40-year-olds, when it comes to activities and interests, obviously with a few exceptions. Although digital media play an
important role in their lives, many of my informants spend much of their time doing
typical after-school activities such as exercising, playing soccer, doing church charity work, or spending time with their families and friends. Also, much of their media
usage is characterized by consumption rather than production, such as watching
movies on the PC or the television, playing computer games, listening to music, and
reading magazines.
Moreover, studies of literacy practices often accentuate the differences between
academic or school-based literacy practices and literacy practice “beyond the schoolhouse door” (Hull & Schultz, 2002). Particularly in discussions of digital literacy
practices, one gets the impression that creative use of technology is something that
happens outside of school and that teachers must look out of school to find innovative and new ways of using technology.
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In my material, such assumptions are challenged, suggesting that school plays
an important role in presenting digital technology to students. Apart from socializing with their friends on Facebook, much of what can be characterized as production and doing new practices in digital media happened or had its origins in school.
As I have touched upon above, some of the students were introduced to social media
and blogging by teachers prior to meeting Anne. Others were inspired by Anne’s
teaching to start their private blogs in addition to the blogs they kept in school.
Many of the students reported that they would keep on blogging after they left
Southwest High. In these cases, teachers and school contributed not only to introducing social media and new technology, but also to contextualizing these tools and
enabling the students to reflect on their digital behavior and to use the digital tools
as a means of empowerment rather than just pure entertainment.
Toward new epistemologies?
Naturally, there are limits to how far my material can be generalized. Still, what
it at least suggests is that school can play an important role in introducing students to technology, in contextualizing, scaffolding, and practicing critical awareness and constructive, perhaps even disruptive, ways of using tools for digital
literacy. In my opinion, teachers can have a unique impact by virtue of the combination of their discipline-specific knowledge and the different digital technologies and tools that can be used to enhance teaching, as Anne’s classroom practices
demonstrate. It is perhaps here, at the intersection of literacy learning, pedagogy,
and technology, that possibilities exist for epistemologically new ways of conceiving of literacy in a digital age.
Technology plays an important role, not alone but as a constantly changing set
of socially situated tools for literacy, for making sense of the world and ourselves.
Many goals can still be reached with pencil and paper, but as Bolter (2001) declares,
the digital media have provided us with entirely new writing spaces: tools and arenas that give us new possibilities for expression and participation in society. As
Anne’s practices have exemplified, these spaces can be mastered to work to the
advantage of students’ critical digital literacies in new ways—while they may never
tear down the walls of the schools completely, they may at least perforate them.
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Barton, D. (2007). Literacy: An introduction to the ecology of written language. Hoboken, NJ:
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Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. New York &
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Crystal, D. (2006). Language and the Internet. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
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Prensky, M. (2001, October). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon, 9(5). Retrieved
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CHAPTER
SIX
Utilizing Mobile Media
AND Games TO Develop
Critical Inner-City Agents
OF Social Change
A NTERO G ARCIA
In the spring of 2011, I handed out iPod Touches to the eager and awaiting hands
of 17 ninth-grade English Language Arts (ELA) students. The mixed feelings of
excitement and apprehension that came with handing out the devices—seen by
many of my teaching colleagues as an ill-conceived decision—would act as a harbinger for the constant challenges of balancing hyper-engagement and hyper-distraction in a space focused on developing critical student voices.
Perhaps more than any other recent innovation, mobile media have fundamentally transformed society. Today’s mobile media devices—including phones, iPods,
and gaming devices—connect the majority of the globe to key networks, economies,
and civic opportunities. These ubiquitous devices are often banned from classrooms
because they are seen as problematic distractions. As an English teacher with more
than seven years of experience in an urban high school, I’ve seen the ways that
mobile media have transformed students’ lives. Considering that the vast majority
of urban youth of color regularly use mobile media devices like cell phones, I distributed iPods to my students as a way of exploring the ways these devices and the
gameplay that occurred with them help students engage critically and transformatively in their schools and communities.
When implemented in the classroom with a strong critical foundation, mobile
media can become a tool for powerful learning. They do so by engendering new
forms of social participation, which, in turn, shape the social practices and civic iden-
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tity of young people. In this chapter, I describe the process of critical literacies
instruction and transformative gameplay that stem from adapting youth cultural practices and functional components of a participatory media influenced by a “new culture of learning” to engaging pedagogy with urban youth (Thomas & Brown, 2011).
I used a small grant awarded by a local organization to purchase a class set of
iPods for this study. Since iPods are significantly cheaper than cell phones, I envisioned that in my class iPods would play the same ubiquitous always-on learning
opportunities that day-to-day mobile practices afford students; without the pesky
annual contracts and monthly bills, the iPods act identically to iPhones when using
a wireless network, minus out-of-the-box phone-call functionality and GPS.
Additionally, engagement with mobile computing devices such as iPods also seemed,
to me, the most cost-effective way to confront the participation and achievement
gap that plagues urban youth across the country.
To engage student in critical use of mobile media devices, I constructed a curriculum that utilized participatory media practices in both digital and non-digital
contexts. Pragmatically, this meant guiding students through a scavenger hunt I created for them, asking them to critically interpret their own experiences in and
around their school, and teaching them how to use the tools and writing practices
required for them to create their own scavenger-hunt clues. This project also meant
engaging in alternate reality gameplay that encouraged student role-playing.
Though role-playing may not seem like a necessary component of critical literacies education, it functions in several imperative ways. First, it adds relevance to
the curriculum in ways that students are able to understand. By practicing and
enacting an activity set that requires critical literacies, students understand these particular applications of critical social and spatial analysis as much more than an
abstract concept. Second, role-play bridges the civic development of young people
from what is discussed or analyzed from within a classroom to something that is done
in conjunction with a larger community. As students traversed, searched for, and found
badges in their community, they simultaneously questioned truth statements others
have made about the space and critically understood South Central at large as a negotiated space of education and possibility. Finally, these role-playing activities oriented
students toward similar identity practices that require participatory media. The way
identity is constructed in online space mirrors the activities students engaged in,
bridging digital and the non-digital learning experiences. The offline nature of performing physical equivalents of online photo tagging, commenting, and folksonomy—collaborative organizing and “tagging” of information—meant that the transfer
of these skills online could occur; by the time this learning unit concluded, with students editing a Wikipedia page collaboratively and curating photographs, students
were familiar with these digital literacies through off-line engagement.
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Located a few blocks south of the University of Southern California, South
Central High School is one of the oldest public high schools in the city of Los
Angeles. With a student population of approximately 3,400, South Central High
School is one of the largest in the city. Its demographics mirror those of its surrounding community: 83 percent Latino, 15 percent black, and 2 percent multiracial, with
an English Language Learner group that makes up 39 percent of the students.
Eighty-seven percent of the students receive free or reduced lunch (California
Department of Education, 2010). Only 35 percent of students graduate from South
Central High School; the majority of these students do not graduate eligible to
enroll in most four-year universities (UCLA IDEA, 2010).
All participant and place names have been changed in this study. I have chosen to rename our school South Central High School not only as a signal of the general geographic location in which this school and this study are immersed, but also
to validate the counter-narrative of cultural prosperity that persists in urban Los
Angeles; a counter-narrative tells a historical account of events from a point of view
that differs from a dominant one and provides a perspective that is often underrepresented. Due to historical depictions of poverty, violence, and squalor in films,
music, and news headlines, for the past several years, the community of South
Central Los Angeles has been in a state of flux. In a deliberate effort to erase a cultural past of uprising, resistance, and negative press through renaming the community, mainstream media and the governing agencies of Los Angeles now refer to the
community as “South Los Angeles.” However, despite the flooding of “South Los
Angeles” messaging in media, I have never heard any of my students refer to this
community as anything but “South Central.”
D ESIGNING S CALABLE , P ARTICIPATORY , C RITICAL P LAY
Currently, we see that urban youth have increasing access to technology, and many
scholars have shown that youth are engaging technology outside of school in
increasingly sophisticated ways (Ito et al., 2010; Norris, 2001; Warschauer, 2003).
Because of this, technology and gameplay are being called upon as antidotes to educational inequity. These tools can be used not only to engage students in meaningful learning experiences, but also to shape ways people participate and interact
with the world (Lievrouw, 2011). However, while there is burgeoning research
around the role that participatory media play in improving learning, educational
researchers have identified challenges in their implementation. For example,
“research on teaching in urban schools suggests that teachers’ limited skills and limiting beliefs about their students lead to a steady diet of low-level material coupled
with unstimulating, rote-oriented teaching” (Darling-Hammond, 2010).
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Though numerous studies point to the learning potential that new media pose
in the changing landscape of education (Bonk, 2009; Plester, Wood, & Bell, 2008;
Schuler, 2009; Wood, & Bell, 2008), little research focuses specifically on their use
in formal learning environments. Even more significant is the dearth of research
focused on utilizing technology with and in underserved urban communities. With
technology ushering in new learning challenges for the first “always-connected
generation” (Lenhart, 2009), the role that this technology also plays in the growing
global economy is taking a sharp turn, connecting individuals into productive networks despite geographical distance.
Recognizing the increasing need for students to critically examine their digital media use instead of merely consuming software, films, and games, as well as the
limitations of many teachers’ experiences with technology in the classroom, this project focused on using mobile media in ways that would be either intuitive or
extremely adoptable for educators. Aside from a specific functional literacy tools,
formal use of the iPod Touches in the class centered around the basic features of
most mobile media devices: students took lengthy notes, texted writing to me,
conducted online research, and heavily documented their research process through
photo and video production. The specific tool, installed as an application on the iPod,
was a Quick Response (QR) code creator and reader; QR codes are square blackand-white barcodes that contain customized information: text, hyperlinks, email
addresses, etc.
In developing the opportunity for critical inquiry in and around the South
Central community, this project is framed as an alternate reality game that guides
students and educator through Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR). As
part of this inquiry, a custom-designed game, “Ask Anansi” (described below),
guided students toward a process of identifying specific topics for critical inquiry
and playing through the act of engagement and participation.
At the beginning of the class, the students independently wrote candid reflections about what they appreciated about their school and what they felt they could
improve. Before the class wrote, I emphasized that their suggestions should look at
specific areas of improvement that students felt they could affect. Through initial
role-playing and storytelling, the students in the class identified six areas of exploration for our collective inquiry: trash, violence, graffiti, pollution, stereotypes, and
love. Following this, larger class discussion and activities focused on honing student
reflections into the specific areas of inquiry that students stated as interesting to
them. In doing this, the students donned various roles to help them manage the task
of identifying, researching, and communicating the topics students selected. These
roles included:
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•
•
•
•
•
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Diplomat: Helps facilitate work between group members
Engineer: Oversees construction and presentation of work
The Checkered Flag: Keeps group working in a timely manner
Tourist: Examines the work from the lens of the “other”
Portal: Communicates and sends updates to Anansi
The class then began writing narratives of individual and collective experience
related to the six topics. A narrative account of how a fight on the first day of middle school affected Solomon, for instance, became a tool for critiquing and questioning the ephemeral influence of violence within the school community.
With these areas of focus, the class began enacting critical digital literacies practices in both online and physical environments. These instructional practices combined tenets of critical pedagogy with critical and sociocultural literacies. Here
critical pedagogy is understood as a libratory approach to education that guides students, as co-constructors of knowledge, to build their own meaning and critique of
the inequities within their lives (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008; Freire, 1970).
In formal school settings such as the one in which this study was conducted, critical pedagogy helps guide students toward academic achievement as a means of
social empowerment; this effort still calls for a seismic shift in the current capitalist school structures and also encourages significant group achievement (Perry,
2003). This “conscientization” finds students and teachers alike questioning social
and historical inequities (Freire, 1970).
Present literacy research points to the multimodal and productive nature of digital literacies (Gee, 2004; Kress, 2009; New London Group, 1996). Often, these conversations disregard the potential of critical within the nascent field of digital
literacies. While this chapter expands definitions of critical digital literacies, I begin
rooted in analog critical literacies. For me, these are critical literacies that are not
tied to digital media; by focusing on analog digital literacies and seeing the ways
these literacies inform decisions with digital media, a stronger understanding of how
digital media products are shaped by critical literacies is clearly parsed. In making
literacies relevant to the larger experiential context of society and culture, Freire and
Macedo describes the need to read “the world” in order to engage in reading “the
word” (1987). Freire’s view fits into sociocultural understandings of literacy as
developing socially constructed meaning. As Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz (Ogbu,
1983) explain, “The move into literacy requires children to make some basic adjustments to the way they socially attribute meaning to events and the process of
everyday world in order to be able to loosen their dependence upon contextually specific information and to adopt a decontextualized perspective” (p. 231). This constant process of reinterpreting and re-reading the world as part of literacies
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development signals opportunity for critique and counter-narrative. Critical literacies allow space for questions and multiple frames of understanding and interpretation. Positioning part of the role of literacies as understanding underlying power
structures, Moje and Lewis (2007) point to the need for a “critical sociocultural literacy” as a means of merging these similar interests.
A SK A NANSI : A P EDAGOGY
OF
T RANSFORMATIVE S OCIAL P LAY
The work that is described follows nearly six weeks of alternate reality gameplay in
my classroom. While the products that students created and analyzed speak to the
transformative power of critical digital literacies, these activities function within a
larger pedagogy of transformative social play.
Transformative Social Play: forces us to reevaluate a formal understanding of rules as fixed,
unambiguous, and omnipotently authoritative. In any kind of transformative play, game structures come into question and are re-shaped by player action. In transformative social play,
the mechanisms and effects of these transformations occur on a social level. (Salen &
Zimmerman, 2004, p. 475)
In Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, Huizinga (1949) describes
the space in which games are played as a “magic circle,” emphasizing that the main
characteristics of play are “that it is free”; furthermore, “[p]lay is not ‘ordinary’ or ‘real’
life. It is rather a stepping out of ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of activity” (p. 8).
The magic circle of gameplay is one in which role-playing, acting, and behavior
exceeds social norms; so it is here that students can comfortably pose, flex, and experiment in ways they may not typically be expected to participate or behave. Casting
this magic circle around the activities in my classroom and shielding our inquiry
from pressure of student social conformity, I created an Alternate Reality Game
(ARG) that steeps student action and problem-posing in a tradition of West
African folklore called “Ask Anansi.” The learning and activities in this ARG find
students acting within communities of practice; a game’s setting and multiple scenarios rely on situated student learning within specific contexts and provide key roles
for students to undertake (Lave & Wenger, 1991).
In Ask Anansi, student participation is community centered; students engage
in inquiry-based problem-solving by communicating with, and helping to unravel
the stories they are told by Anansi. The trickster spider god of Caribbean folklore, Anansi has answers and solutions to any question students can imagine.
Anansi’s responses, however, are not always the most clear: he likes tricks, riddles,
and befuddlement. As a result, students honed critical literacies skills to unravel
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the web of Anansi’s hints and instructions. Some clues were found outside the
walls of the classroom and may appear as posters, barcodes, or phone calls.
Anansi’s dialogue with students is one that challenges concerns of power, dominance, and agency in a capitalist environment. And while Ask Anansi operates
within a fictitious narrative and the students (correctly) assumed I embodied the
Anansi persona when communicating with them via text messages and emails, the
gaming environment allowed students to act, question, and engage in simultaneously critical and playful inquiry.
Below, I describe the conclusion of Ask Anansi. Students were recruited to write
an empowering counter-narrative about their community and dominant stereotypes.
Though the main product of this game is one of problem-posing critical thinking
and civic participation, the goal of the game is one based in the ARG’s fiction: they
must satisfy the insatiable need of Anansi for a good story. The topics that students
chose—trash, violence, graffiti, pollution, stereotypes, and love—are discussed and
repositioned through counter-narrative and critiquing dominant stories told by
and about the community through popular media texts. Next, students proposed
actionable solutions to move from repositioning stories of the community’s past to
threading the narrative toward the future. The scavenger hunt that follows focuses
on the way students’ past inquiry merges with their future. This data comes from
my own daily field notes as the class teacher and co-researcher with my classroom
as well as from the work students turned in, the text messages, photographs, and digital products sent to me, and from transcriptions I made of class conversations and
focus groups. I coded my data using an inductive approach (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw,
1995). In analyzing the qualitative data in this study, my main units of analysis were
specific literacy events (Barton & Hamilton, 2005) and student-created critical textual products (Morrell, 2008).
While computational literacies, by their nature, focus on digital tools and dispositions like hacking and online media remixing, part of the work I’ve been doing
with my students in this project is centered around extending these skills into a physical world and deliberately offline environment. These activities serve several purposes, including:
•
•
•
Alleviating teachers from the strain of a digital participation gap
Fostering physical world relationships among students in classrooms
Illustrating the connections between 21st-century literacies and the
academic literacies that are most heavily emphasized by standardized
curricula, tests, and policies
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I NFORM , P ERFORM , T RANSFORM
This scavenger-hunt sequence illustrates the ways youth may recontextualize their
physical surroundings. This sequence followed a key thematic approach to critical
transformative practice: Inform, Perform, Transform. This was adapted from my own
experiences with the Black Cloud Game (Niemeyer, Garcia, & Naima, 2009), in
which students’ actions focused on improving local air quality and were informed
by data collected at various nearby locations.
Each of the three thematic components to this approach had distinct activities
tied to them:
Inform: Students gather, analyze, and collate information in order to produce
their own, original work. Students furthered three types of knowledge during this
phase:
1. Indigenous expertise of their communities
2. Conceptual understanding of the function of gameplay and problemposing inquiry
3. Functional literacies skills including creating and reading QR codes,
writing challenging and engaging clues, and properly logging and
reflecting on found items.
Perform: Utilizing the knowledge and information acquired through their
informational inquiries, students produce/perform new work that is tied to a larger
critical, conceptual, and/or academic goal.
Students developed scavenger hunt clues for their classmates, hid them in and
around their school space, and later searched for each other’s clues.
Transform: Extending their performance toward publicly shared knowledge and
action, students focus on directly impacting and critically transforming their world.
Students adapted the closed, class-only scavenger hunt into a publicly curated
exhibit to impact the public’s reading and interpretation of the South Central community.
“Inform, Perform, Transform” mirrors this research project’s methodological
approach. In allowing students to develop their own body of knowledge, with the
teacher acting as facilitator in this process and encouraging transformative performative action, this process is a way to make explicit a YPAR design. I will go into
further detail below about how each of these separate components unfolded within
this project, the kinds of literacies and civic practices they developed, and the ways
that this three-step process highlights a shift toward transformative social pedagogy
in English Language Arts classrooms.
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I NFORMING : F OSTERING I NDIGENOUS K NOWLEDGE
D EVELOPING F UNCTIONAL C RITICAL L ITERACIES
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AND
In the first phase of this scavenger-hunt process, I relied on traditional pedagogical practice. I modeled what I felt was an engaging learning process for students,
asked them to share their own knowledge in regards to this topic, and then guided
them through ways to explore and apply new critical literacies skills.
I scaffolded the searching process in the practice scavenger hunt, and then the
class collectively analyzed clues that lead them to QR code badges hidden at
SCHS. The first clue was intentionally easier and in extremely close proximity to
the students. The final clue I provided was significantly more difficult: the vocabulary utilized to describe the location, the spatial thinking required, and the fact that
the clue was located in a place many students had not explored before lead to a more
challenging and collaborative problem-solving process.
In the anecdote below, I recount the process of watching the first scavengerhunt clue move students from tepid, required participation, to out-of-the-seat
ownership of the class curriculum:
As I handed out the printed paper that described the location of the first clue,
students took the papers with their standard nonchalance for schoolwork. Here is
what the students read:
“This badge is tucked away in the corner of one of Mr. Garcia’s favorite things: a book! There
are many here . . . so which one is it? To successfully find this badge, you need to find a book
someone wrote about his own life, just like you have. He had many names: Homeboy,
Satan, Minister, El Hajj Malik El Shabazz. This badge can be yours if you look on page 165.”
As soon as Dante realized that he was looking for something within the class
and that this was a sort of game, he stood up and started pacing looking for things
that might be askew among the disheveled bookcases. While many of the students
looked uncertain and looked back and forth from their paper to me for further
instruction, Dante had now roused Solomon and Jay and all three had now congregated around the bookcase.
As Dante and his friends focused on looking through myriad books, Tess
focused on the final sentence of the clue description. She pulled out her iPod and,
with the device placed in the middle of her table to collaborate with Holden,
tapped “el hajj malik el shabazz” into her Wikipedia mobile application. The result
redirects users to the page for Malcolm X. While more students continued to congregate around the bookshelves, Tess sat and took stock of our room: to her left,
nearly half of the class was looking at or in books. Scattered in front of her, the rest
of the class, including myself, was looking at the scavenger-hunt clue or at the mass
by the bookshelves; the walls were cluttered with student work.
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And then she saw it.
Perched high above the white board, strikingly out of place once noticed, a single paperback leaned casually by itself. She nodded to Holden and they slowly rose
from their desks attracting nobody else’s attention. She dragged her chair to the shelf
and Holden stood on it, retrieved the black book, and handed it down to Tess.
Flipping to page 165, seeing a QR code paper clipped above an underlined passage,
Tess looked at Holden who yelled, “We found it!” Surprised comments (and disappointed grumbling from Dante) came from across the room.
I asked Tess to explain how she and Victor found the clue and then she read
the underlined passage aloud for the class:
The devil white man cut these black people off from all knowledge of their own kind, and
cut them off from any knowledge of their own language, religion, and past culture, until the
black man in America was the earth’s only race of people who had absolutely no knowledge
of his true identity.
Minerva, after the quote was read—before anyone could speak or reflect, and
specifically before I could ask the class any guiding discussion questions, as is my
wont—quickly said, “That’s a nice quote. Okay what’s the next clue?” The rest of
the class looked to me expectantly.
Though Dante seemed somewhat disappointed that he didn’t find the clue, the
class was interested in the process of looking for and eventually finding a tangible
object. As a game, the scavenger hunt increased participation for the day; entanglement with critical theory became a product of this pedagogical instrument.
To tie into an ongoing theme in the class of empowering individuals through webs
of counter-narratives, the remaining badges (and the ones that students would subsequently create and hide) were wrapped scroll-like inside the ring portion of black plastic spider rings—the kinds typically given out to children around Halloween.
The next clue eventually led students to examine the portable desk that Mr.
Raskol utilized to travel from room to room. I asked the students why they thought
I ended up hiding a clue in the bright red desk that Mr. Raskol affectionately called
“The Armadillo.” Before handing out the third clue, the class spent a few minutes
discussing my intentions as the game designer for the clue.
Elizabeth, the student to successfully locate the badge in a paper tray, said, “I
think you wanted us to think about the fact that Mr. Raskol doesn’t have his own
classroom.”
“Maybe you wanted us to look at the big-ass desk that Raskol has to move every
period,” Solomon added.
“This school can’t even afford to give its teachers their own rooms and it will
still probably fire Raskol at the end of the year,” Jay said.
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After discovering each clue, students were required to document their findings
by logging a brief entry into a Scavenger Hunt Finding Log. The log prompted students to write down the factual information about the clue: what it was called, who
authored it, when and where it was found. The log also briefly asked students, “What
do I think this space’s story is? How does it help tell a story about the community?”
After a second clue that led students to discover a clue hidden on the principal’s desk, students were given a final clue I named the “Hidden Vestibule,” which
led students to an abandoned classroom space in an upstairs alcove of one of the
school’s buildings. Students were signaled that they were in the right location by a
solitary spider dangling from a string in the doorway of the rundown room.
Marjane quickly grabbed the plastic spider and posed to highlight her win.
Other students shuffled into the cramped space. Katherine let out a sigh of dismay,
“It’s so dirty up here. Oh my god.” She said this while also holding her iPod up to
her eye level and began snapping pictures of the disarray. Holden and Elizabeth also
walked into the room and began snapping photos. Dante brooded in the back of the
pack, dismayed that he’d only discovered one of the four badges for the day.
It is worth noting the fluid nature with which Katherine and our other coresearchers internalized the process of documentation. After nearly a month of being
asked to photograph, document, or text qualitative data about their community for
Ask Anansi, it was now a natural performative element of how the students understood their role when engaging in academic work.
In later class reflections, students would point to the scavenger hunt—both the
model I’ve described and the version described later in this chapter—as a “fun” component of the class. It was also a significant pedagogical step forward for how the
students interacted within the class and with their community. In many ways, this
was the foundation for transformative youth voice becoming a primary goal as articulated by students. While the class continued to maintain competitiveness in
searching for badges and in writing “difficult” clues, these became anchored in
challenging the hegemonic norms of their surroundings. This was a transparent goal
I’d designed into the gameplay curriculum and it was one that was understood by
students and articulated in their textual products: SMS messages, scavenger-hunt
clues, and video reflections.
Student iPods were utilized throughout the class to document the experience;
the creation of QR codes was the only component of this scavenger hunt that
required digital media tools. At the same time, the QR codes—as they are essentially a personalized text themselves—are no different a productive tool than the ability to create a text message, an essay, or a photograph.
Further, the QR code isn’t even a crucial element of the scavenger hunt; all of
the elements of hiding and of seeking would still be in place regardless of whether
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or not QR codes were used. In addition to being a functional literacy tool to add
to students’ bodies of knowledge, the QR codes were adopted for this unit to add
feelings of exclusivity and, as a result, strengthen class community. Though QR codes
are becoming more and more a mainstream media tool seen on advertisements, magazine covers, and even functioning as business cards, the students in my class and
in the focus groups I conducted as part of this research project did not know QR
codes by either sight or by name. With this in mind, they seemed like a foreign,
“secret” language that my students were able to detect, create, and dialogue through.
Like a digital Pig Latin or other playful language system, QR codes allowed students to communicate with each other, with me, and with those who found their
clues in a way that was occluded from the public, dominant gaze.
These functional literacies did much more than simply mirror the way that literacy acquisition occurs in traditional ELA classrooms. Specifically, students understood how to use QR codes in ways that related back to their own identity
development. In terms of learning to use a tool like a QR code reading application
on a mobile media device, this is a significant negotiation that pedagogically plays
out in the learning environment. Instead of purely pulling student-endorsed mobile
media into the classroom through appropriation of youth tools and culture, the QR
code application is instead engaged in a “third space” (Gutierrez, 2008); it is necessary for class participation, but it also becomes an additional ascribed layer of how
students practice, flaunt, and share their mobile media repertoires of practice.
During this first process of playing, the class and I developed three key knowledge sets that would be used throughout the rest of the activity:
1. Indigenous expertise of their communities
2. Conceptual understanding of the function of gameplay and problemposing inquiry
3. Functional skills including creating and reading QR codes, writing
challenging and engaging clues, and properly logging and reflecting on
found items
P ERFORMING : P RODUCING C LUES T ANGLING
WITH
W EBS
By the time the class finished the first scavenger hunt that I prepared for them, students had expressed interest in creating their own scavenger-hunt clues and hiding
badges. Minerva and Dede had formed a team and began plotting locations to hide
clues. Likewise, Dante was thrilled about the competitive prospect of potentially
finding a clue before others did.
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Students had opportunities to write clues and hide scavenger-hunt badges in
pairs before being given asked to produce them independently. This aspect of the
game transitioned the class from being merely a community of shared practice and
shared production to a space where students highlighted and presented individual
work to a shared space. In this way, it speaks to the balance between workplace environments that deemphasize individual work products, and academic spaces where
original work is what often receives the most merit. Although I asked each student
to hide a minimum of four badges and turn in four clues, eight students, nearly half
of the class, turned in additional clues.
In a clue titled “Captain Green!” Dede attempted to draw her classmates’
attention to the few plants and vegetation on the campus:
We all know where we study but we don’t seem to take a look at this Green friend of ours.
After school some of us walk right next to it its real close. Notice how you see this everyday when you come in. Why is Captain Green all alone? [sic]
Dede’s clue is similar to many of her peers’ in that it is simultaneously playful and provoking. Though the clues point toward critical thought, they do so while also allowing students to enjoy the scavenger hunt as a game. Likewise, Minerva’s clue, leading
to a spider taped beneath the building’s water fountain, helps her classmates look at
how the poor conditions of her school environment are normalized. In the middle
of her clue she writes: “We use it or have used it before but still we think it comes
out nasty. It’s where we walk by every day and sometimes we don’t even look at it.”
With three days to write and hide their clues, students in class spent much of
the week busily creating and revising their clues. Meanwhile, the class service
worker, Bruce, acted as the collator of clues: as students finished revised clues,
Bruce would make a class set of the clue and collate them for impending distribution. By Friday, each student was given a sizeable workbook of more than 80 original clues. With a class period and a weekend to search on their own, students
hunched over clues and copies of campus maps plotting how to not only retrieve
clues based on where they speculated they were hidden, but how to do so efficiently:
two students—Elizabeth and Marjane—grouped clues by proximity to each other,
in an effort to find badges that were closest to one another and build a mapped journey of searching across the campus. Elizabeth started with searching for several
badges that were in our building before venturing to the outside quad, the neighboring building, the main lunch area, and two badges that were located near the
school’s auditorium.
In preparing students to hide and search for each other’s badges, I deliberately
attempted to incorporate a subtle identity shift for the students. As the Ask Anansi
narrative culminated in students sharing the storytelling duties of and about their com-
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munity, Anansi revealed that the members of the class were recruited as “Agents of
Anansi.” Students were provided badges that allowed them to move around the campus on specified dates and times in order to look for appropriate hiding places and to
place their badges in the correct locations. By wearing a physical badge that labeled
the students as Agents of Anansi, student classroom identity shifted once again—no
longer were they simply doing “English work” or playing a game, students could interpret their actions as embodied role-playing, performing a specific identity practice.
As students abruptly shifted their roles from hiding clues to now seeking
them, it was enlightening to see the different ways students played and attempted
to deal with the bulk of data that was presented to them—with such a large stack
of clues to work through, students problem-solved their assignment in very different ways. Dante, donning his Agent of Anansi badge, took his clues and immediately left the room on his own accord. Unaccompanied, Dante would end up finding
more clues than any other class member. In contrast, Elizabeth slowly riffled
through the clues, sorting them as mentioned by location but also by what she felt
was the difficulty that they were to “solve” and, in her own words, the clues “that
[Dante’s] probably already gone found by the time I went out there.”
C RITICAL L ITERACIES
AT
W ORK
AND AT
P LAY
The role-playing component of this activity also meant students embodied qualitative research practices while also searching for scavenger-hunt badges. By filling
out searching logs and reflection forms after the hunt, students captured data based
on their observation and participation with the world at large. When understood
that being an Agent of Anansi also meant being an indigenous anthropologist, the
role of the game acts as an additional layer of educational value: students engaged
in ELA curriculum that simultaneously fulfilled generic “school” functions while also
prepping these participants for “society” positions that hold scholarly, political, and
economic value.
The scavenger hunt ensured that critical literacies were embedded within students’ school practices well beyond a single classroom activity. By definition, critical pedagogy challenges the dominant narrative and “hidden curriculum” (Anyon,
1997) of school. And while this curriculum, too, looked to push back on dominant
and positivist constructions of literacies, it functioned to do this while also preparing students for meaningful post-secondary engagement and employment. By
approaching critical literacies from a pedagogy of transformative social play, students
incorporate literacies of resistance and, in turn, amplify their own emerging critical viewpoints through performance.
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Similarly, this activity encouraged ninth graders facing three more years of secondary schooling to approach future classes with questions, criticality, and playfulness. While the duration of the activities that took place were limited due to the
school’s rigorous testing schedule, the literacy practices were purposefully developed
to be applicable to myriad environments and circumstances. Exploring space, questioning author or producer intent, game-design thinking: these literacy-building
skills helped students for classes that would likely not engage in alternate reality
gameplay. Through these approaches, young people are guided through humanistic practices of critical literacies that extend beyond the ELA classroom, the walls
of the socially sequestered school space, and into the liberatory and pragmatically
relevant realm of the civic.
T RANSFORMING : E NSNARING P UBLIC D ISCOURSE
OF C RITICAL T RANSFORMATIVE A CTION
IN THE
W EBS
Once students had completed the scavenger hunt, we discussed what students
encountered on their journey, who the class considered “the winner” of the hunt, and
next steps. As a principal of most, but not all, games is the way that they are competitive (Salen & Zimmerman, 2004), the students were intent on quantifying
their experiences to determine the winner.
As I did not anticipate the need to select a “winner,” I attempted to shift the
class discussion to focus on how the game could be taught to others. We engaged
in a discussion of what fairness means. Most students felt that the game was played
fairly when students independently searched for badges and relied on no other individuals while searching. I pointed out to the class parallels between gameplay and
school structures and that fair gameplay and equitable gameplay essentially establish similar patterns of inequality.
Fair also meant making a “reliable” clue. As Jay explained, “Some clues were just
like finding a piece of grass on the lawn. It was impossible.” The specificity was of a
degree that made finding some clues more tedious than provoking. It is worth noting,
however, that even these clues that were too detailed in location, were still critical of
the location to which they directed students. As Holden said when discussing the single blade of glass example, “I wasn’t going to search every piece of grass on the field and
I could see the point of the clue—the field is dirty and looks all dangerous.”
As we continued to discuss the game, Elizabeth opened up a discussion of what
made playing successful: for her, winning this game was about mutual participation
in both aspects of the play performance, which meant writing challenging and enlightening clues and searching “with all your energy” for the clues that could be found.
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Looking over their experiences transforming the experiences for their classmates, the final step was to invert this game. The “magic circle” of gameplay made
it acceptable to perform the role of the clue-placer/writer and searcher; the strict
social rules that students learn as part of the informal curriculum of going to South
Central High School were eschewed for the experience of “play.”
Selecting two of their locations, I asked students to write very short descriptions of what they encountered, along with an informative or intriguing title. The
assignment also asked the students to conclude their descriptions by posing a question to the individuals that read them. After these cards were written and revised
by a classmate, students used tape to post them prominently in the spaces where they
had originally hid the clues. The hidden badges morphed into prominent public displays of knowledge and dialogue. Minerva’s clue, once hidden underneath the dusty
water fountain outside our classroom, for instance, was later translated into a notecard that was taped directly above the water fountain, unavoidably within the line
of sight of anyone using the fountain.
Pedagogically, this exercise places the critical practices of understanding hidden narratives of power within the community as a component of transformative,
empowering voice. As educators and policymakers explore ways to weave participatory and mobile media practices into classroom practice, the potential demonstrated here suggests the value of mobile media to empower not only the individual
learner but the community at large through easily replicable critical digital literacies instruction.
Further, the transition from making this a “closed” game only available to the
students in my class into an open dialogue with the community is the most transgressive element of this curricular endeavor. Like graffiti or billboard advertisements,
curating the space and reconfiguring how people see their environment is invasive.
Though the notecards that students wrote can be removed and nothing permanent
was added to the spaces, when they were up participants were confronted with a
counter-narrative to the way space is interpreted and engaged.
In writing placards and physically curating the experiences of their community
members, students express critical digital literacies as an opportunity to expand
beyond reading the word and reading the world (Freire & Macedo, 1987) into a productive process of writing the world. Later, the digital world, too, was written upon
by the class since the students took to the official Wikipedia page for South Central
High School Wikipedia. They edited it using Standard English and the database’s
citation format. Students included details on the Wikipedia page that, while just as
factually sound as the existing information about the school’s history and alumni,
allowed students to voice what they felt was necessary, important, and relevant to
the public that may want to access the Wikipedia page. Students captured qualita-
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tive data about student opinion about the food, emphasized the school’s dropout rate,
and noted the small number of custodial staff for the large school.
T OWARD
A
P EDAGOGY
OF
P ARTICIPATORY M EDIA
In 1932, Counts wrote that “teachers must bridge the gap between school and society and play some part in the fashioning of those create common purposes which
should bind the two together.” With participatory and mobile media tools, there is more
potential to bridge this gap than ever before. The tools are already owned and understood by the students in our classroom and traditional pedagogy disregards this fact.
Through examining existing hegemonic narratives of their community and
reappropriating space through textual performance, students developed critical literacies that sought to directly engage in community dialogue. While their use of
mobile media facilitated and made easier the types of productive practices that are
embedded in this curricular exercise, this unit emphasized that a pedagogy of participatory media can instill 21st-century critical literacies development without
overly relying on complicated digital tools. Though students regularly engaged
with mobile throughout this project—documenting evidence, looking up
Wikipedia-related research, and writing discursive notes as both game designers and
game players—it was never the central pedagogical spotlight of this work.
Ultimately, the research that the students and I conducted yielded critical practice
that decentered learning from a traditional classroom; it located engagement in
spaces that students explored critically and instilled literacies instruction within
experiential community knowledge.
Too often, I hear my teaching colleagues and administrators pass off mobile
media as a novelty at best, and—more often—a significant distraction to learning.
When educators and policies deliberately exclude the opportunities demonstrated
through mobile media and participatory media pedagogy, they are perpetuating an
achievement gap that further cleaves society by race and class ( Jenkins, 2008).
Getting students to move more freely beyond the walls of traditional classroom
pedagogy required recognizing the types of practices that students engage in
through their informal practices and adapting them for formal, critical engagement
with literacies. Similarly, even when the pedagogical design of this game-based activity meant students were not using their iPods during many parts of this work, the
project was designed to replicate online participatory media shifts. The tools and
forms of critical digital practices are insignificant. Students need to be exposed to
ways that engagement with media and with society has shifted, regardless of the
tools used. In this study, iPods were used. However, even if my students and I were
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unable to utilize these devices in our co-research, we would have been able to still
participate in critical digital literacies instruction and learning. A pedagogy of participatory media, as demonstrated in this chapter, responds to the needs and interests of youth and engages them in practices they are familiar with to develop a
transformative, community-driven voice.
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CHAPTER
SEVEN
Beyond Technology Skills
Toward a Framework for
Critical Digital Literacies in
Pre-Service Technology Education
S ARAH LOHNES WATULAK & C HARLES K. K INZER
I NTRODUCTION
In this chapter, we propose a theoretical framework of critical digital literacies. We
believe that a critical digital literacies perspective used in conjunction with Koehler
and Mishra’s (2009) Technological, Pedagogical, and Content Knowledge
(TPACK) framework can provide important guidance for meeting the standards
advocated by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) and
others concerned with the effective preparation of our nation’s teachers in areas
related to technology. ISTE’s National Educational Technology Standards (NETS)
for Teachers (2008) encourages teachers to “understand local and global societal
issues and responsibilities in an evolving digital culture and exhibit legal and ethical behavior in their professional practices” (para. 4); likewise, students are expected
to “understand human, cultural, and societal issues related to technology and practice legal and ethical behavior” (ISTE, 2007, para. 5). These standards ask students
and teachers to engage with the broader social and cultural contexts of their technology use, concepts that move beyond the ability to manipulate a keyboard or create an interactive PowerPoint presentation.
Yet much pre-service education technology instruction focuses overly on the
use of technology as a tool for digital creation. Perhaps this occurs, in part,
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because of the emergence in the United States of a participatory culture that features “relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong
support for creating and sharing one’s creations, . . . members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another”
( Jenkins, 2006, p. 3). These acts of sharing, collaboration, and expression—central to engagement in a participatory culture—are enabled and supported by free
or low-cost web-based digital technologies such as blogs, wikis, YouTube, and
other social media. There is both subtle and overt pressure to focus on teaching
technologies as tools, without incorporating an understanding of their uses within
participatory culture, and without integrating technology instruction fully into the
pre-service curriculum in ways that result in critical analysis of content or alignment with pedagogy.
Technology integration strategies and models in pre-service education have traditionally focused on technology skills development (Polly, Mims, Shephard, & Inan,
2010), although Koehler and Mishra’s (2009) Technological, Pedagogical, and
Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework is increasingly used to address weaknesses in this approach because of its holistic focus on technology alongside pedagogy and content knowledge. However, while critical and reflective components are
largely absent from current skills-based conceptions of technology instruction in
teacher education, neither are they explicitly addressed by TPACK. This may raise
concerns for pre-service educators and others who expect that future teachers be able
to model successful participation in a digital society and teach their students to be
technologically literate in the fullest sense. To address such concerns, we propose a
theoretical framework of critical digital literacies.
We begin, below, with an overview of the current state of technology integration efforts in pre-service teacher education. Next, we develop a theoretical
framework for critical digital literacies, which we define as encompassing four
main elements: understanding cultural, social, and historical contexts of technology use; critical thinking and analysis; reflective practice; and facility with the
functional skills and tools of digital technology production. Although discussions
of technology integration most often fall under the purview of the field of instructional technology, we feel that a literacies approach in general, and a critical digital literacies approach in particular, has much to contribute to helping pre-service
technology education move away from a skills-focused approach to digital literacy. We conclude with implications and suggestions for using critical digital literacies in conjunction with TPACK, within pre-service technology course
curricula, to develop critical, reflective teacher practitioners who understand the
uses, functions, and influences of technology.
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T ECHNOLOGY I NTEGRATION
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T EACHER E DUCATION P ROGRAMS
Not surprisingly, technology instruction has become a component of the vast majority of teacher preparation programs, in recognition of the need for pre-service
teachers to be prepared to teach and to live in a digital society. Teacher education
programs that seek to infuse technology into their curricula have used a variety of
strategies to do so, including: a single course that focuses on technology; integrating technology throughout the pre-service curriculum, perhaps through the use of
multimedia and e-portfolios; training education faculty, often through voluntary or
required workshops (sometimes providing additional payment for workshop attendance); modeling strategies for teaching with technology (either in a single course,
or integrated); collaboration with public schools to set up field-based programs, often
involving a teacher mentor; increasing access to technology; and various combinations of strategies (Kay, 2006).
Recent studies have found that most teacher preparation programs in the
United States employ a stand-alone course model, and to a lesser extent, technology-intensive field experiences (Gronseth et al., 2010) to encourage technology integration. In our own teaching, we attempt to integrate technology into every course,
in order to introduce and model skills, practices, and ways of thinking for our students. The first author has also taught a version of the stand-alone technology
course, the model employed at her institution. The population of learners served by
this course includes primarily sophomore and junior undergraduate students, who
have been accepted to an education major with teaching certification (including elementary education, secondary education, and special education). This course is
taken prior to the students’ field experience. The range of models and experiences
described above aim to help pre-service teachers “see connections between current
technology applications and the appropriate uses in a classroom” (Vannatta &
Beyerbach, 2000, as cited in Gronseth et al., 2010, p. 30).
However, the literature does not present a clear picture as to the effectiveness
of various technology integration strategies. Kay (2006) reviewed 68 studies on the
effectiveness of integration strategies on pre-service teacher skills, beliefs, or attitudes toward technology (the three factors most often tested in the studies).
Although a useful overview of integration strategies, Kay ultimately was unable to
draw a conclusion regarding the effectiveness of these strategies, citing weaknesses
in the methodological and theoretical orientation of the studies. Furthermore,
there are many factors that can impact successful technology integration. For example, in studying the implementation of an online, case-based instructional system,
Kinzer, Cammack, Labbo, Teale, and Sanny (2006) found several factors mitigating the instructors’ desired integration of technology, including faculty frustrations
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with university IT departments, lack of readiness of equipment in time for classes,
lack of appropriate software, and lack of awareness by university administrators of
classroom issues when attempting to integrate technology.
Thus, while teacher educators must be prepared to assist their students in
learning the skills and competencies that will provide a foundation for successful
infusion of technology into their teaching, they may be constrained by a lack of
access to technology, and/or insufficient support for use of technology in their own
teaching (Wepner, Tao, & Ziomek, 2006); their skill level with the technologies; their
understanding of best practices for using various technologies to promote learning
and engagement; and by a lack of time to develop this expertise, especially given
teaching, service, and research duties. Many of these factors are also present and must
be considered with regard to field placements as well, in addition to considerations
of mentor teachers’ skill levels, and the match between the technologies that students were introduced to in their university classrooms, and what is available in the
respective placement (Gronseth et al., 2010).
The pedagogies employed by teacher educators and curricular cohesiveness in
university pre-service programs also factor in the eventual success of pre-service
teachers’ technology integration efforts. Groth, Dunlap, and Kidd (2007) found that
the pre-service teachers in their study did not apply the hands-on technology training from their literacy methods courses during their student teaching because they
did not see a clear connection between the literacy methods content and the technology instruction. Gronseth et al. (2010) advocate for “maintaining a level of authenticity in technology experiences” as a means of providing a real-world context for
technology training (p. 30). Indeed, technology instruction that focuses primarily on
developing students’ technology skills has been criticized for leading to ineffective
technology integration once in the in-service classroom (Harris, Mishra, & Koehler,
2009; Polly et al., 2010). Pre-service teachers may know how to create a blog, for example, but lack the ability to use this knowledge to create activities and environments
that promote a deeper understanding of literacy content when they enter the profession as practicing teachers. Below, we describe a framework for technology integration that addresses some of the critiques of skills-focused technology instruction.
O VERVIEW OF
I NTEGRATION
THE
TPACK F RAMEWORK
FOR
T ECHNOLOGY
Within the field of instructional technology, the TPACK framework for technology
integration has gained a great deal of traction over the last five years. At the 2010
annual meeting of the Society for Instructional Technology in Teacher Education,
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for example, TPACK was included in the list of session topics used by the program
committee to categorize posters and presentations; this category comprised 33
accepted paper presentations (4.5 percent of accepted papers). In 2011, the number
rose to 72 (8.9 percent of accepted papers). Papers that address TPACK as a model
for technology integration have been published in top-tier journals in the instructional technology field, including the Journal of Research on Technology in Education
(i.e., Schmidt, Baran, Thompson, Mishra, Koehler, & Shin, 2009), the Journal of
Technology in Teacher Education (i.e., Hur, Cullen, & Brush, 2010), and the Journal
of Digital Learning in Teacher Education (i.e., Niess, van Zee, & Gillow-Wiles, 2010).
The recent popularity of this model stems from its attempt to address the weaknesses in skills-only technology instruction by providing an ecological approach to
technology integration that focuses on the interplay between content knowledge,
pedagogical knowledge, and technology knowledge (Koehler & Mishra, 2009).
The model has gained traction, particularly among instructional technologists and
teacher educators in university settings, who have used it as a framework to (a)
design or redesign pre-service technology instruction (including the stand-alone
technology course at Towson University), and (b) guide pre-service teachers in
developing their own technology-supported instruction. For example, Spires,
Hervey, and Watson (in press) and Spires, Zheng, and Pruden (in press) have found
TPACK to be useful in helping educators understand the relationships between content, pedagogy, and technology, especially as related to new literacies.
Koehler and Mishra (2009) describe teaching as an ill-structured domain
“requiring teachers to apply complex knowledge structures across different cases
and contexts” (p. 61; see also Simon, 1973; Voss, 1988; Spiro & Jehng, 1990; and
Ge & Land, 2003 for discussions of problem solving and learning in ill-structured
domains). Shulman (1986; see also Berliner, 1986) argued that in order to be successful in this type of environment, teachers must be able to integrate knowledge
across relevant domains, on demand, including knowledge of their content area (for
our purposes here, literacy), and knowledge of pedagogy (general teaching methods, how people think and learn). He also identified a third domain of knowledge
that combines the two, pedagogical content knowledge: “an understanding of
how particular topics, problems, or issues are organized, represented, and adapted
to the diverse interests and abilities of learners, and presented for instruction”
(Shulman, 1987, p. 8). To these, Koehler and Mishra (2009) add the domains of
technology knowledge (TK), knowledge of technology tools and affordances;
technological content knowledge (TCK), knowledge of how tools can be used to
support specific content and objectives; and technological pedagogical knowledge
(TPK), knowledge of how particular technologies can be used to support specific
pedagogical approaches.
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In practice, the model suggests that successful technology integration—that is,
technology integration that is seen as having a meaningful impact on pre-service
teachers’ learning—would occur at the intersection of content knowledge (CK), pedagogical knowledge (PK), and technological knowledge (TK): TPACK. Teachers
must have a deep understanding of how to select pedagogical strategies and technologies, to further the understanding of specific content, within particular contexts
and environments.
In order to scaffold this understanding, Harris and Hofer (2009) developed a
framework of learning activity types that provide a content-focused structure for planning instruction that integrates these knowledge domains. See Tables 1 and 2 for examples of learning activity types for elementary and secondary literacy learning (Schmidt,
Harris, & Hofer, 2011; Young, Hofer, & Harris, 2011). While these learning activity
types provide a “preliminary organizational structure to help scaffold teachers’ thinking about how one might design engaging literacy learning activities” (Schmidt et al.,
2011, p. 1), the authors emphasize that these activity types provide a starting point only;
as teachers develop their TPACK knowledge, they will find new ways to integrate content, pedagogy, and technology in ways that best fit their own context.
Although a relatively new model of technology integration, examples of research
that examine TPACK outcomes exist in the literature. Much of this research uses
survey and self-report to measure students’ increased understanding in each of the
TPACK domains separately (CK, PK, and TK), as well as the overlap between them
(TPACK). For example, courses designed around the TPACK model have been
shown to promote positive changes in students’ self-efficacy as related to TPACK
domains (Abbitt, 2011a; Schmidt et al., 2009). Koehler, Mishra, and Yahya’s (2007)
qualitative analysis of pre-service teacher discourse around a semester-long designbased activity revealed the development of connections between technology, pedagogy, and content domains over the course of the semester. Despite these positive
outcomes, Abbitt’s (2011b) review of research methods and instruments used by
researchers to assess gains in TPACK knowledge by pre-service teachers points to
future research questions that must be answered in order to fully understand the usefulness of the TPACK model for technology integration:
How much knowledge of technology, pedagogy, content, or within the blended domains such
as TPK, TCK, TPACK, etc., is sufficient for a beginning teacher? (p. 140)
Although a more robust and complex approach to technology integration than
previous models, technological knowledge (TK) primarily refers to the development
of technology skills, and understanding the affordances of particular tools. As we
discuss below, this conceptualization falls short of perspectives that advocate moving beyond skills-based notions of digital literacy.
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Table 1. Example of Fluency Learning Activity Type for Elementary Literacy Learners1
1. Schmidt, Harris, & Hofer, 2011, p. 2.
Table 2. Example of During-Writing Activity Type for Secondary Literacy
Learners2
2. Young, Hofer, & Harris, 2011, p. 8.
C RITICAL D IGITAL L ITERACIES
“Digital literacy” has been used to signify a variety of concepts in recent years, and
remains a contested term. The phrase has roots in and relationships with a variety
of disciplines, including computer literacy, ICT literacy, media literacy, information
literacy, and e-literacy. This is reflected in the range of definitions of digital literacy, from mastery of digital-technology-related basic skills and competencies
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(Bawden, 2008), to digital literacy as “ideas, not keystrokes” (Gilster, 1997, as cited
in Martin, 2008, p. 18). This latter concept is embedded in the growing body of work
in the theory and practice of digital literacy currently under development at
Futurelab, a United Kingdom–based nonprofit dedicated to 21st-century teaching
and learning. Futurelab’s digital literacy framework emphasizes “social awareness,
critical thinking, knowledge of digital tools” (Hague & Williamson, 2009, p. 8).
Martin (2008) integrates ideas from information and media literacy with an emancipatory agenda, defining digital literacy as
The awareness, attitude and ability of individuals to appropriately use digital tools and
facilities to identify, access, manage, integrate, evaluate, analyze and synthesize digital
resources, construct new knowledge, create media expressions, and communicate with others, in the context of specific life situations, in order to enable constructive social action; and
to reflect upon this process. (pp. 166–167)
In these definitions of digital literacy, functional technology skills are only one piece
of a complex digital literacy picture. Indeed, the latter definition represents an
expanded view of digital literacy, echoing sociocultural perspectives that acknowledge the generative interplay between literacy and the contexts in which literacy
occurs (Lankshear & Knobel, 2007).
Similarly, Gillen and Barton (2010) advocate a social practices approach to digital literacy, drawing on literacy frameworks such as the New London Group’s
conception of multiliteracies (1996), Kress’ multimodality (2010), and Hutchins and
colleagues’ notion of distributed cognition (Hutchins, 1991; Hollan, Hutchins, &
Kirsh, 2000). In their view, digital literacies are “the constantly changing practices
through which people make traceable meanings using digital technologies” (Gillen
& Barton, 2010, p. 9). From this perspective, what it means to be “literate,” “successful,” “appropriate,” “constructive” are defined contextually, as in Street’s (1984) ideological model of literacy, in which literacies “are always rooted in a particular
world-view and in a desire for that view to dominate and to marginalize others”
(Street, 2003, p. 2). The notion that definitions of literacy are contextually based and
must continually change has also prompted arguments that literacy has become a
deictic term due to the link between literacy practices, rapidly developing and
changing technologies, and societal demands and expectations of literate individuals who must use such technologies (e.g., see Leu, 2000; Leu, Kinzer, Coiro, &
Cammack, 2004).
This understanding of digital literacy and its practices provides the foundation
for critical digital literacies, an emerging concept within discussions of digital literacy. From the perspective of sociocultural frameworks of literacy, one might argue
that digital literacies are by definition critical. However, we employ the specific term
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“critical digital literacies” to de-emphasize the relative importance of technology
skills, and emphasize the critical understanding of and engagement with functional technology skills within the broader contexts of technology use. One of the
first authors to employ the phrase in the literature on digital literacy, Merchant
(2007), drew on critical pedagogy and critical literacy to argue for infusing digital
literacy with criticality: “it is important to examine and critique discourses that relate
to wider social issues, power relationships, prejudices or inequities, and indeed that
it is part of the function of educational institutions to engage in this sort of work”
(p. 125). In a similar vein, Dowdall (2009) defined critical digital literacy as “a mastery of the wider sociocultural and economic context in which text production in
digital spaces occurs” (p. 51). Note that both of these positions acknowledge the
functional aspect of digital literacy (i.e., digital text production, broadly defined), but
focus their attention on understanding the broader contexts in which production
occurs, and their potential impacts and outcomes.
Thus, in our view critical digital literacies are not as much a departure from previous concepts of digital literacy as an intentional emphasis on the “critical” component, which is often de-emphasized. In other words, critical digital literacies are
part of a broader digital literacy framework, embedded within personal and professional contexts, environments, and practices. Drawing on earlier definitions of digital literacy, as well as emerging understandings of critical digital literacies, we see
them as encompassing four central elements located within professional and personal contexts, environments, and processes, and within the broader category of digital literacy. Figure 1 illustrates the relationship between the factors that comprise
a critical digital literacies approach.
In its fullest sense, each of the factors represented in Figure 1 encompass those
situated within. Thus, professional contexts, environments, and processes include
aspects of personal contexts; digital literacy; critical digital literacies; critical thinking; reflective practice; understanding of social, historical, and cultural contexts; and
functional knowledge. The figure illustrates visually that digital literacy must
encompass critical digital literacies, and its four central elements:
•
•
•
•
Understanding cultural, social, and historical contexts of technology
use, including ethical and appropriate practices
Critical thinking and analysis
Reflective practice
Functional skills with digital technologies
Each of these elements of critical digital literacies are described in detail below, after
a brief discussion of professional and personal contexts and their application.
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Figure 1. Elements and Positioning of Critical Digital
Literacies from a Pre-service Technology Integration Perspective.
Professional and personal contexts, environments and processes
Keeping in mind the focus of technology integration within pre-service experiences,
we begin with professional contexts, environments, and processes. Using technology for professional purposes, such as teaching within a subject area, requires content-specialized knowledge. A science teacher, for example, may need to know
about using probes linked to a computer, while this may not be relevant for a language arts teacher. Similarly, the contexts within which professional activities are performed influence the technology selection, as well as its use. Professional activities
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conducted with home-based technologies might include the use of specific software
or Internet tools (perhaps Google Scholar or Gradebook software, or software
developed by designers or publishers for specific professional uses in a given content area) and hardware that differs from professional uses in classroom contexts
(where hardware might include interactive white boards or projection capabilities).
Communicative activities, both in form and content, may also differ in the context
of professional uses when compared to personal or informal uses; the structure and
content of communication on a professional forum would differ from informal communication targeted at friends or family. Pre-service technology integration must,
therefore, consider the affordances and constraints of professional contexts and technologies when planning for instruction. As noted by the TPACK framework, a onesize-fits-all approach to technology integration may not develop the specific
expertise that content-area teachers require in their professional activities.
Lohnes and Kinzer (2007) and Lohnes Watulak (2012) have shown that different personal contexts, environments, and processes also lead to differences in technology selection and use. Personal contexts may be physical, experiential, or based
on levels of expertise. For example, personal contexts may encompasses a family situation with computers shared across family members versus a laptop that never
leaves one’s side; knowledge of, and sophistication with, certain types of software
tools over others may all lead to different affordances and constraints. Such factors
should be acknowledged when considering technology integration.
In Figure 1, we place professional contexts within its outer ring given that the
framework targets pre-service instructional considerations. We recognize that personal contexts and factors in technology use spill into and influence professional uses
as well. Teachers with always-available computers function in different ways than
those who share computers, as do teachers who feel that social software is integral
as opposed to peripheral to their personal lives. Clearly, on a personal level, technologies can be leveraged in powerful ways to communicate both personal and professional identities. Dowdall (2009) uses the example of social network site profile
creation to illustrate the knowledge of the wider social and communicative contexts
that young people draw upon while participating in social network sites, using a carefully chosen mix of words, images, and actions to perform their digital identity via
their profile.
Arguably, one might say that personal factors may override professional ones;
and, if the framework focused on general factors of use, the two outer rings may be
reversed. However, with pre-service courses that attempt to integrate technology into
their curricula as our present focus, we feel that planning for instruction and technology integration should begin with professional aspects that acknowledge the
influence of personal factors.
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Critical thinking and analysis
At its core, critical thinking represents thinking that is “purposeful, reasoned, and
goal-directed” (Halpern, 1997, p. 4). Dictionary.com provides a second definition
of critical thinking as well, drawn from their “21st Century Lexicon”: “the mental
process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing,
and evaluating information to reach an answer or conclusion” (dictionary.com,
n.d.). This definition shares much in common with information literacy, and also
overlaps with elements of Martin’s (2008) definition of digital literacy. It also
reflects a shift in how critical thinking is understood by the general public, in part
due to the discourse surrounding what have come to be known as 21st-century skills
and competencies—though critical thinking, evaluation, analysis, and distinguishing fact from propaganda have been a part of literacy curriculum guides for decades.
Nila Banton Smith, for example, cites Stauffer, a coauthor of the popular Winston
Basic Readers published between 1960 and 1962, who notes that the first- through
sixth-grade reading series includes “Deliberately selected stories [that] focus on
problem-solving situations . . . [inviting] children to value and improve their skill
in critical thinking” (Smith, 2002, p. 308).
The Partnership for 21st Century’s (2009) Framework for 21st Century
Learning lists “critical thinking, problem solving, communication and collaboration”
as core skills that students need in order to be successful in today’s workplace in a
digital society (p. 1). Within the 21st Century Framework, critical thinking is
applied specifically within the context of our “technology and media-driven environment, marked by access to an abundance of information, rapid changes in technology tools and the ability to collaborate and make individual contributions on an
unprecedented scale” (p. 2). It has always been necessary to think critically about the
evidence available for decision making, in order to make informed, rational decisions;
however, the vast amount of information available requires us to apply the processoriented second definition in order to achieve the first.
Our understanding of critical thinking within the context of critical digital literacies draws on both of these perspectives. In his discussion of the collaborative
inquiry group research method, Reason notes that participants are asked to develop
“critical attention . . . the ability to look at their experience with affectionate curiosity” (1999, p. 212)—in other words, to question the taken-for-granted elements of
their lives. This is an apt description of what we see as the “critical” component of
critical digital literacies. We ask students to question the taken-for-granted elements of their lives—in this case, their experiences around technology—and to
develop more disciplined thinking about their technology use, informed by an
understanding of both the technologies and their contexts of use. This disciplined
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thinking and understanding can be developed through the process described by the
second definition of critical thinking: conceptualizing, synthesizing, evaluating,
applying, and so on.
Finally, we note that we differentiate our understanding of the “critical” aspect
of critical digital literacies from critical literacy, a framework that is “intended to help
the marginalized unveil unequal power relations and transform their lives through
the empowerment of literacy education” (Lee, 2011, p. 96). While we advocate for a
self-reflective understanding of our position and practices within a digital society (see
next section), these understandings are focused on changing personal and professional
practice, rather than on uncovering power inequality and social injustice.
Reflective practice
A critical digital literacies perspective incorporates the idea that digital citizens
should be reflective practitioners who must possess awareness of social, cultural, and
historical contexts and functional skills, but also should reflect on their position and
practices within these contexts and the outcomes of the uses of their functional skills.
Reflection is an important aspect of a critical digital literacies approach, and one that
needs to be explicitly articulated in any definition of critical digital literacies.
Martin’s (2008) description of the three stages and “key elements” of digital literacy emphasizes reflective practice through a conscious, reflective engagement with
the technologies in our lives. According to Martin, reaching “digital transformation”
(the third stage of digital literacy) requires “the ability to be aware of oneself as a
digitally literate person, and to reflect on one’s own digital literacy development”
(2008, pp. 166–167) in order to bring about change within one’s life.
Within a professional context, Martin’s digital transformation brings to mind
what Schön (1987) calls “reflection-in-action (the ‘thinking what they are doing
while they’re doing it’) that practitioners sometimes bring to situations of uncertainty, uniqueness, and conflict” (p. xi). Reflection-in-action arises from an in-themoment recognition that a change is needed in a particular situation, and leads to
immediate experimentation with ways to bring about a change. Our future teachers need to have the resources to resolve challenges that occur within complex
classroom spaces, including those arising from attempts to integrate technology into
instruction. In the context of a technological challenge, we require knowledge arising from reflection on our own digital literacy practices, including the limits and
needed extensions to our functional technology skills.
Thus, digital transformation begins with self-reflection, when we bring the types
of critical attention, awareness, and thinking described above to bear on our digital literacy practices. Transformation occurs when we extend the understanding
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gained through reflection to the outside world in order to bring about conscious
changes in ones’ technology practices. Within the context of a participatory culture,
reflection may be social and collaborative, as well as personal and individual.
Care must be taken, however, to ensure that reflection activities are designed
around important issues and require deep thinking. Reflective practice has a long
history and many advocates. Yet, Risko, Vukelich, and Roskos (2002) remind us there
are many things to consider when talking about reflective critique. Following a critical review of research that focused on reflection activities with pre-service teachers, they found that
the professional literature is thick on describing researchers’ goals and intentions but thin on
providing guidance for teaching students how to reflect. . . . [and the] goal to initiate reflective critique as an intellectual practice was not met. (p. 135)
Risko, Vukelich, and Roskos suggest that in order to encourage effective reflective
practices, instructors must consider the social contexts within which reflection is
expected to occur. While they do not directly address technology as a tool for collaborative reflection by pre-service teachers, pre-service technology instruction can
encourage reflection in a number of ways, including individual and/or shared collaborative activities in face-to-face classroom settings, or asynchronous reflection via
technology tools. This must be done with care and planning, and instructors will
need to incorporate the various factors shown in Figure 1.
Understanding cultural, social, and historical contexts of technology use
Technologies are not value-neutral objects. As users of digital technologies, we must
understand that technology and its uses are both shaped by social and societal
forces, and synergistically shape how we interact with and make meaning in the
world (Pinch & Bijker, 1984). Leu, Kinzer, Coiro, and Cammack (2004; see also
Leu, Kinzer, Coiro, Castek, & Henry, in press) note that there is a synergistic relationship between technologies and cultural and social factors, and that these often
overlap economic interests. For example, they point to relationships between changing technologies of literacy and societal needs initially in the use of cuneiform tablets,
which arose due to the need to record business transactions in Sumerian society in
the fourth millennium BC; the emergence of the printing press and resulting societal changes that threatened religious dogma and autocratic governments; the distribution of books influencing the development of public education in the United
States; and so on. More recently, we have seen the role of social software and technology as instrumental in supporting efforts of resistance against governments in
the Middle East (Howard, Duffy, Freelon, Hussain, Mari, & Mazaid, 2011; Taylor,
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2011) and to organize protests throughout the world within what has come to be
known as the “Occupy” movement (Preston, 2011). Clearly, technology and literacy are intertwined and are linked through historical, cultural and societal contexts.
Leu, Kinzer, Coiro, and Cammack (2004) also note the importance of technology to increased personal fulfillment and economic benefits. They argue, “global economic competition within economies based increasingly on the effective use of
information and communication” is a social force that shapes our literacy and technology practices (p. 1573). Within all of these contexts—cultural, historical, and
social—particular technologies, skills, and the practices in which they are embedded are valued above others. Jenkins (2006) suggests that a participatory culture privileges “social skills developed through collaborating and networking” (p. 4). Other
valued skills and competencies include the ability to effectively use information and
communication technologies to find and organize information, to communicate, collaborate, solve problems, and think critically, all of which form a part of a critical
digital literacies perspective.
Understanding the broader, often less-visible frameworks that shape our interactions with technology has implications for the design of instruction at all levels.
For example, pre-service teachers can use this understanding to maintain a level of
authenticity within the formal instructional environment, asking their students to
blog in order to connect with others, rather than using the blog space to reproduce
a traditional three-part essay. At the same time, we must also understand that there
is more at stake than whether or not students are capable of creating a Facebook profile or crafting a blog post that becomes a platform for engaging discussion. What
are the implications for students who do not have access to the technologies themselves (the traditional digital divide), and/or who do not have access to the privileged practices (the second digital divide)? These are the types of questions and issues
with which pre-service teachers must be prepared to engage when planning a curriculum that integrates technology.
Functional skills with digital technologies
Functional skills—the ability to manipulate technological tools for a specific purpose—are the foundation of traditional definitions of digital literacy, and are an
important aspect of a digital literacy approach. Teachers and students must be able
to identify and use appropriate technological tools to further their pedagogical and
communicative goals, thus skills training is often a central goal of pre-service technology education. We see a parallel with contested definitions of traditional, textbased literacy that view literacy as a series of skills to be mastered rather than
defining literacy as skills embedded within practices. To be literate in the first
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sense is to master sub-skills; to be literate in the second is to both master sub-skills
and be able to deploy those skills in contextually appropriate ways. To be digitally
“literate” in the fullest sense means incorporating functional skills and the other components of critical digital literacies to understand the practices and cultures of use
within which these skills are deployed.
However, focusing only on teaching technology skills is less than optimal for
another reason as well: the fast pace of technological change means that many of
the functional skills deemed important today will be different than the functional
skills necessary for success in the future. For example, we heard colleagues and students exhibit varying degrees of frustration when our campuses updated to a newer
version of Microsoft Office, which has a different interface from previous versions.
Some people, who exhibited mild frustration when trying to find command locations that were moved (print, save, etc.), took the change in stride, knowing that the
commands must be there—it was simply a matter of finding them. These users were
secure in the knowledge that they could master the change. Some other users
seemed stymied by the changes. Those who exhibited high degrees of frustration
seemed to resent the change and had difficulty with the transition, viewing the
changes as inappropriate and burdensome, and worrying that they might not be able
to function well with the updated software.
Indeed, Standard 3 of ISTE’s (2008) NETS for Teachers, Model Digital-Age
Work and Learning, asks teachers to “demonstrate fluency in technology systems
and the transfer of current knowledge to new technologies and situations” (para 3).
This requires not only functional skills knowledge, but also a framework that provides a critical understanding of how technology can be used, why changes occur,
why they may be necessary, and how they can be implemented across personal and
professional contexts. We believe that teaching with a purely functional skills focus
discourages the flexibility needed to maximize the potential to adapt to technological change.
Figure 1 shows functional skills as being both within and outside the factors that
should form a part of pre-service technology education. The lower part of the functional skills circle, outside the rest of the diagram, shows the location of many technology programs at present. We feel that functional skills are best taught at the point
where all of the circles in the diagrams insect within the functional skills circle. At that
intersection point, functional skills would be taught and incorporated with all of the
other factors represented in Figure 1. When creating pre-service technology courses
or integrating technology instruction into content-area methods classes, keeping this
intersection in mind will help ensure that students learn functional skills, understand
their application within their professional and personal contexts, and understand the
implications of technology on society, as well as their own and their students’ lives.
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P ROGRAMS
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T EACHER E DUCATION
At the beginning of this chapter, we set forth the challenge to envision technology
integration within teacher education programs that prepares future teachers (and
their students) to be successful, full participants in today’s digital society. Although
the research literature does not provide conclusive evidence as to the best way forward in terms of technology integration strategies, it appears that strategies that
focus primarily on technology skills instruction—whether in a stand-alone course
or a field experience—tend to fail (Harris et al., 2009; Polly et al., 2010). With the
introduction of the TPACK model for technology integration, the field has been
reminded that successful technology integration begins with a deep understanding
of the intersection of content, pedagogy, and technology tools and affordances. This
has been viewed as a positive step toward improving how we envision technology
integration in university as well as K–12 classrooms.
However, even within the TPACK framework, technology knowledge (TK) is
discussed primarily in terms of functional skills—how to manipulate technology
tools—and is reminiscent of a skills-based definition of digital literacy. Critical perspectives are largely absent from the discussion. The notion of context is incorporated into the TPACK model (see Figure 1), but its role is not explicitly addressed.
Pre-service teachers are sometimes asked to reflect on their TPACK knowledge after
completing technology-related projects (e.g., Wetzel, Foulger, & Williams, 2008),
which taps into the notion of reflective practice within professional contexts.
However, the model does not explicitly address social and institutional contexts, nor
does it address self-reflection on our digital participation in a digital society.
We suggest that a critical digital literacies framework, used in conjunction
with TPACK, may serve to bring a critical, reflective lens to technology use within
personal and professional contexts. From a practical standpoint, a critical digital literacies perspective suggests that formal and informal learning concerned with digital literacies must involve more than functional (digital) skill instruction. Below, we
present two example activities that incorporate critical digital literacies and TPACK
into their design. Teacher educators can use these activities in stand-alone technology courses, or in any content-area or methods courses that incorporate technology. Through these activities, teacher educators work with their pre-service teachers
to become technologically literate in the fullest sense. Functional skills should be
taught as needed. Knowing how to create and post to a blog, use Comic Life
(http://plasq.com), create a graphic novel, and so on would be taught as needed in
order to fulfill the larger goals of the assignment. We also include the Common Core
English Language Arts College and Career Readiness (CCR) Anchor Standards
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(Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2010) to connect these general activities to a literacy content framework.
Activity 1. Instructors employ this instructional activity to engage pre-service
teachers in a critical exploration of the concept of participatory culture, a concept
central to understanding the current social and cultural contexts of our technology
use. In addition to pre-service education, this activity may be used in any course that
deals with digital culture, youth culture, or technology topics.
Pre-service teachers would blog their technobiographies—autobiographical
accounts of the role technology plays in their lives—in order to reflect on themselves
as participants in a digital culture. To critically explore their context, they would
choose, explore, and analyze a topic related to participatory culture, and produce a
video mashup (created by recombining original source material) that represents their
understanding of the topic. The video is shared on YouTube; students are expected
to use comments left on their video by other YouTube users to revise their work.
After the activity, pre-service teachers blog again, reflecting on the experience of digital authoring within a participatory context. They may also reflect collaboratively,
using a wiki or Google Docs to look back together on the development of their skills
and knowledge as related to their teaching practice. See Table 3 for the alignment
of the activity with critical digital literacies components, TPACK components,
and the Common Core CCR Anchor Standards.
Activity 2. This activity asks teacher educators to use the TPACK learning
activity types (see Table 2; also Harris & Hofer, 2009) to provide authentic, content-based experiences for their pre-service teachers. Incorporating activities based
on the learning activity types provides pre-service teachers with an opportunity to
practice using technologies to support specific content objectives and pedagogical
approaches. The learning type activities can then be modified to include elements
of critical digital literacies.
For this example, we refer back to Table 2 and the Writing Other Forms of Text
learning activity. To modify this activity to incorporate a critical digital literacies perspective for pre-service teachers, the instructor would ask her students to create a
short graphic novel that represents their understanding of a class topic, as an alternate to writing a traditional research paper. Before beginning the assignment, the
pre-service teachers write a blog post about what they know about graphic novels,
and share their experiences with reading or creating graphic novels. During the
research and pre-writing process, they also investigate the graphic novel genre, and
how they are embedded in popular culture, in order to use the technology to represent their understandings via images and text in a way that appropriately reflects
the discourse. Pre-service teachers then use Comic Life or other comic-creation software to create their assignment. After completing the assignment, they write a final
blog post reflecting on the experience of making their graphic novel, with a focus
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Table 3. Alignment of Participatory Culture Inquiry Activity With Common Core English
Language Arts College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards, Critical Digital Literacies, and
TPACK
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Table 3. (continued)
on translating their experience to future classroom teaching. Alternatively, they may
use a visual format such as the graphic novel, or digital storytelling (a video combining images and audio narration), to create a multimedia reflection. See Table 4
for an overview of the alignment of the activity with critical digital literacies components, TPACK components, and the Common Core CCR Anchor Standards.
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Table 4. Alignment of Writing Other Forms of Text Activity With Common Core English
Language Arts College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards, Critical Digital Literacies, and
TPACK
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Table 4. (continued)
These activities draw on elements of TPACK and critical digital literacies to
engage pre-service teachers in experiences that move beyond technology skills, toward
an understanding of what it means to be a digital practitioner (Hague & Williamson,
2009) in a participatory culture that emphasizes technology as a preferred means of
producing and communicating information and other texts ( Jenkins, 2006).
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C ONCLUSION
In one of the earliest articles to explicitly articulate a need for critical digital literacies, Merchant (2007) concluded that students have a “common entitlement with
respect to critical digital literacy” based on these rights:
•
•
•
•
The right to access and use up-to-date new technologies building on
everyday (or out-of-school) practices
The right to an education that supports and develops the skills, knowledge and dispositions needed for the effective use of digital media, and
also provides opportunities for critical digital literacies practice
The right to explore and experiment with one’s own digital space
The right to critique and resist dominant or dominating discourses in
digital domains (p. 126).
These are rights of pre-service teachers, and of their future students. Though traditionally focused on technology tools, pre-service technology instruction has an
opportunity to play a role in securing these rights for our current pre-service teachers. This requires an acknowledgment that successful participation in our digital society includes the ability to understand, think critically about, reflect on, and respond
to the societal, cultural, and economic forces that shape our interactions with and
through technology, both in our professional lives as educators, and in our everyday lives. We hope that the critical digital literacies framework and activities presented in this chapter offer both theoretical and practical guidance for teacher
educators to conceptualize pre-service technology instruction that incorporates, but
moves beyond, teaching technology skills.
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PA R T 3
Resisting Dominant Narratives
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CHAPTER
EIGHT
“They Get What
They Deserve”
Interrogating Critical Digital Literacy
Experiences as Framed in a Québec
Alternative High School Context
DANA E. S ALTER
In this chapter I would like to make two interconnected arguments. First, I argue
for the interrogation of the way alternative schools are framed in order to explore
what range of literacy practices are enabled and/or constrained by how critical digital literacies practices and experiences get produced and taken up in this education context. There are three frames that help me make this argument: (1) the
nuanced frame of defining the alternative-school context, (2) English Language
Arts curriculum in the alternative-school context, and (3) digital literacy definitions produced in the alternative-school context. These frames were distilled
from my interviews and conversations with teachers and students in a Québec
alternative school, as well as curriculum and policy document analysis. Taken
together, these three frames highlight how the underlying structure and values
associated with the alternative school in my study produces a definition of inschool literacy and student engagement with literacies—critical digital literacies
in particular—that narrows, rather than expands, literacy engagements for students
in this schooling context.
Second, I argue the vital importance of interrogating the pre-formed images
of the schools, students, and learning that critical digital literacies teachers and
researchers bring to alternative education contexts and how these taken-for-granted
ideas about these schools and research sites shape the way we frame our critical digital literacies research through how we interact with the sites themselves, our inter-
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actions with research participants, and our expectations of what we’ll find. This is
particularly true for contexts and people who have been framed around discourses
of deficit, pathology, exclusion, and marginalization, and subsequently had significant bearing on my research. The two arguments go hand in hand and have not
been widely explored in alternative education, literacy, and critical digital literacies
in alternative-education context literature. I conclude by noting that we should
“think big” (Greene, 1995; Kim, 2010) about critical digital literacies in alternativeschool contexts so that all students, and especially students in alternative schools,
get the education—literacy education in particular—framed and taught in ways they
“deserve.”
W HAT I S
THE
S TORY ?
So how did I arrive at the above arguments in this chapter? While analyzing my
data, several emergent themes kept taking me back to an observational vignette that
I captured early on in my field notes as I conducted my research at Opportunities
High School (OHS) (all names are pseudonyms), an English-language alternative
school in Québec, Canada. The alternative school in my study is part of a group of
publicly funded schools in Québec that educate students who have been “invited to
leave” or have been “pushed out” of traditional/regular high schools for a variety of
reasons and who struggle to complete high school (Hemmer, 2009; Kim, 2008, 2011;
Kleiner, Porch, & Farris, 2002; Smith, Peled, & Albert, 2008; Wishart, 2009;
Wright et al., 2008). This vignette turned out to be a pivotal moment in my research
in terms of how I began to “see” the OHS contextually.
Vignette: “They get what they deserve”
Opportunities High School (OHS) is an alternative high school located in a working-class neighborhood in Québec that provides education for about 60 young people ages 14–20. The computer lab there has about 25 old PCs in it and on any given
day, fewer than half of them are fully working. There is a row of about 12 broken
computers lined up on the floor in the back of the lab. Their black screens are covered in a fine layer of dust.
Outside of the computer lab at OHS is an old piano with well-worn keys. Some
of the ivory has chipped off the keys and the piano is obscenely out of tune. But that
doesn’t stop students from playing it. And that is the point of its existence there.
In fact, on the day I’m writing about, one student, Shawn, was teaching himself to
play piano by watching YouTube videos and playing this very piano.
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During the morning of my fourth day of fieldwork, I walked into the computer
lab and met Linda, the technology support person who worked for the IT department at the school board. Linda was at the school to check for software updates on
the computers in the lab. What fascinated me about Linda’s presence was an interaction she had with Mary and Joanne, the teachers I was working with on the critical digital literacies graphic-novel digital story and comic-book projects.
Both teachers asked Linda when someone was going to come and pick up the
defective/non-working computers so that they could fix up the computer lab.
Linda’s response was to talk about the organization of picking up computers and
that they have to be picked up in batches of 20 or more. There were only about 12
sitting on the floor. Linda said that it would be a useless trip for them to pick up a
few computers. Joanne was irritated about this and said so. She couldn’t believe that
no one could come and get the computers so that she and Mary could make their
school look nice. I noted in my field notes that it didn’t seem like an unusual protocol for computer pick up and so Joanne’s response seemed off to me or disproportionate to what I thought the situation called for.
Mary added that one of the main reasons they wanted the computers out of
there is that they have “new” donated computers, and having me volunteer showed
the kids that they (the teachers and the school) take pride in kids and in the
school’s appearance—and that this goes a long way towards improving student perceptions of the school. Joanne apologized for her line of questioning and asked if
they could just rent a truck and move the computers. Linda said no, as each computer had to be scanned and accounted for.
Linda continued that it was a shame that OHS didn’t have more money
because there are other schools that have so many new computers. There was a pause
in the conversation as the echo of Linda’s statement hung in the air. Linda continued that in some schools she goes into, there are all these new computers and so no
computer maintenance is needed—she basically has nothing to do when she goes
to these schools. Mary and Joanne continued to look at Linda. There was no conversation about why this school wasn’t getting new computers.
I left the room because Shawn popped his head in and asked me to watch a
YouTube video and play the piano with him. When I returned, Linda was in the
middle of explaining that the kids in this school have to take care of their things
and why fix them up or get new ones if the OHS students weren’t going to take care
of them anyway. Linda said the OHS students had to learn to accept the consequences of their actions. She concluded: “These kids get what they deserve.” Mary
and Joanne, visibly angry, looked at the clock on the wall and left to start the
school day.
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How this vignette begins to illustrate “the story”
I took a step back from the data and asked my own follow-up question to Linda’s
observation: “What do ‘these’ students ‘deserve’?” The dictionary defines “deserve”
as meaning “to be qualified for reward, punishment, recompense, etc.”
(Dictionary.com, 2011). The idea of the students in the alternative school as being
qualified for having old computers with outdated software and a broken-down piano
got me thinking about what else we think these young people are qualified for. The
moment that Linda, the technology support person at OHS, uttered these words
and I observed Mary and Joanne’s reaction to them ultimately proved to be a pivotal turning point in my research, because this vignette helped me begin to articulate the frames that produce the context of the school, the way English Language
Arts curriculum is taken up and how critical digital literacies get defined in this context. Re-reading my field notes as I explored the emerging themes in the data
brought the vignette to the forefront of my research analysis because of the questions it raised in light of my emergent findings. Particularly, what pre-formed
images do we have about alternative schools? How are these images constructed?
How are these images operationalized in the literacy curriculum at this school?
What happens when we introduce critical digital literacies into this context? How
are critical digital literacies then framed in this education context?
To begin to address these questions, I again returned to my analysis, which
helped me see that while Linda’s words were upsetting to hear, I had to try to place
myself in Linda’s shoes and think about what pre-formed images of the alternative
school could have possibly shaped her response. Again, how was that image constructed and operationalized in Linda’s discussions of the OHS students and technology with Mary and Joanne? What story of the school could this image create and
how did Linda “see” the students? How did Mary and Joanne “see” the students?
How did I “see” and frame the students, teachers, the school, and the critical digital literacies praxis in the school?
O VERVIEW
OF THE
S TUDY
As I begin to talk in more detail about the story of the OHS context as revealed
through the vignette, I will first briefly outline my study. In this study, I worked with
the Secondary 4 and 5 (equivalent to high school grades 9–11) students, English
Language Arts teachers and resource teachers at the school to create two separate
critical digital literacies projects that had never been done before at OHS: a graphic
novel-based, digital-story unit and a self-reflection comic-book unit. Briefly, my
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working definition of critical digital literacies builds upon Dockter and Lewis’
(2009) definition by viewing them as digitally mediated social practices that envision and frame literacy as a form of critical civic engagement “so that [students] can
‘read’ [and I would add produce and act upon] the linguistic, visual, and aural signs
and symbols that inundate their lives, both public and private” (p.17; also see
Merchant, 2009). The critical digital literacies projects I helped design with the students and teachers at OHS used this working definition as the foundational theoretical frame as we aligned the project with the Québec English Language Arts
curriculum (MELS, 2001).
In this chapter, I focus on the graphic novel-based digital story unit where students chose a pre-approved graphic novel and produced a digital story of their own
critical literacy response to the book. After the students completed these projects, I
interviewed them and their teachers. At that point in the research, I saw that I needed
to step back and explore more deeply what the students, teachers, and my analysis
of the curriculum was revealing, because my findings were bumping up against my
taken-for-granted pre-formed images about the school context and my research.
As I analyzed the data, I was compelled to look at three emerging themes that
I hadn’t anticipated as having such a profound impact on my critical digital literacies
research in this context: contextual characteristics of alternative schools; stories/narratives associated with students/teachers in alternative schools; and literacy and critical digital literacy as defined at OHS. I didn’t think I entered into the research context
naively; I had researched the alternative education and critical digital literacies literatures to think through issues of literacy, power, critical digital literacies, and context.
I did note that I found minimal research relating to critical digital literacies praxis in
alternative-school contexts. However, I didn’t anticipate how meaningful that research
silence would be in my work. These themes did not make sense with my initial
research focus, but they brought forward important conversations about how alternative schools are framed that I subsequently learned were rarely mentioned in relation to critical digital literacies and alternative schools in the literature.
To illustrate my point, I return to Shawn, the student in the vignette who used
YouTube to teach himself how to play piano. Shawn really embraced the project,
going beyond the assigned work to create not one but two digital stories about his
process in creating the assignment. This project was a particularly generative moment
for Shawn and his teachers because it showcased a side of him that the teachers and
his peers had not seen. Because of the highly enthusiastic and surprised response to
his project, I obtained Shawn’s permission to show his digital story to other teachers and students and interview the teachers and students immediately after viewing
the digital story. One teacher responded that this project “completely changes his
story! I had no idea he could do this…what other talents do these kids have that we
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just don’t know about because of the way we’re teaching them?” This project seemed
to provide a more complex and rich way to frame critical digital literacies research
in alternative-education contexts. But again, that was not the full story.
In the next sections, I discuss in greater detail the three frames for interrogating critical digital literacies praxis in an alternative-school context that emerged from
my data. These three frames are context, curriculum, and critical digital literacies
definitions produced in this context. Taken together, they begin to construct what
I call “messy” contextual understandings of how, when not interrogated, the alternative-school context can produce a narrowed, rather than expanded, literacy
engagement spectrum for students in this school.
F RAME N UMBER 1: N UANCED D ISCUSSION
C ONTEXT
OF THE
OHS
The first frame for interrogating critical digital literacies in the alternative-school
context is the frame of a nuanced discussion of context itself. Through a focus-group
conversation and interviews with the teachers in the school, in which I asked them
to respond to Shawn’s project, I began to see how “messy” yet crucially important
framing a nuanced discussion of the context of OHS was for understanding the role
and impact of critical digital literacies praxis in the school. Quickly and tellingly,
my goals for the conversations to be about Shawn’s project morphed as they were
taken up by the teachers and repurposed to discuss both the need for schools like
OHS and the teachers’ own experiences of the challenges of the very existence of
the school. The longer we talked, the messier my understanding of the alternativeschool context became, and the clearer I began to see the need for this messy frame
in thinking through the consequences and affordances of critical digital literacies
engagements in alternative schools like OHS. Based upon the teacher’s conversations, there are three key parts to this frame: the alternative-school identity crisis,
the Québec education landscape, and the sloganization of inclusive education.
The alternative-school identity crisis
The excerpt below is from a teacher focus-group conversation about Shawn’s project. This conversation quickly turned into a discussion of the challenges of defining the school context itself through my question regarding the teachers’ perceptions
of the impact of this project at this school. The teachers sought to define the school
and subsequently revealed three different images of alternative schools that shape
how they are defined, and ultimately help us begin to understand the pre-formed
image people may have about the school (Kim, 2008, 2010).
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PATRICIA:
[OHS] is a dumping ground—
HOPE:
Yea, we don’t know who we are. We don’t know if we’re a special ed school or—
BRIAN:
Or…or socio-environmental—
TRICIA (TEACHER):
Yea, we kind of have an identity crisis going on . . .
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The theme of “not knowing who we are,” the image of the school as a “dumping ground” and having an “identity crisis” are observable in the emerging alternative-school literature (Becker, 2010; Kim, 2008, 2010; Munoz, 2004; Rhymes,
2001). As the excerpt from the teacher interview shows, depending on how the alternative school is framed from its conception and in relation to its context, the alternative school can have a staggering amount of definitions. As Patricia noted, it can
be defined as being a “dumping ground” or “warehouse” for young people who don’t
fit into or are falling behind in “regular” school contexts (Kim, 2008, p. 207). It can
be defined as education space for students with behavioral challenges, psychosocial and emotional needs (Quinn & Poirier, 2006; Smith, Peled, & Albert, 2008).
It can also be understood as a space for education that is less regimented and more
aligned with the specific needs of students and community (Wishart, 2009).
Additionally, these schools can be defined as charter schools and other alternativeeducation programs (Raywid, 1999). Finally, alternative schools can be understood
as combinations of all of the above school conceptualizations (Kim, 2010; Rymes,
2001). Importantly, even with the myriad of definitions, alternative education in
North America has been minimally researched in relation to the ongoing role they
have had in public education (Kim, 2008).
Returning to the teacher excerpt, Kim (2008) discusses the concept of identity
crisis by arguing that the alternative school in her study existed “in a multidimensional state of disequilibrium” (p. 217) that impacted and shaped a range of schooling practices. This identity crisis or disequilibrium caused Kim to wonder “who truly
benefited from this kind of alternative education” (p. 217). These teachers seem to
be asking the same question, which is important since this conversation happened
just after viewing Shawn’s project. What is obscured by this confusion around
defining alternative education in general and OHS in particular and “not knowing
who [they] are” is the larger discursive framework that produces these schools and
out of which the schools produce students, teachers, and learning experiences.
The challenge of the Québec context
Continuing my discussion of the first frame for interrogating critical digital literacies in the alternative school context, I turn my attention to locating alternative edu-
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cation in the Québec geopolitical context. In this focus-group excerpt, Patricia, the
head teacher, explains why she believes the alternative school is needed in Québec,
while also speaking to the challenge of being heard in a context that seems indifferent to your existence:
…but there are kids out there that are different, absolutely, and…I think the school system
has to cater to that…[the Québec Ministry of Education has] begun to understand that there
definitely is a need for [Opportunities High School and schools like it] but I think…we need
to be heard. There has to be…a louder voice because we are definitely not getting enough
funding in order for us to succeed. And to feel that we’ve succeeded in catching all these
kids…we need to have more funding and very slowly people are beginning to understand
that we’re the ones that are keeping the dropout rate low.
Patricia’s argument that the school system needs to not just acknowledge but
include and cater to the students who “are different” invites us to question what
it means for a student to be “different” in Québec, where the education system has
recently (within the last ten years) undergone sweeping curriculum reform
(MELS, 2001; Smith, Foster, & Donahue, 1999). It also begs us to ask how that
difference translates to schooling practices. For example, to date, recent studies and
public discussions have addressed how issues related to difference, such as dropout
and retention (McKinsey & Co., 2010), immigration, French- and English-language laws and policies (Breton-Carbonneau & Cleghorn, 2010; Lamarre, 2008),
local, national, and global socioeconomic policy discourses (Edgerton, Peter, &
Roberts, 2008; Henchey, 2007), and the aforementioned curriculum reform
(Bhardwaj, 2011; Lafortune, Prud’homme, Sorin, et al., 2011) create a complex
education context that seems to simultaneously provide space for and limit a spectrum of education options. Alternative-school education seems to be produced as
one of these options (Wright et al., 2008).
However, while these schools may be produced as an option, Patricia observed
that her school and other schools like them fill an ever-growing need to reduce the
high Québec dropout rate (McKinsey & Co., 2010); yet they still “need to be
heard,” amplifying the silence about these schools in the Québec research literature—even in light of the above-mentioned geopolitical context. As the Canadian
education system is organized around provincial education policies and funding
practices (Edgerton et al., 2008; Wotherspoon & Schissel, 2000, p. 2), it is difficult
to get a clear picture of the scope and frame of alternative education across the country because, to the best of my knowledge, there is not a multiple provincial or
national discussion or repository of alternative-education research and studies (e.g.,
Carver, Lewis, & Tice, 2010; Stanford University’s California Alternative Education
Research Project, 2008). The dearth of research and analysis on alternative schools
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in the Québec context, especially in light of what it means to be “different” in this
context as briefly outlined above, has an impact on the questions asked and research
done regarding the learning experiences of increasing number of Québec students
who are struggling in school. Extending this conversation, in the absence of sustained
research and wide-ranging nuanced discussions of alternative education in Québec,
how do we understand the image of schools like OHS that are produced in an
opaque system and the impact of that image on framing learning experiences
(Munoz, 2004, p. 14)?
The consequences of the sloganization of inclusive education
Since alternative schools are minimally discussed in Québec research, an insightful
way to try to view the alternative-school context in my study is through Québec’s
adoption of an inclusive education policy stance towards education (Lupart, 2000,
2008; MELS, 2000; Porter, 2008; Slee, 2011), since this policy is aimed at framing
educational avenues for students who struggle in school. Briefly, inclusive education
in Québec, like alternative education, has a long history and a host of definitions that
are fraught with deep tensions around defining and diagnosing students who struggle in school, how the barriers for learning should be removed and high-quality equitable schooling provided for all students, but especially students who have been
diagnosed with learning disabilities/difficulties and/or who struggle to fit in to socalled “regular schooling” (Advisory Board on English Education Special Education,
2006; Allan, 2009; Benjamin, 2002; Lupart, 2008; Slee, 2011). By law, each Québec
school board constructs and implements their own inclusive education provisions and
these can range from “integration” of students to providing special-education schools
(MELS, 2006). Keeping this in mind, the question then becomes, how do alternative schools like OHS fit into inclusive education conversations?
During our teacher focus-group conversation about Shawn’s digital story, a
teacher named Hope opens up this question by making the following statement:
It used to be that…a lot of the students that are here now probably…wouldn’t have been
kept in schools. It’s just recently that Québec has adopted this whole inclusion [inclusive
education policy] thing…so now they’re deciding to not separate these students who are
learning disabled who used to be in special ed classes or resource rooms or stuff like that.
Now they are trying to incorporate these students into a regular classroom and when you
have 30 kids in a classroom…or you have maybe one person following the child and it just
creates the behaviour difficulties. So a lot of these schools are trying to…it seems like they
are just trying to get rid of these kids. So now the alternative school has also become kind
of like a special ed center.
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Taking up Hope’s observation that certain understandings of inclusive education policy and practice allow regular schools to use the alternative school as a way
to remove the students who struggle, I argue that she is alluding to the impact of
the sloganization of inclusive education. The way that the many inclusive education definitions and policies get produced and taken up in education contexts has
led to the sloganization of inclusive education—where, as Benjamin (2002) notes,
“a framework for understanding and engaging with student failure has not been
developed and failure itself becomes elided through complicated narratives of remediation and ‘banal and vacuous’ versions of ‘inclusion’ (Wilson, 2000)” (Benkamin,
2002, p. 50). In Hope’s statement, a version of inclusion is the “dumping ground”
of the alternative education. Inclusion becomes just another slogan.
Pushing back against the sloganization of inclusive education, Slee (2011)
reminds us that “[i]nclusive education…requires that we seek understandings of
exclusion from the perspectives of those who are devalued and rendered marginal
or surplus by the dominant culture of the regular schools” (p. 107). While many alternative schools, including the one in my study, are framed as inclusive education
spaces that can provide positive and rich learning spaces for students who have struggled in traditional schools and help them be successful in their post-school lives
(Kim, 2010; Slee, 2011; Wishart, 2009; Wotherspoon & Schissel, 2000), as the head
teacher Patricia noted above, these schools also serve as places to “catch” the surplus
students. While this can seem laudable on the surface, it also produces a certain kind
of student in a certain kind of education context—an “at-risk” surplus student in an
education context that is rendered invisible (Gee, 2001). This alternative-education
context frame has enormous ethical and emotional costs for students, teachers, their
communities, and society as a whole. In particular, the frame of context impacts how
curriculum is shaped and implemented in general, and critical digital literacies curricular practices in particular.
F RAME N UMBER 2: E NGLISH
THE OHS C ONTEXT
L ANGUAGE A RTS C URRICULUM
IN
The second frame for interrogating critical digital literacies praxis in the alternative school context is curricular. In this section, I argue that the OHS context produces a version of the English Language Arts curriculum that bumps up against the
stated goals of the official English Language Arts curriculum. Examining the
stated goals and desired competencies of the Québec Education Program curriculum raises important questions about the role of context in literacy/critical digital
literacies education in the alternative school.
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The Québec Education Reform English Language Arts Curriculum and
Critical Digital Literacies
I would argue that according to the Québec Education Program, the curricular
expectations for literacy in all Québec high schools is, in theory, very much aligned
with definitions of critical digital literacies that call for a renewed examination of
what critical digital literacies engagement looks like in classrooms with historically
marginalized students (Dockter & Lewis, 2010; MELS QEP, pp. 4–5). The Québec
Education Program states that high school Cycle 2 (Secondary 4 and 5) English
Language Arts is a critical literacy curriculum that “focuses on fluency in the reading and production of spoken, written and media texts.” (MELS QEP, pp. 1 & 5).
Teachers and students are encouraged to work from an integrated “interactive and
collaborative” inquiry approach to literacy education that is deliberate about addressing the sociocultural nature of the codes and conventions of different genred literacy experiences (MELS QEP, pp. 7 & 11).
Indeed, as I mentioned previously, in my study, my working definition of critical
digital literacies builds upon Dockter and Lewis’ (2009) arguments by seeing them
as digitally mediated social practices that envision and frame literacy as a form of critical civic engagement “so that [students] can ‘read’ [and I would add produce and act
upon] the linguistic, visual, and aural signs and symbols that inundate their lives, both
public and private” (p.17; also see Merchant, 2009). Working with students in alternative schools to have a range of literacy experiences is at the heart of my definition,
and I see it echoed in the stated English Language Arts curriculum. In the Québec
Education Program, there is an explicit directive for literacy education that provides
a robust range of literacy experiences that are reflective, and that provide degrees of
civic engagement and prepare students for post-school life (MELS QEP, pp. 5–7).
Re-thinking the Québec Education Program and the alternative-school
context
On the surface, the Québec Education Program seems to align nicely with critical
digital literacies discussions. However, as with any curriculum, not all education contexts where the curriculum will be implemented are equal, and taking up the
Québec Education Program English Language Arts curriculum in the OHS context magnifies the constraining force of context. When I use my emerging frame
of the little-studied messy context of OHS, I get another view of the Québec
Education Program English Language Arts curriculum and how literacy is framed
in this context that compels me to question how we conceptualize critical digital literacies in alternative schools like OHS (Munoz, 2004). For example, the Québec
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Education Program has been critiqued as being produced within and advocating a
neoliberal discourse that privileges a direct linking of school knowledge with the
knowledge-based economy (Bhardwaj, 2011). This coupling of school knowledge
with economic structures is not new (Apple, 2001; Cuban, 1989; deCastell & Luke,
1983; Franklin, 1994; Stevens, 2011), but what is important to consider is how emergent discussions of critical digital literacies are being produced and taken up within
this equation that subsequently frames how literacy discussions and curriculum are
produced and implemented for historically marginalized students who are rendered
surplus and are in alternative-education contexts (Alvermann, 2006, 2009; Franzack,
2006; Hull, Zacher, & Hibbert, 2009; Janks, 2010; Vasudevan & Campano, 2009,
p. 328). That is, we must consider how critical digital literacies are defined and the
range of literacy experiences that are subsequently expected within the alternative
school context based upon how the school itself is framed (Luke & Woods, 2009,
pp. 198–200). In the next section, I begin to discuss specifically how the frames of
OHS context and English Language Arts curriculum in this context help us see how
critical digital literacies discussions are produced and taken up at OHS.
The pull of context: The Québec Education Program English Language
Arts curriculum, OHS, and narrowed definitions of literacy
In discussing their experiences of the tension between the stated goals of the
Québec Education Program English Language Arts curriculum and what happens
when it is taken up at OHS, Nora, one of the two support teachers I interviewed
who work closely with the OHS English Language Arts staff explained:
Really, it’s depressing. When you read about [the high dropout rate]…when you read about
these kids and the outcomes and all of that, it’s…it’s not positive at all. Why are we giving
up? I mean it’s scary to think…when you think about…what…what is going to happen to
them? That’s what I think about. What is going to end up happening? Because there is such
a high demand in the workforce for literacy, for social skills, and all of these skills that you
know…and here we are working in piecemeal…you know, past-tense verbs and are they able
to understand this or that or spell a word right. You know, very discrete little skills that, in
the end, who cares. Once we get into the world, it’s not about whether or not they can spell
“because” exactly, right?
Nora’s comments pull together our previous discussions to this point in this chapter. She begins by talking about the public engagement with the messy context of how
OHS is framed by talking about the negative images of the school and student in it
in public discourse (Branswell, 2009) such as newspapers, social media, and TV. She
moves the conversation from the theoretical to the emotional by noting that there is
a strong element of fear associated with thinking about the lived experiences of stu-
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dents in alternative schools. The emotional connection that Nora voices when she asks,
“What’s going to end up happening” to the students relates to my earlier discussion of
how the school is framed as an inclusive school, but we must closely examine how inclusion and exclusion are framed from the perspective of those who are rendered surplus.
What is inclusion in this context and what happens after one is excluded?
Finally, similar to the framing of the Québec Education Program, Nora links
literacy engagements and neoliberal knowledge-based economic conversations by
noting that a range of literacy skills are in demand in the workforce. But interestingly, she immediately draws attention to how all of these issues converge in the
alternative-school context by stating, “here we are working in piecemeal.” For Nora,
in this alternative-school context, she cannot even get to addressing the literacy experiences outlined in the Québec Education Program, because “here” literacy is framed
as remediation within a larger deficit construction of students’ literacy practices and
engagements (Valencia, 2010).
And while this view of literacy as a set of remedial piecemeal practices may be foregrounded at OHS, I would like to return our attention to the nuanced discussion of
context. The school itself is produced at the intersection of a range of issues, and rarely
researched and discussed, thus producing a “thick” silence that Patricia, the lead
teacher, articulated, where these important literacy/critical digital literacies conversations remain in isolation. The students, teachers, and staff work piecemeal to teach and
acquire literacy practices. I am not interpreting Nora’s comments as arguing that
there are not specific skills that young people need to have in order to take care of themselves and be successful (e.g., being able to read and write to do well in a job). What
I am saying is that Nora’s comments highlight the point that these skills cannot be
divorced from the context in which their value was produced (Gutierrez, Morales, &
Martinez, 2009). We value certain kinds of literacy skills in certain kinds of contexts.
And in the alternative-school context, a narrowed literacy spectrum that focused on
job-readiness literacy skills seems to be most valued (Franzak, 2006). Again, I understand why, especially in light of the high dropout and unemployment rate for young
people who struggle in school. However, that is not the only reason for literacy practices. We must expand the literacy spectrum and value a range of literacy experiences
for all students, and students in alternative schools like OHS in particular.
F RAME N UMBER 3: C RITICAL D IGITAL L ITERACIES
C ONTEXT
IN THE
OHS
How do we begin to expand the literacy spectrum for students in alternative schools
like OHS? I argue that critical digital literacies are one way to begin. In this next
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section, I return to my conversations with teachers and students after they viewed
Shawn’s digital story. What I found most interesting from these conversations was
that even in a project designed to engage with critical digital literacies, the pull of
the context (e.g., the need for the project to lead to post-school, work-related, literacy-skills development) almost overshadowed the critical components of the digital literacy engagements. Revealingly, as the researcher, I was a key part of
encouraging this line of reflection. I feel this is important to acknowledge for
methodological reasons as we conduct critical digital literacies research in alternative-education sites and other historically marginalized and underserved contexts.
If the messiness of the alternative-school context is not considered, critical digital
literacies can be shaped and taken up as “more of the status quo” of literacy instruction and learning. At the same time, when the messy context is engaged with, it can
provide a way to loosen the constraining, narrowly defined literacy discourse that
may be produced in this context.
Reinscribing narrow critical literacy visions
The excerpt below took place immediately after two support teachers and I had
watched Shawn’s digital story together:
TARA:
But to use [this project] as an alternative…why not? I mean
it’s…they’re doing…they’re using the same basic skills…they’re
researching, they’re having to plan it out, they’re having to present, to express themselves…so what is the difference, really?
But I think this is even better because they’re using…they’re
using technology that they will likely have to use at some point
when they’re working, you know?
DANA:
And that’s one of the things I said to him that, you know, we
can…we can start to think about your CV and get more digital
storytelling…experience.
NORA:
It really just focuses in, centers in […] so that he’s able to find a
career or some kind of job at least that…that he can use his
strengths in.
Astoundingly, the very first thing the teachers and I mentioned about the project
is the isolated skill sets that Shawn employed. I argue that while my good intentions
were aimed at working with the teachers and Shawn to make a project that we hoped
would begin to expand his range of in-school literacy experiences, part of the way we
framed and discussed the project bore the traces of a discourse of risk and deficit constructions mentality (Slee, 2011; Swadener & Lubeck, 1995; Valencia, 2010) that
reduces literacy discussions in alternative schools to, in this case, making sure to
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emphasize how this project, and projects like this, might help Shawn and students like
him get jobs and be “successful” in their post-school lives (Benjamin, 2002, p. 50).
A key assumption or pre-formed image we had was the role that increased new
literacies opportunities can have in helping historically marginalized young people
participate in global knowledge economy. As Tara asked, “what was the difference,
really” between this project and a non-critical digital literacies project? Shawn did
take ownership of the project and engage in some critical elements of meaning-making, but during the course of the project, we (researcher and teachers) got so excited
about the fact that it was happening at this school in this context that we didn’t look
carefully at the literacy engagements that were being produced. We focused on the
discrete narrow skill sets Shawn was practicing. Again, yes, this is important, but it
tends to be the default conversation in alternative-school contexts (Hemmer, 2009;
Kim, 2008). While the teachers and I did talk about the decontextualized nature of
testing and how the culture of the school impacts learning, that exchange took place
later in the conversation, not directly after viewing Shawn’s digital story.
And here we can see the pull of the messy context. I am not arguing that our
response is only localized to the alternative-school context (Alvermann, 2009); I am
instead arguing that this kind of response is even more the case for a schooling contexts made explicitly for students who have been “rendered surplus” and marginalized from regular or traditional education system—no matter the good intentions
(Kim, 2011; Slee, 2011). It is this idea of default thinking about literacy experiences
in the alternative-school context that can make the introduction of critical digital
literacies seem to be one more initiative along the continuum of approaches introduced into this context. But there are ways to reframe this default conception.
The potential role of critical digital literacies in expanding the literacy spectrum at OHS
In light of all three frames for looking at critical digital literacies praxis in an alternative school like OHS, a lightning-rod moment in the study was the conversation
I had with Eric, a recent graduate of OHS, just after he viewed Shawn’s digital story.
Our conversation immediately shifted from one that focused on an instrumental
view of critical digital literacies, to one that looked at it as socially mediated civic
engagement view, and this shift was led by Eric.
You know, I think projects like this are good, right? They get you active and doin’ stuff in
school. [School] is more interesting, right. But you know, well, you know, when I think about
school and stuff, I remember how I, like, lived in three different countries while in high
school, right? South America, U.S., and Canada. And I had a lot of trouble in regular
schools, but there’s reasons, you know? There’s many reasons…like sometimes I would
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come to school hungry—and [OHS] school is good, they feed you if they see you’re hungry. But this school gets to be a place where like, you can put kids, you know? Anyway, other
kids have to take three buses and to get to school and there’s all [these things going on] at
home. Like, our parents work hard and but it’s tough, you know? So, I get to school and then
I’m supposed to just learn in class—like, write some essay or something? So, I guess video
games and digital [stories] could be a part of that but there,…I don’t know…it’s a lot to think
about, [students at OHS] have a lot of things going on already so the [work] in school has
to, I don’t know.…[the teachers] have to think if they’re gonna do [these projects] here . . .
Eric’s words put my conversation with Tricia and Nora in sharp relief as we discussed Shawn’s project. This moment underscored the importance of considering
how students in the alternative school understand their literacy experiences before
critical digital literacies are introduced—something I had not focused on in my
research. Eric brought up several of the points that I’ve previously discussed in this
chapter as being vital for thinking about critical digital literacies in the alternativeschool context. For example, in talking about the “regular schools,” he notes that
while he did get into trouble, he was “rendered surplus” by the regular school and
one of the reasons he got in trouble was that he would come to school hungry. As
a side note, upon reading this chapter, Eric asked me to add that he is not excusing his getting into trouble, just calling out the factors that greatly influenced his
in-school experiences.
Eric continued that, on top of what was happening outside of school, when he
got there he was supposed to “just learn in class—like, write some essay or something.” This speaks to the clash of the Québec Education Program, which calls for
a range of literacy experiences, and Patricia’s comment that the school needs more
funding, among other resources, to serve the students they get. Eric, and students
experiencing out-of-school lives that are similar to his, don’t “just” learn. Like any
student, they need meaningful, rich, and critically engaging curricular experiences
designed with a nuanced understanding of students’ existence across multiple
(sometimes competing) contexts. If his school is rarely discussed and not visible in
research literature or public discourse, how can the curricular become rich in this
silence? Eric’s in-school experience with literacy was one that was greatly shaped
by his out-of-school context. Again, we know that research and conversations with
students, teachers, parents/guardians, and community members supports this, but
little research has explicitly documented it in the alternative-school critical digital
literacies context. This thinking through or interrogating how students’ literacy experiences are understood helps students themselves, and their teachers, better understand how the messy context of the alternative school shapes the literacy expectations
for students—and how to push back against those frames.
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C ONCLUSION : S O W HAT D O T HEY D ESERVE ?
Circling back to the vignette at the beginning of this chapter, I hope I’ve created
the beginning of a matrix-like layout of the complex messy construction of the alternative-school context in my study and the implications of that context on critical
digital literacies praxis. My intention is that this discussion of the context in which
the school is produced can help us think through and frame how we see comments
like the one made by the technology-support person, Linda. I also hope we are able
to hold our (well-intentioned?) pre-formed images of the school up for analysis to
see how our assumptive ideas and unexplored frames about a site like Opportunities
High School can potentially produce a narrow vision of critical digital literacies
engagement in context—from conception to implementation.
How we conceptualize the alternative-school context frames our image of the
school, which impacts how we design and implement literacy curriculum in this context. Creating so-called critical digital literacies experiences, like the project I did,
to help push back against marginalization and myopic literacy engagements can on
the surface appear to be helpful. However, if we are not mindful of the alternativeschool contexts, these projects can essentially champion a narrow spectrum of literacy possibilities and practices for young people who have already historically
been marginalized. Again, going back to Franzak (2006), “[b]ecause marginalized
adolescent readers [and learners] are initially identified as such within the school
context, the underlying structure and values of school literacy are built into definitions of struggling readers [and learners]” (p. 219). Extending this understanding
to the alternative-school context in my study, I argue that the underlying structure
and values of the alternative school, as it is produced in the messy “identity crisis”
context, produces a definition of literacy and student engagement with literacy
that narrows, rather than expands literacy engagements.
My goal in this chapter has been twofold. First, to show how the three frames
that emerged in conversation with OHS teachers, staff, and students and myself—
the frames of context, curriculum, and critical digital literacy defined in context—
produce a narrow version of literacy and critical digital literacies when they are not
interrogated and brought into the forefront of literacy policy, research, and pedagogical discussions. Second, as Eric showed and reminded me, we must expand and
“think big” (Greene, 1995, p. 10; Kim, 2010) about how we (researchers and teachers) conceptualize critical digital literacy in the OHS context. While on the one
hand, there was excitement on the part of both the teachers and me about the project, Eric reminded us of larger critical issues related to expanded notions of literacy. I draw upon Greene’s (1995) discussion of “thinking big”:
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To see things or people small, one chooses to see from a detached point of view, to watch
behaviors from the perspective of a system, to be concerned with trends and tendencies, rather
than the intentionality and concreteness of everyday life. To see things or people big, one must
resist viewing other human beings as mere objects or chess pieces and view them in their
integrity and particularity instead. One must see from the point of view of the participant
in the midst of what is happening if one is to be privy to the plans people make, the initiatives they take, the uncertainties they face. When applied to schooling, the vision that sees
things big brings us in close contact with the details and with the particularities that cannot be reduced to statistics or even to the measurable. (p. 10)
As Vasudevan and Campano (2009) argue regarding historically marginalized
young people, “the language of innovation and discovery does not permeate the levels most frequently used to describe the youth on whom we have been focused in this
review” (p. 329). The same can be said for students like Shawn at Opportunities High
School. Because the language of innovation and discovery, though present in the
English Language Arts curriculum, has not permeated the context of the school, it
is easy to view any introduction of innovative critical digital literacies approaches as
being a positive move. However, as my study showed, it must be conceptualized as
“big” and brought “into close contact with the details and the particularities” of
alternative-education context so that it is a part of expanding, not the continued narrowing, of literacy experiences for students in these schools. This is all in a continued effort to help these and all students get the education they deserve.
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CHAPTER
NINE
Relocalization IN THE
Market Economy
Critical Literacy and Media Production
in an Urban English Classroom
C YNTHIA L EWIS , C ANDANCE D OERR -STEVENS ,
J ESSICA D OCKTER T IERNEY, & C ASSANDRA S CHARBER
“But Ms. Haas, you spent all year teaching us that this stuff is corrupt!”
Ms. Haas, an urban teacher who taught an 11/12 English class focused on critical
media analysis and production, shared with one of us that a student in her class had
said these words. The student wanted Ms. Haas to consider that the public relations
unit they were undertaking at the end of the school year seemed to contradict the
critical media focus of the course itself. Ms. Haas smiled when she relayed the student’s comment, pleased, as were we, to find that the critical focus of the course had
taken hold to the extent that a student would challenge one of the course units.
Ironically, Ms. Haas created this unit on public relations not as a tool for marketing
corporate products or services, but rather as a tool for critical intervention. Specifically,
Ms. Haas’s purpose in this unit was to focus on using public relations techniques to
promote the school, with the hope of producing a counter-narrative to the debilitating discourses that malign urban high schools such as this one. This scenario represents the conundrum that we wish to write about in this chapter: a tension inherent
in critical literacy classrooms given the pervasiveness of a market economy that
shapes student and institutional identities as well as classroom pedagogy.
English educators have long focused on critical media literacies in an effort to
challenge the pervasive media content that persistently reproduces dominant ideologies. Although typically media literacy courses focus on close analyses of media,
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scholars in the field have claimed that media production should be at the center of
any critical media curriculum in order to foster critical perspectives that cannot be
developed through analysis alone (Fabos, 2008; Kellner, 2004; Sholle & Denski,
1994). The increasing use of digital media tools in schools has provided new
avenues for critical media production within a critical literacies framework. However,
some scholars contend that involving students in media production is not enough
unless the social and political dynamics of this work are examined. Hill and
Vasudevan (2008) and Morrell (2007), for example, argue that it is important for
researchers and teachers to consider the particular conditions and contexts that shape
how media producers resolve tensions between social reproduction and critique.
In an effort to understand how students as media producers resolve these tensions, our research examined media practices as students partnered with a multinational firm (hereafter called “The Firm” to use media content to market their own
school; names of participants and school are pseudonyms). Having learned that the
school had hired a public relations firm to promote the school, Ms. Haas convinced
her principal that students in her media studies class be allowed to participate in the
project. Trained by the marketing firm, the students produced promotional videos,
news broadcasts, logos, and newsletters, all of which were published via an online social
network software, in this case using Ning, which was publicly available at the time
and through part of the following school year. After a discussion of the theoretical
grounding for this chapter and a brief description of the context and methodology,
we focus on the competing discourses that shaped the unit and the way that these discourses were taken up by the teacher and her students. We follow this section with
an example of one student’s navigation of the complex terrain of the classroom and
conclude the chapter with implications for critical literacies research and practice.
G LOBAL
AND
L OCAL D ISCOURSES
AND
P RACTICES
This study draws from interdisciplinary work in critical linguistics and social semiotics, especially contemporary work related to globalization and mediated discourse. Globalization is marked by increased “flows” (Appadurai, 2000) that expand
the connectivity between ideas, bodies, and identities across local spheres, which are
continually shaped by the global interdependence of economies and technologies.
Social practices in local spheres are always navigated across different scales (e.g.,
local, institutional, and global scales) that represent differential access to discursive
(and material) resources. Social theorists who study globalization view homogeneity as one effect of the global market (Bauman, 1998; Pennycook, 2010; Santos,
2006). Related to public education, globalization redefines local practices in schools
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amid intensely competitive notions of what counts as legitimate knowledge.
Communities vie for market niches that appear to provide viable choices (e.g., specialized charter schools) but ultimately remain viable only if they meet homogeneous
national and international measures of “accountability,” such as the standardized
ranking of academic achievement (e.g., the widely publicized rankings of the
Programme for International Assessment). As Santos (2006) stated:
Globalization seems to combine universality and the elimination of national borders, on the
one hand, with rising particularity, local diversity, ethnic identity, and a return to communitarian values, on the other. In other words, globalization appears to be the other side of
localization, and vice versa. (p. 393)
Pennycook (2010) argued that global discourses are “relocalized” (p. x) through
local practices. These local institutional contexts and histories of participation create locally manifested ways of being, producing, and interpreting that are constituted
in global spheres such as neoliberal notions of school choice and international
assessments of student achievement. Practices at the classroom and school levels are
integrally shaped by these distal factors and “reaccented” (Brooks, 2011, p. 75)
locally. Like Santos, Pennycook (2010) discussed two seemingly conflicting effects
of global forces on local practices. On the one hand, globalization demands homogenization—for example, a “standard” for what a school should look like in multiple
localities: standardized achievement scores, graduation rates, and so forth. On the
other hand, the homogeneity produced through globalization also has the potential to produce difference because global homogeneity can only be understood
through its inflection in local practice, which is, in Pennycook’s view, dynamic and
capable of resistance and rearticulation. It is this side of the global market—this side
of school “choice”—that the critical media is leveraging. East High School, the site
for our study, was a case in point.
Our knowledge of East High developed over four years (2007–2011) during
which several of us conducted research and participated in program development.
We first conducted a study of critical engagement in a documentary film class
(Lewis & Dockter Tierney, 2011) and later developed and studied a ninth- through
twelfth-grade interdisciplinary digital media studies program (Scharber, Lewis, &
Beach, 2010). The public relations unit that is the focus of this chapter occurred in
the spring quarter of 2009, during the first school year of the digital media studies
program. As already mentioned, the teacher initiated the unit as an impromptu part
of her curriculum based on the opportunity she saw to incorporate The Firm’s expertise and provide her students with a project that involved an authentic purpose and
audience (creating public relations products for their school in order to “sell” it to
potential students and boost its reputation in the district and neighborhood).
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Keying into the popular discourse of 21st-century skills, the critical media
course we studied was a site of resistance to the perception of East as a “default
school,” as one teacher put it. It was a site that attempted to rearticulate the meaning of rigor—the rigor of critical engagement in digital media production—which
students described in interviews from an earlier study to be the “most intellectually
challenging” and “hardest” work they’ve ever been asked to do in school (Dockter,
Haug, & Lewis, 2010).
East High School was low status in this Midwestern metropolitan school district, with many problems typical of urban schools. Standardized test scores were
low and school enrollment decreasing. The shift from neighborhood schools to
“magnet” programs, each with a special academic focus drawing students from
across the district, fueled the use of various discourses. Informed by neoliberal
notions of school choice, district schools were placed in competition for student
enrollment, forcing schools to market themselves as products to be consumed.
When looking at the local discourses involved in the school’s identity, East High
School was located in a mostly white lower-middle to middle-class neighborhood,
and had a history that included a good deal of pride as a neighborhood school. In
recent years, few neighborhood families sent their children to East, yet its more illustrious history figured prominently in the language and lore surrounding the school
(as gleaned from field notes and interview data). Teachers and students alike hoped
that East could return to some version of its glory days, albeit one that celebrated
the more recent demographics of its student body, which included at the time of this
study, 83 percent who qualified for free and reduced lunch, 39 percent English-language learners, and 90 percent students of color (46 percent African or African
American, 33 percent Latino/a, 8 percent Asian American, 3 percent American
Indian). The class we studied was representative of this demographic distribution.
Informed by this view of classrooms as relocalized spaces, we were interested
in the contradictions inherent in creating promotional media as part of a classroom
that had been steeped all year in critical media literacies. We were especially interested in how students responded to these contradictions and negotiated competing purposes, audiences, and desires as they created promotional media.
M EDIATED D ISCOURSE A NALYSIS
AS
T HEORY
AND
M ETHOD
Our research is a close qualitative examination of a one-month unit focused on digital media analysis and production. We had 27 participants in the study representing all students in the class and the classroom teacher. Four students served as focal
participants, one for each of the public relations media formats described below. The
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classroom teacher, Ms. Haas, a white female with 17 years of urban teaching experience, developed a similar process for each unit, which involved students accessing
multiple media texts and genres; critically analyzing those texts for how technical
elements positioned viewers to believe, feel, or think in certain ways; and creating,
sharing, and reflecting on their own media projects. Units during this yearlong course
focused on the following: how the media defines and creates our modern culture;
media representations; power of the media to create awareness and change in the
world; propaganda focused on news and advertising; and the 21st-Century
Marketing Campaign for East High School (the unit focused on in this chapter).
Major projects included media ethnographies, wikis that researched and exposed
corporate ethics, spoof ads, and the promotional media discussed in this chapter.
For the public relations marketing unit, we served as participant-observers in
the class three times weekly for four weeks. Each of us facilitated one of four student groups working on public relations for the school in one of the following formats: YouTube videos, logos for a billboard, a newsletter, and a Ning for social
networking. Students’ unfamiliarity with YouTube content creation and with Nings
as a format for social networking caused them to gravitate to the more familiar formats of billboards and newsletters when initially asked to choose a group. However,
once a representative from The Firm came to discuss the new media options of video
creation and social networking, students became interested, and the groups were
formed. As the project progressed, and in keeping with the way that media formats
converge, the Ning group became blended with the YouTube and broadcast news
groups. The broadcast news features were uploaded to YouTube, which was linked
to the Ning. Students in the Ning group did not have end products to produce, such
as a logo, newsletter, or video, and so had more time to participate in video production and use the videos to create a more engaging site with which to reach out to
current and potential students.
Data sources included corporate documents, field notes, recordings of classroom
interactions, interviews with focal students, and informal conversations with students
as they produced media content. In analyzing this data, we applied the theory and
method of mediated discourse analysis (MDA) and geosemiotic theory, which we
drew from the work of Scollon (2001), Scollon and Scollon (2003) and Norris and
Jones (2005). Briefly, this work regarded meaning-making to be both semiotically discursive and material. It foregrounded action in social spaces and provided a lens
through which to understand the meaning of texts and tools in practice. Since social
action is carried out by social actors/agents who interact with mediational means in
sites of engagement, mediational means such as texts and language “are carriers of
social, cultural and historical formations that amplify certain social actions and limit
others” ( Jones & Norris, 2005, p. 49). In the mediated action we highlight in the next
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section, the mediational means are the digital media tools of video editing and
Ning, along with specific voice-enhanced “vocaloid” videos that one student, Ellen,
viewed and appropriated in order to create her promotional video. Vocaloids are videos
made using the Vocaloid software, which use synthesizer effects to blend voice and
music along with images and video frequently appropriated from Japanese anime.
Scollon and Scollon in Discourses in Place (2003) used the term “emplacement”
(142) to explain the relationship between objects and their environment. These texts
emplaced in an English classroom seem commonplace to those for whom media
analysis is an ordinary component of English studies and integral to this particular class with its regular use of media texts. However, the text as a site of meaningmaking in the classroom can be interpreted and produced differently depending on
repeated social performances that index the text as having a particular function or
meaning in local practice (Lewis & Dockter Tierney, 2011). In other words, the way
that teachers and students repeatedly responded to or interact with a text produces
and reinforces the text’s function in the local context. Naturally, given that there are
many social actors in a classroom, texts can have multiple functions and meanings
at once or over time. In the next section, Ellen’s vocaloid serves as an example.
“Practice,” in the language of mediated discourse analysis, is a linked chain of
mediated actions and histories of participation. As Thibault (2004) explained:
Meaning-making is a semiotic-discursive phenomenon in the sense that its dynamical
processes enact meaningful patterns and relations that integrate the particular occasion or
situation to the systems of semantic and other semiotic categories that the members of a given
community or social network recognize and interpret as meaningful. Furthermore these categories serve to link the particular event and the particular individuals who participate in that
event to other activities, other practices, other individuals and social institutions on diverse
space-time scales that go beyond the particular here-now event. (pp. 6–7)
Particularly important in this passage is the concept of linkage across space-time
scales that include the histories of participation—or practice, to use the mediated
discourse term—within and outside the “site of engagement” (Scollon, 2001, p. 3)
where the mediated action occurs. Such histories include the school’s illustrious past
and current low status, the teacher’s passion for critical media analysis and fervent
desire to revise the narrative about her school, and Ellen’s identity as a white adolescent girl in a very diverse school as well as her de facto role as sole creator of the
video. Our analysis depended on these linkages of actions and practice. “The place
to look for struggles of power and ideology, according to MDA, is not, however, in
any one of these practices, but in the way multiple practices converge to influence
concrete social actions” ( Jones & Norris, 2005, p. 10.) The next section explains the
competing discourses and practices that played a role in the creation of Ellen’s video
and shaped the meaning of critical literacy in the classroom.
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P RACTICES
In this section, we highlight the competing discourses and practices at work in the
classroom that influenced the social actions of students as they created media products around the stated common goal of “marketing” the school. We demonstrate, at
the same time, that students’ own purposes and perceived audiences were often different than those outlined by the public relations firm and even, at times, by Ms.
Haas. Like their teacher, most students were interested in offering positive representations of their school since they were very aware of the school’s low status and
declining enrollment. However, instead of using corporate- or school-sanctioned
genres, students pursued their own agendas and styles of expression. This section
offers an overview of conflicting discourses, purposes, and audiences interspersed
with examples from multiple students and situations that reveal the complexity of
digital media marketing within a critical literacies framework.
Competing discourses: Marketing versus advocacy
During their first session with students in the digital media studies classroom, the
representatives from The Firm made the goal of the marketing unit clear. A slide
from their first PowerPoint read: “Your Job: You are a junior marketing executive,
helping to create and execute marketing for East High School.” And another slide
read: “Your Goal: to increase awareness of programs and opportunities available at
the school among key audiences.” The representatives went on to define the idea of
branding for the students, explaining the concept by emphasizing the discrete skills
of “defining a product,” “distinguishing it from other competitive offerings,” and
“controlling an image.”
Framing the discourses of the unit this way from the outset, representatives from
The Firm established a discourse of business marketing within the classroom. For
the students, this discourse was compelling because they believed they were being
given a special assignment, or in terms of the marketing executives who presented
the challenge, a special “job.” Ms. Haas, too, promoted the discourse of marketing
when talking with students about the unit. To one group of students, for example,
she gave this praise: “[One of the public relations representatives] thinks your video
is awesome. She thinks the Ning is awesome. I’m sure she went to the YouTube
channel and saw the colors and banner and everything matched. She said to tell you
all that I should give you a raise. You’re junior account execs, right?” Despite being
frustrated with The Firm in ways we describe below, Ms. Haas promoted the market discourse they established in order to frame the project and students’ involvement as special and important.
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At the same time that the unit carried with it a discourse of business shaped
by notions of executives, earning raises, and being given a job, representatives from
The Firm wanted to control the image of the public relations firm as not so much
a multinational corporation, but a bold company of “advocates” who are “shaping the
game.” In fact, the firm’s logo stated, “Advocacy starts here,” and when one of the
representatives described the firm as “part of a conglomerate,” her colleague was
quick to jump in and explain that conglomerate means they are a “family” with “a
family of expertise.” The public relations representatives used language that suggested
diversity and variation, favoring terms such as “define” and “distinguish” in relation
to the school as a product, and the language of personal connection—for example,
“family” over “conglomerate.” These terms served to obscure the power relations at
work, including what it meant to “distinguish” a product so that consumers would
believe they have the power to select the superior product among a field of choices.
Ironically, despite the desire for uniqueness through the niche markets of public
magnet and charter schools (including large public schools that create “brands”
through small learning communities or a whole-school focus), consumers of schools
seek typical indicators of success such as performance on achievement tests and
strong statistics for college admission. Thus, schools that serve niche markets survive only if they meet homogenous indicators of success.
Tensions between the discourses of market and advocacy led to questions from
some students about whether The Firm was providing their time and expertise free
of charge, questions that both the teacher and the representatives skirted at various
times. This, and the fact that one of the public relations representatives frequently
talked about how special she thought it was for the school to offer a class like this
one, also led to a mentality among some of the students that The Firm was there
to help them save their low-status school, which was in serious danger of being
closed. In reality, however, The Firm, which was paid by the school for three hours
of prep time and two hours of travel time for every one hour of teaching (at $250
per hour), did not offer any assistance beyond their contract even when Ms. Haas
sent inquiries via email and even when the newsletter, one of the media produced
in the unit, was in danger of not getting printed because there was no money available to do so. At moments like this, some of the students saw The Firm in a new
light. Sarah, from the newsletter group, said in class one day, “They got paid already
and they can’t shovel out like $200.”
For Ms. Haas and the students in the media studies classroom, advocacy meant
something different. Ms. Haas, for instance, wanted the project to promote a sense
of continuity and history. She used the word “legacy” throughout the unit to remind
students that this project would connect them to the history of their school—back
to East’s better days and a “better” reputation—and would also be something they
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would pass on. It was for this reason that she persuaded Sarah, a leader in the
newsletter group whose family had a long history of attending East, to change the
chosen name for the publication from The East Side Gazette to The New Standard,
which echoed the publication’s former name, The Standard.
In addition, Ms. Haas saw this unit as an avenue to regain a sense of community in the school. She was particularly excited about possibilities for the Ning,
despite the fact that students were reluctant to sign up for this group because none
had heard of a Ning before. When she shared the media tool with her classes, several students asked that they be switched into this group. Pictures from homecoming, pep rallies, and other events throughout the year as well as special groups
created by students and staff caught their attention. In addition, the Ning posted
information about upcoming school events such as the blood drive. Ms. Haas
shared her excitement about the Ning with her students, telling them, “This is what
we need.”
Although The Firm set up a clear role for the students in the media studies
classroom—to act as executives and market their school—and established a business discourse that motivated the students and their teacher, competing discourses
around the school’s need for a historical and future legacy as well as an avenue for
community created a tension at the outset of the unit. Ms. Haas was a confident and
creative teacher who advocated bringing The Firm into the classroom. She needed
The Firm’s expertise in order for her and her students to learn the basics of public
relations, but was fully in charge of the groups and their progress after the initial
workshop for each of the four public relations genres that students would produce.
While Ms. Haas attempted to maintain the discourse of marketing in order to push
her students to produce powerful media, she also felt very strongly about the need
for students to be in charge of their own identity representations and speak back to
a reputation of urban youth as apathetic and incompetent. In this way, marketing
worked as both a tool for taking control of an image of urban youth while also
demonstrating to students that, in the real world, money (and offering services only
when being paid) could trump more ephemeral goals of maintaining a legacy and
creating community. Ms. Haas’s practice, in this case, was mediated by institutional
histories as well as dominant ideologies about urban schools and urban youth that
operate both locally and in broader contexts.
Competing purposes: Critical analysis versus production
Another tension that emerged during the unit was between critical analysis and production of media. Critical analysis of media was a cornerstone of the media studies course throughout the year, and Ms. Haas taught students that the best way to
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understand and challenge manipulation was through production. For example, in
one unit, Ms. Haas had students analyze and identify various forms of propaganda
and then had students create counter-propaganda in response. In another unit, Ms.
Haas had students research the ethical practices and advertising of multinational corporations and create wikis to educate the public about the hidden practices of wellknown companies such as Coca-Cola and Nike. And during the marketing unit, Ms.
Haas reminded students again, “There is no better way to understand and be proactive than to produce something.”
Yet students received a very different message from the public relations firm.
Critical analysis according to the public relations representatives was a “landscape analysis” completed in order to further define a product. This analysis served the goal of controlling the image of a product, in this case, East High, and manipulating an audience,
in this case, those who might attend East. For Ms. Haas, critical pedagogy involved a
partnering of analysis with production in an effort to avoid manipulation and to create counter-narratives. For the public relations representatives, the benefit of the relationship between analysis and production was manipulation—and ultimately profit.
This tension was best demonstrated by an example from the first visit by the
public relations firm during the unit. As they explained to the class that day, one of
the main clients for The Firm was the U.S. Army; they gave the example of a public relations event where the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders visited high schools and
challenged students to push-up contests to find out if they were “Army ready.”
Cynthia, who was observing the class on that day, was interested in students’
responses to this example because earlier in the year Ms. Haas had used Army
recruiting videos for the purposes of critique and students had identified clearly the
videos’ techniques of manipulation and propaganda. Surprisingly to us, neither the
students nor Ms. Haas said anything nor responded in any way visibly to The
Firm’s Army connection.
Instead, as already mentioned, many of the students thought it was generous
of The Firm to come and teach them. One student who was part of the Ning group,
for instance, mentioned several times that she was so pleased that the public relations firm “funded us”—although the opposite was true. However, Ms. Haas later
shared that one of her students (as reported at the start of this chapter) remarked
that the public relations project seemed weird because “you spent all year teaching
us that this stuff [corporate manipulation] is corrupt.” To this, Ms. Haas responded
by saying that they would be promoting their school, which was not the same as promoting a product. And yet, later, as students argued over the branding of the billboard during a class presentation of each group’s work, Ms. Haas stated, “marketing
is marketing”—no matter the product involved. In this way, the purpose of the marketing unit, while exciting to students for its real-world appeal, conflicted with the
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purpose of critical analysis that Ms. Haas had taught to the students all year. Was
it possible to be critical consumers and producers of media while also being savvy
product marketers? The next section further complicates this question and underscores Pennycook’s (2010) concept of relocalization.
R ELOCALIZED P RACTICE : A N I LLUSTRATION
Perhaps most helpful in understanding classroom practice as relocalized in relation
to competing global discourses, audiences, and purposes is to look at one of the
media products made by the students in the class. One such project was a promotional video (PV) created by Ellen and her group, developed for the purpose of
attracting youth to enroll in this urban high school. In this district, families had some
degree of choice in selecting a high school (although complicated by local politics,
socioeconomics, and zoning and transportation factors beyond the scope of this
chapter), and Ellen’s video would need to appeal to several audiences, including parents, youth, classroom peers, and her teacher.
Ellen was the primary creator of the PV. Ellen and the other two students in
her group were part of the YouTube Channel group, which was in charge of making and managing videos for a student-sponsored YouTube channel. The videos and
channel were linked to the school Ning site. We discuss her video not because we
think it represents an effective PV, but rather because her video and its process of
production illustrate the competing forces discussed in the previous section and serve
as an example of relocalized practice.
Relocalized production process
Ellen’s media production process reflected conflicting definitions of “marketing.” First,
according to the multinational public relations firm working with the class, “marketing” involved defining and controlling the image of product via branding. Ms. Haas’s
definition of marketing differed from that of The Firm in that she focused on promotion and marketing as selling a product via product placement. In other words,
Ms. Haas urged that the promotional video (PV) should educate the audience about
East High School in a way that presented the school as a “desirable” product. In this
situation, “marketing,” with its various definitions, was a construct of the global
market, which in Ms. Haas’s class, was reframed for local purposes.
Ellen’s preferred style of marketing involved selling an identity or lifestyle via
product association, a further relocalization of the marketing construct. For Ellen,
the purpose of her PV was to market an identity as a product and, in turn, market
the institution (her school) through selling that particular identity. Ellen’s under-
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standing of “marketing” was informed by various sources including the media
analysis class, the public relations firm, and her own media consumption, particularly that of Japanese anime. Ellen described the best PVs as those that play on big
screens at “fun, exciting events,” such as the “vocaloids” played at concerts or in dance
clubs. While these PVs are not the main focus of the audience’s attention, Ellen
claimed that they were absorbed as part of the “cool event.” While the other students in Ellen’s group were more inclined to go with the teacher’s vision of a PV,
Ellen was persistent in putting forward her vision for the PV. These differing views
of what it meant to market and promote a product led to much delay and conflict
among the group members in terms of deciding on an idea and getting started with
the filming and editing.
Production delays were further fueled by conflicting perceptions of intended audiences and purposes. While Ms. Haas made it clear to students that it was their perspective that would make the social media appealing to other students, telling them,
“As adults, we come from a different point of view than you…as the teenagers who
are using this site, we want to know what you think,” she also named the intended
audiences for the media pieces as parents of current and prospective students, district
administrators or “gatekeepers,” and her professional peers. Ms. Haas explained to her
students the importance of attending to these different audiences:
You have to keep a couple things in mind, you guys, is that we’re trying to convince the school
district, you know “gatekeepers” to open the gates and let you guys have some power, and in
order to do that we have to play by some of their rules. So we can’t be having people put up,
you know, cursing, and things like that.…This channel is going to say East High School, it
is going to be public, so we want to make sure we are representing ourselves in a way that is
responsible, and what not.
For Ms. Haas, the idea of audience and purpose in this unit was very tied to a sense
of public performance of the digital media course. Her focus on rules and responsible representation highlighted a sense of public evaluation by other authorities.
Thus, students were expected to use language and images that would appeal to teens,
but at the same time keep in mind the reputation of the school and its students by
framing it in a positive light for parents, teachers, and community members.
Ms. Haas was open with students about this dilemma over public content. “As
adults,” she told them, “we are worried about safety,” and went on to explain that
media content had to be carefully guarded for the well-being of students and with
attention to copyright issues. While she, like her students, was excited about the
Ning becoming a school-wide social media tool, she told students, “The Ning
should grow beyond this class, as long as it’s about East.” Ms. Haas then suggested
that they limit content to only events and images related to the school. With little
resistance, students in the class agreed with Ms. Haas and decided that the student
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administrators of the Ning group would be in charge of controlling all content to
ensure its appropriateness.
In this way, students’ ability to share their identity affiliations beyond the walls
of the classroom and the school became limited, a fact that frustrated Ms. Haas behind
the scenes, but to her students, she resolved, “We need to start thinking about these
issues as we become more global.” The local practices of the classroom—where students’ identity affiliations were valued and mobilized in media production—were “relocalized” (Pennycook, 2010) by global constructs of urban youth and by judgments
about what counts as legitimate knowledge, and by whom, in competitive schools.
A concern for rules and responsible representation were not, however, among
the criteria for the various audiences that Ellen perceived for the video. In viewing
the piece as a PV to attract students to East, Ellen saw the main intended audience
as prospective eighth graders choosing a high school. In particular she wanted to
attract students like herself, whom she described as artistic students or “artsy kids.”
In addition, her audience involved her own peers. She talked about sharing the video
with her friends who go to other schools, including art schools. When asked about
her intended audience, Ellen described the group:
I tried to do a specific group of people like eighth graders and more artistic people, like
vocaloid people, cause they’re artistic.…I wanted, basically like any artist, to use pictures to
tell a story. And they [artistic eighth graders] would probably understand that. They would
think, “Oh, this is cool, maybe I can do this. I can express myself through the media and get
credit for it.” Maybe then hopefully they will come to East. And that’s what I really wanted.
In Ellen’s description of her intended audience, she positioned the PV not as a text
that explicitly promoted East, but instead as an example of something students could
do if they were to go to East. In other words, the PV was associated with freedom
of expression in terms of students’ academic work, a quality that Ellen believed would
attract artistic eighth graders to East. Of course, expression is never purely transparent. It is mediated by many competing discourses, which often inspire and/or
require relocalization. In the case of the students’ media products, the global discourses of product branding and neoliberal concepts of school choice pushed and
pulled at students’ production decisions, leading to various product positionings or
emplacements.
Product emplacement
In looking specifically at the media product and how it is emplaced, it is important
to remember that texts as sites of meaning-making can be interpreted and produced
differently depending on repeated social performances that index the text as having a particular function in local practice. In this case, the primary genre Ellen had
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in mind was vocaloid videos. Ellen described vocaloid videos as cool videos played
at events to promote a hip, artsy youth culture. Ellen identified the Hatsune Miku—
Hiro Sai as one of her favorite vocaloid videos. (The video can be viewed at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUAAnDJ6060.) In this video, the female persona Hatsune Miku (created using the voice-synthesizing software Vocaloid 2) sings
the song Hiro Sai. Similar to an animated music video, the song is illustrated by a
series still anime drawings and video of Hatsune Miku running through the streets
in search of a mysterious person or love interest.
Influenced by the vocaloid genre, Ellen’s video also featured a love story, but
instead of anime drawings and video, her video included a series of still photographs
of the school and of two students as the characters who fall in love. All images were
set to piano music with a hip-hop beat composed by one of the group members.
Ellen’s initial plan was to make a vocaloid video similar the Hatsune Miko—Hiro
Sai video described above. She had made anime sketches for the video and had
hoped her group member would make the music. Yet through repeated conversations and discussions about what constituted a “promotional video” with her group
members and Ms. Haas, the final media product showed a compromise of various
elements that underscored that texts are produced and interpreted as having particular functions in local practice.
First, in terms of genre, Ellen’s video followed the typical vocaloid narrative,
which is that of a suspenseful love story; yet due to the urging of her teacher and
peers that the product to be promoted, East High School, should be evident in the
video, Ellen decided to situate the story in the school. She did this by including still
photos of the school mural, a school basketball game and the school mascot. A group
member digitally synthesized the music for the final piece.
It is perhaps with image selection and editing that Ellen, who did all of the video
editing for the project, was most able to realize her original plans of making a vocaloid
video. Similar to a vocaloid video, Ellen used a series of motion and zoom features to
add motion to still shots. In particular, she mimicked and appropriated a series of profile shots used in the vocaloid video into her own video. See Figure 1.
This appropriation of image editing reveals Ellen’s resistance to the more traditional forms of PV that were presented in class through incorporating elements
of vocaloid videos, which she viewed as effective promotion. The repeated image of
a girl’s face from slightly different angles is resonant of the vocaloid video that served
as Ellen’s inspiration, but in the form of an actual student at East High emplaced
in the school’s hallway. Ellen’s appropriation of semiotic signs can be understood in
terms of the process of “entextualization,” discussed by Blommaert (2005). This
process involves a text that is removed from its context (decontextualized) and placed
in a new context (recontextualized) in order to produce a “preferred reading”
(Bauman & Briggs, 1990, p. 73). This process, we argue, is central to digital media
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Figure 1: Image Editing in Ellen’s Video and Vocaloid Video
Top: Hatsune Miku—Hiro Sai (Vocaloid Video)
Bottom: Project (Ellen’s Video)
production and to critical literacy. In this case, Ellen’s promotional video served the
process of entextualizing Higo Sai’s vocaloid video so that the initiating text was
removed from its interactional setting and placed in a new context. This new context (a Ning) included other media meant to build community within the school
and attract new families to the school. Thus, the recontextualized video is entextualized as a new text with a “metadiscourse” that stipulates how it should be interpreted (Blommaert, 2005, p. 47). This process resonates with a concept discussed
by Scollon and Scollon (2003) that signs are emplaced in relation to other signs, producing a “double indexicality.” Each sign “indexes a discourse that authorizes its
placement” (p. 205), in this case vocaloid video, but “is never isolated from other signs
in its environment, embodied or disembodied” (p. 205). The other signs were those
within the Ning, within the images presented as examples appropriate for the marketing of East High, and within the competing discourses of marketing and advocacy, which regulated the processes of production and interpretation.
But these processes can never be entirely regulated. Ellen’s post-production
reflection essay revealed Ellen’s use of the media production process as an active
process of identity exploration both for herself and her school as a possible community that supports her. As Ellen explains,
It was hard to put the marketing into something artistic, as I think the two are separate. But
after talking with [fellow student], I remembered something we watched about ads and advertising. They said something along the lines of “we are just making ads for ourselves” and that
struck home and made me able to continue.
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In other words, her motivation for completing the PV was less about promoting her
school on The Firm’s terms and more about figuring out how she viewed her school
and where she saw herself in that image. Through making the video, she was able
to entextualize herself into the East school body.
Both Ellen and her teacher acted in ways that were constituted in global discourses. Ellen’s work existed on multiple spatial and temporal scales. She was not
only creating a video in the here and now, she was enmeshed in who she imagined
herself to be as well as the kind of place she wanted her school to be. In a sense, she
was creating what Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, and Cain (1998) would call a “figured world” where particular ways of being and acting are valued over others (p. 52)
but where meanings and structures are also transformed through ongoing cultural
production (Bartlett, 2005). Ellen improvised within the figured world of her classroom to create a video that imagined another figured world with students whose
artistic interests and identities meshed with her own.
C ONCLUSIONS
AND
S IGNIFICANCE
Our focus in this chapter has been on how critical media literacies are influenced
by global market forces interrelated with local practices. Although Ellen’s PV was
at odds with The Firm’s examples, she used her video to rearticulate the concept of
promotion rather than dismiss it. Ellen found a way to insert her interests and identities into the PV, but she did so with the intention of “selling” the school to other
artistic youth like herself. She was not concerned about boosting enrollment for
funding as were the administrators who originally hired The Firm, nor did she
express her teacher’s concern for rewriting the negative narrative that maligns
urban schools. Nonetheless, the marketing focus permeated her discourse and practice as she sought to attract more students to the school and determined that the
best way to accomplish this promotional goal was to represent the school through
her own interests in (the globally marketed) vocaloids and anime—a kind of promotional affinity space, to use Gee’s (2004) term for a space where social actors share
interests, activities, and identities.
Pennycook (2010) argued that representational and embodied practices are always
relocalized. We have tried to demonstrate how this relocalization occurred in an
instructional unit that revealed how the global market economy discursively and
materially shaped student and institutional identities as well as classroom pedagogy.
As described earlier in this chapter, students had engaged in highly critical
analyses and production of media content throughout the year (e.g., corporate
ethics wikis). However, their media content for this school promotion project did
not reflect the same level of critique. Other media products for this unit included
a school newsletter describing end-of-the-school-year events; billboards and school
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logos attempting to brand the East High mascot and school colors; video updates
broadcasting topics of student interest; and the very popular Ning space, which
hosted most of the final media products and much student discussion. While most
of these media products were effective in distributing the news, events, and newly
“branded” image of East High, they were not critical of school or corporate authorities, nor were they as genre adventurous in their expression as Ellen’s video. We
attribute this first to the competing discourses of doing school and performing media
competency according to marketing goals. With these competing frameworks came
conflicting knowledge economies and media practices (e.g., critique vs. branding).
Second, given the expanded audience and visibility of the media content, students
were concerned about how their work would be received. Because they were often
ascribed identities of underachievers, this media production event offered opportunities to perform competency for their local and metropolitan communities.
As our example shows, students focused on performing media-literate identities rather than on producing critical media content. However, in reaccenting global
discourses such as the language of neoliberalism associated with school choice, students actually produced what could be viewed as critical media literacies. Much like
their teacher, many saw value in producing counter-narratives that would market
their urban school. Global discourses are themselves various. Ellen’s vocaloid vision
was supported by an entertainment industry that markets to youth like her as a target audience. Although she viewed her artistic aesthetic as individual and expressive, rather than determined by market economies, she used what could be viewed
as critical media literacies to fuse the artistic vision she thought would best sell her
school with the vision of her teacher and classmates who wanted realistic profiles
of students in the school setting.
The multinational marketing firm’s participation in this unit placed in high relief
the tension between critical literacy and market economy. However, we argue that
this tension, which permeates all aspects of critical literacy pedagogy and practice,
is under-examined. The students and teacher in this class were social actors whose
relocalization of the global market produced a complicated and dynamic form of
critical media literacies praxis. This has led us to reconsider what counts as “critical” in critical literacies pedagogy. Our examination of the mediated action involved
in this example showed how objects, images, and language were used to both appropriate and remake global market discourses. It also showed that the social actors
involved had competing desires and interests that they viewed as central to promoting their school in a competitive market based on niche offerings as well as standard indicators of success. We argue that the meaning of critical literacies should
be re-examined through an analysis of how social actors in the classroom relocalize global discourses as they appropriate and remake texts and signs.
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CHAPTER
TEN
Hacker Literacies
User-Generated Resistance and
Reconfiguration of Networked Publics
R AFI S ANTO
I NTRODUCTION
In this chapter, I want to address what I see as emerging forms of literacy in digital
culture and in doing so answer what I believe to be important questions: What role
might criticality play in the age of participatory media? How are values-based questions like those relating to corporate control most relevant in a world where the oneto-many broadcast media is but one component of a many-to-many participatory
media culture? Where can we currently look to see critical and empowered digital
practices at play? And how can these in situ cases that merge critical and participatory mind-sets guide us as we conceptualize emergent literacy frameworks?
In the first half of this chapter, I explore the theoretical contours of hacker literacies and share why I see them as necessary, and in the second half I aim to show
how hacker literacies are currently being practiced in situ in order to ground the construct in lived experiences. I share examples of how users are currently resisting and
reconfiguring networked public spaces, such as the mass uprisings in response to
Facebook privacy changes, the invention of the hashtag on Twitter, and a teen-led
protest movement in a virtual world.
Hacker literacies, characterized simultaneously by criticality and participation,
are a response to a shifting media landscape. In the past, communications media
evolved at a rate that pales in comparison to what we’re experiencing in the 21st cen-
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tury. Even then, it was not a simple task to conceptualize what it meant to be literate with media. At the same time, despite what pundits and some watchers of the
digital space might brashly proclaim, we are not entirely in a “brave new world” where
“everything is different”; we have much to gain from looking at the rapid change
before us through some existing, well-developed lenses, tinkering and adjusting
them to our new circumstances as needed rather than starting from scratch.
What I call “hacker literacies” are just that—a cobbling together of two existing
paradigms for understanding what it means and looks like to be literate with media:
critical media literacy and participatory media literacies. (Use of the singular, ‘literacy,’ and plural, ‘literacies,’ is intentional here and based on how these existing bodies of literature characterize themselves.) Hopefully in this process of theoretical
concoction, a Frankenstein isn’t created, though the examples of hacker literacies I’ll
share here point, I believe, to the fact that not only does this synthesis already exist
in real-world practices regardless of theory, but that those practices are not monstrous
in their nature by any means. To the contrary, I believe the examples I will share later
in this chapter are important signposts on the road to figuring out how we should be
educating young people to be literate with media in the 21st century.
S YNTHESIZING M EDIA L ITERACY F RAMEWORKS
What it means to be literate with communications media has always been a moving target (Hannon, 2000)—media inevitably change, and when they do, so do the
social practices that surround and shape them. And so as a society we’ve always done
our best to document and understand what it means to be literate in these practices.
What I refer to as the “first wave” of these literacy frameworks, critical media literacy, responded to the explosion of broadcast media in the 20th century. TV, radio,
film, and the press enriched society—new forms of artistic and popular culture,
broadly accessible information about politics, and the possibility of understanding and
connecting with a wider world. And they simultaneously presented risks. With media
controlled by just a few interests, political bias, propagation of problematic stereotypes,
and lack of attention to issues deemed unsavory by those in power became regular features, and to many, flaws of the mass-media landscape. Critical media literacy offered
itself up in response to these sorts of issues. It advocated practices that empowered
young people in relation to the messages of mass media, asking them to question the
intent, assumptions, and biases of media producers (Buckingham, 2003; Hobbs,
2006; NAMLE, 2007). Who made this TV show? What kind of culture is it promoting? Who is this ad targeting? What techniques is it using to make me want to buy
the product? These are hardly questions that should go out of vogue.
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Yet at the start of the 21st century, we saw a new paradigm for media literacy
emerge. The advent of the Internet and the broader participatory culture surrounding it heralded a number of “second wave” media literacy frameworks, most prominently the new literacies studies (Gee, 2007; Lankshear & Knobel, 2006, 2007) and
new media literacy ( Jenkins, Clinton, Purushotma, Robison, & Weigel, 2009), that
I refer to collectively as “participatory media literacies.” This framework recognized
that participatory forms of interaction through new media (blogs, wikis, social networks, virtual worlds, etc.) were becoming broadly accessible, and proposed that a
new set of literacies were organically emerging that focused on how people can leverage and participate culturally through new media, empowering them not simply to
be consumers of culture, but producers of it as well.
In practice, while critical media literacy would have a person ask how a cable
news program might contain political bias, participatory media literacies would then
have them engage in authentic blogging practices within a broader online civic community so that they could spread their own political views within a broader ecology. In short, one advocates criticality in response to media while the other
encourages participation through it.
Both of these paradigms are crucial, and there remains significant work to promote
the kinds of practices they value. At the same time, something is missing—the current
conversation happening around participatory media literacies concerning empowerment
through new media has seldom incorporated ideas about empowerment in relation to
new media. For example, questions about what agendas are implicit in the very design
of these new participatory tools don’t get asked very often. These are the sorts of questions critical media literacy would ask about a media message. Additionally, more
work could be done to understand the ways that the practices associated with participatory media literacies can be used to advocate for substantive changes to the design
of these sociotechnical spaces when they fail to align with a person’s values.
Drawing from many of the strengths of the critical media literacy and participatory media literacies traditions, there lies the potential to address this problem
through the proposal of a “third wave” media literacy framework that I refer to as
hacker literacies. Hacker literacies are a set of practices that support an individual
to become empowered in relation to participatory digital media, such that the
design and norms of sociotechnical spaces and the intentions of their creators and
associated communities are not taken for granted. Rather, they are seen as malleable
avenues for expression of the values and agendas of the individual user, as opposed
to solely those of the designer or dominant community. Important to note is the fact
that hacker literacies as a construct does not seek to impose any normative ideological “right response” to technologies or people aside from one that assumes active
engagement with sociotechnical spaces based on the values one brings to them.
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In defining hacker literacies, I take inspiration from many within the critical media
literacy and participatory media literacies traditions, as well as from Constructionist
learning theorists such as Papert (1980) who were interested in ensuring that it is the
child who programs the computer, rather than the other way around.
I define hacker literacies in this way: empowered participatory practices,
grounded in critical mind-sets, that aim to resist, reconfigure and/or reformulate the
sociotechnical digital spaces and tools that mediate social, cultural, and political participation. These “critical mind-sets” include perceiving how values are at play in the
design of these spaces and tools; understanding how those designs impact the users
of those spaces and tools; and developing empowered outlooks, ones that assume
that change is possible, in relation to those designs rooted in an understanding of
their malleability. “Empowered participatory practices” include making transparent
for others the values at play in and effects of sociotechnical designs, voicing alternative values for these designs, advocating and taking part in alternative designs
when spaces and tools are misaligned with one’s values, and employing new media
as a means to change those digital spaces and tools whether on the social or technological level via social or technological means.
I will highlight how I’m conceiving of literacy and sociotechnical spaces below,
but will for the most part let the examples in the second half of this chapter illustrate the construct of hacker literacies in terms of the critical mind-sets and empowered participatory practices that comprise it.
When I say literacy and literate practices, I am referring to existing sociocultural
conceptualizations of literacy and looking specifically to a definition put forth by
Lankshear and Knobel: “socially recognized ways of generating, communicating, and
negotiating meaningful content through the medium of encoded texts within contexts
of participation in Discourses (or as members of Discourses)” (2006, p. 64). A key idea
in their notion of what counts as a literate practice is the intersection of a technology
(though not confined to digital ones), knowledge (including values, attitudes, and
beliefs) and skills and associated actions.
In this case, the technology is indeed digital—it is those sociotechnical digital
spaces that increasingly mediate participation in civic, social, and political life. I refer
to these spaces as sociotechnical since they are simultaneously made up of technical
features and social actors existing in dialectic relationship with one another. Technical
features afford and constrain certain social behaviors, and at the same time are always
themselves shaped by social actors, whether they are users, designers, or other stakeholders. This dialectic relationship, of course, is what makes these spaces malleable, and
so is foundational to their reformulation and reconfiguration through various practices.
While many digital spaces are explicitly social in their design, such as social
network sites like Facebook or interest-driven community sites such as
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AnimeMusicVideos.org, for the purposes of hacker literacies I also include digital
technologies that are not explicitly social, such as media production tools like
Photoshop or FinalCutPro as well as other computer applications. These tools
have important roles in mediating what kinds of participation are possible in the
21st century, and are themselves, of course, designed and iterated upon by social
actors and as such deserve our attention.
O N H ACKERS
When I use the term “hacker” here, I’m not talking about any malicious or unethical people, a misapplication of the term often used in popular culture and mainstream news contexts,1 but am pointing to the critical and participatory ethos of
the hacker community that revels in collaborating around, tinkering with, and
reconfiguring technology from an empowered space that assumes these actions are
both possible and desirable.
I also would warn against seeing hacker literacies as totally technical. As with
the assumption that hackers are malicious, the assumption that hackers are solely
solitary writers of code is also in need of a bit of corrective. That imagery is a far
cry from how most people that engage in creative production with technology operate, and this is especially true in the case of computer programmers. From its origins, hacker culture was deeply communal, with a strong ethos of sharing and
collaborating, of contributing both expertise and code to others. Within that culture are a range of practices, some more technical in nature, such as individual debugging of a compilation of computer code, and others more social in nature, such as
advocating for the adoption of a new common technical standard and engaging in
collaborative projects. The same is true for hacker literacies—some of the ways that
people aim to reformulate sociotechnical spaces are more technical in nature while
others are more social.
O N E MPOWERMENT
As a final note in this more “definitional” section, I want to briefly address the usage
of the word “empowerment,” which is quite commonly used in educational contexts,
especially by those advocating for critical perspectives. I have already used, and will
continue to use, terms like “empowered digital practices” and “empowered mind-sets”
in this chapter, and given that, I think it’s important to be clear on what I mean when
I say empowered. As Lankshear noted, “If people do not recognize and address the
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vague semantics and ambiguity of ‘empowerment,’ they may well fall for educational
agendas they would otherwise have rejected on the grounds that they are in fact
manipulative or oppressive” (1997, p. 64). He suggested the usage of a simple
schema for clearly outlining what one means when using the term empowerment
within a given context. For the purposes of talking about hacker literacies, the
schema looks like this: users of digital participatory media (the subjects) are empowered in respect to the designs and formulations of those media (a particular aspect
of the structuring of power) through engaging in hacker literacies that are based on
an understanding of those media as changeable (a process) such that those media
become reformulated to reflect the values of the user (the valued ends/outcome).
W HY B OTHER ? E MERGING F ORMS
OF
N EW M EDIA R ISK
The example of synthesis I provide here is not just an academic exercise to see what
happens when we remix theory; the practical stakes are high. Despite how important it is to not sound alarm bells when talking about digital culture at a time when
traditional media and the government have developed a bad habit of making mountains out of molehills, such as in the case of overblown fears about online predators
(Collier, 2011; Wolak, Finkelhor, Mitchell, & Ybarra, 2008), there are in fact substantive emerging forms of risk and media manipulation that we are going to have
to face up to as a society.
Foremost in the mind of the public is the issue of privacy, a wide-ranging topic
concerned with personal information posted online and its accessibility by various
interested parties, whether they are other citizens, journalists, private companies, or
governmental agencies. Emerging research is showing that users of online tools care
about privacy issues, though not in ways that are evenly distributed among users (boyd
& Hargittai, 2010)—a fact that has important implications in terms of who remains
at risk. In more mainstream contexts, privacy issues are receiving deep scrutiny by the
press, as evidenced by the Wall Street Journal’s series of reports on the subject, ominously titled “What They Know” (2010), displayed prominently for almost two
years and counting in the technology section of the newspaper’s website.
While much of the concern around privacy issues has focused on the role of
companies in tracking online behavior and selling data to marketers, there is increasing scrutiny on the intersection of government and privacy issues as it relates to surveillance. With social media now established in their role as central tools in
organizing, though not predicting the success of, public protest (Shirky, 2011),
governments the world over have an increased stake in surveilling these technologies. Even in the United States, the Obama administration has proposed new laws
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that would give the government centralized “back-door” access to encrypted emails,
peer-to-peer communication services such as Skype, and social network sites such
as Facebook (Savage, 2010), a move that if successful would afford unprecedented
governmental access to vast amounts of information with major implications for privacy and democracy.
Beyond privacy, many have begun to look at how the formulation and availability of certain technologies are norming sociality in new ways. Research has established
that even when presented with the opportunity and ability to customize software
according to their priorities, most people end up using the default settings (Mackay,
1991). This fact gives major power to the designers of technology in terms of how
successful they will be in promoting certain types of behavior over others.
Research by the Pew Internet and American Life Project also hints at how the
rise and decline of certain technologies correlates with changes in societal behaviors. A report about teen social-media habits (Lenhart, Purcell, Smith, & Zickuhr,
2010) documents how the number of teens blogging declined dramatically, by a full
50 percent, from 2006 to 2010. While not explicitly linked in the report, it is
notable that during this same time period there was a major influx of teen users to
Facebook from MySpace. That the decline in teen blogging correlates to a move to
Facebook, which does not have a blogging feature, as contrasted to MySpace,
which prominently displayed this functionality and had a strong blogging culture,
is a fact not lost on many teen social-media watchers.
In a similar vein, emerging research on personalization of online spaces and tools
is showing how an increased ability to deliver customized services might actually
contribute to a balkanized Internet in which we’re less likely to encounter views that
challenge our own, a long-held, though contested, fear of many Internet researchers
(Lessig, 2004; Sunstein, 2001). In his book The Filter Bubble, Pariser (2011) shared
how the results displayed on Google are increasingly differentiated depending on
what Google knows about you based on past behavior, to the point that we no longer
have a common public experience of what results show up when a person searches
for something as simple as “Egypt.” He pointed to the fact that the current logic
by which various websites personalize their user experiences, or even that they do,
is increasingly non-transparent for those whom it affects the most: the user.
Finally, increased attention is being given to the possibilities and realities of
exploitation of online activity. The increase in user-generated content online has coincided with the monetization of much of that content through what some call an
“architecture of exploitation” (Petersen, 2008). Services such as Google Image Labeler,
for example, engage people in an interactive matching game in which two people
simultaneously look at the same image, with one person trying to get the other person to guess what the picture is of without using certain common keywords. In the
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process, enormous value is created for Google, whose image search is now that much
more accurate. While the proposal that this is an exploitative practice is complicated
by the fact that users get entertainment value in the process, these continuities
between online labor, play, and value exchange merit scrutiny (Sholtz & Liu, 2010).
All of the examples are not here to serve as more fodder for a culture of fear
around the Internet and technology. I personally believe that the flourishing of participatory culture that coincided with rise of the Internet is something we should
be proud of as a society. At the same time, its development wasn’t an accident: many
people were very intentional about what they wanted from these technologies, and
technology took shape accordingly. I point out these emerging forms of risk to highlight the reasons that the public needs to continue to engage with technology
intentionally, and according to considered values, rather than assume that it is
always being developed according to the public’s best interests. These examples lay
the groundwork needed to highlight what I see as new practices that acknowledge
and are already actively responding to these types of issues, responses that form the
basis of how we might understand hacker literacies.
H ACKER L ITERACIES
IN
C ONTEXT
One of the central things that I’d like to convey in this chapter is not just the idea
of what hacker literacies are, but also that this is a phenomenon well under way in
current culture. In this section, I explore a number of examples of this so that various dimensions of hacker literacies can be made more transparent.
The great Facebook privacy debacle of 2010
Facebook has a well-documented history of making controversial, and some believe
ham-handed, decisions when it comes to issues of privacy on its social network site
(boyd & Hargittai, 2010). But the particular situation I’d like to talk about, referred
to by some as “The Great Facebook Privacy Debacle of 2010” (Beale, 2010) resulted
in what was arguably the greatest negative reaction up to that point among not only
its users but also larger cultural, social, and political actors.
In late April of that year, Facebook announced at their annual F8 conference two
new features: Instant Personalization and Social Plugins (McCarthy, 2010). Both of
these changes to the popular site aimed to leverage a user’s personal connections
within Facebook to augment and “add value” to their usage of third-party websites.
The particularities of these features themselves are less important than the fact
that both of them included new kinds of access to personal information not just for
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third-party websites but also for any interested party. A lack of clarity in terms of
what user information was now available to whom in this process was the antecedent
to an extended public backlash that included Facebook’s user base, government actors
including United States senators and regulators at the U.S. Federal Trade
Commission, activist groups such as MoveOn.org and the American Civil Liberties
Union, and a range of journalists from both technology-oriented and mainstream
news sources.
In a study of the incident, I examined responses of 242 individuals to the situation in terms of how they evidenced hacker literacies. I applied a coding scheme based
on the theoretical construct to 280 comments posted to mainstream (New York Times,
Washington Post) and technology-focused (Mashable, Techcrunch) news sources on
articles about Facebook’s privacy changes (Santo, under review). The data contained
a wide diversity of both the critical mind-sets present in hacker literacies as well as
the empowered participatory practices that are expressions of those mind-sets.
Critical mind-sets
The critical mind-sets at play in the data largely fell into two categories: pointing
to the effects of the new designs for users, and interpreting the values and intentions that drove those new designs.
In this first category, many pointed to ways that the new privacy settings had practical negative consequences for users, such as this individual: “By making a connection on FB, I’m invading that connection’s privacy: revealing that connection’s identity
to the world, making the person behind that connection searchable” (fjpoblam, posting on Techcrunch.com). Beyond considering Facebook less useful and being disinclined to use it, this individual pointed to specific design implications that could result
in personal and professional issues arising through the simple, and central, act of
adding someone as a “friend” after the new privacy setting changes were implemented.
This evidences a form of design thinking in which a person links the particular designs
of a tool or space to the kinds of behaviors afforded or constrained and the implications this has for the user—a cornerstone of hacker literacies.
Those who fell into the second category of critical mind-sets, pointing to values and intentions behind the new designs, were more explicitly political in their
commentary, such as this individual’s implied comparison of Facebook to the fictional regime in the book 1984: “They are not redefining privacy, they are debasing the language of privacy. George Orwell understood this principle completely:
newspeak” (Anonymous, posting on Mashable.com). The statement is not just a clear
indictment of what this person saw as the values inherent in Facebook’s new
designs, but acknowledgment that there in fact were values that were guiding those
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designs. This is no small thing, as technology is often easily seen as “value neutral,”
despite the old saying about what happens when you only have a hammer.
Empowered participatory practices
This interpretative space of critical mind-sets in which individuals “read” the “text” of
the Facebook platform in order to uncover values and design implications can be seen
as the basis for the wide range of empowered participatory responses to the situation.
Three categories of advocacy and action showed up in the data I examined: advocating individual actions, voicing alternative designs, and advocating collective actions.
On the individual level, many felt that it was the responsibility of the user to
respond to the situation accordingly, either by not posting certain things in their
Facebook profiles if they wanted to keep them private, or by educating themselves
about the contours of the new privacy policies. Others argued for personal deletion
of Facebook accounts. Some of these calls were sarcastic responses to others complaining about the new policies and were of the “if you don’t like it, why don’t you
leave” variety. Others, though, were from individuals who had essentially decided to
boycott a service that no longer lined up with their values and intentions. All of these
responses, at their core, were somewhat representative of libertarian notions of
civic engagement, wherein the individual citizen, given freedom and choice, can
determine her own destiny according to her values, and avoid things that are undesirable or create her own means of response to them.
A second category of advocacy and action was aimed at creating alternative
models that Facebook might follow in order to become better aligned with what
their users might want, such as this suggestion for how Facebook should reconfigure its privacy settings: “I’d like to see Facebook adopt a much more simple model:—
Share with my Friends.—Share with Friends of my Friends.—Share with everybody.
If you want to go crazy granular on settings under those buckets, great. But at least
at a high level I can choose one of 3 things and feel mostly comfortable. That’s
enough for most users” (Chad Whitney, posting on Mashable.com).
Most common was the suggestion that Facebook should adopt an “opt-in”
model when making changes to the kinds of information that can be shared. Rather
than defaulting users into settings that made their information more rather than less
public, a practice that Facebook has engaged in on numerous occasions (boyd &
Hargittai, 2010), many suggested that Facebook make these possibilities available
for people to choose to opt into if they so desired.
These sorts of design suggestions evidence a different notion of agency and
understanding of the possibilities for reconfiguring sociotechnical spaces than those
individuals who suggested that users educate themselves on the new policies or just
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leave Facebook. One can imagine these suggestions emerging from the experiences
of individuals who had encountered a wide range of changes to Facebook prior to this
one. They understood that Facebook was completely capable of implementing new
designs, and via their suggestions these individuals in some respects positioned themselves as advisers to Facebook’s architects, or as advocates exerting public pressure for
specific policy decisions and self-regulation on the part of Facebook.
Finally, numerous individuals voiced the need for collective action to explicitly
exert pressure on Facebook to change how it operated. Many of these had less implicit
trust in Facebook’s ability or desire to self-regulate than those who suggested alternative policies and designs. Common in this category were calls for governmental regulation, mass exodus from Facebook, and suggestions that users collectively join sites
deemed more respectful of privacy. The individual below advocated for a group action
that displayed a deep understanding of the underlying market logic on which Facebook
operates: “We are taking the fight to Facebook. We know how the info game is
played, so every week we’re going to change a detail on our Facebook profiles en masse
to throw off their marketing data” (Amy Stein, posting on Mashable.com).
The collective actions more often seemed to align with somewhat traditional
notions of community organization and nodded to the use of online civil disobedience, to desires for regulation of powerful entities and to treating Facebook like
a traditional utility such as electricity or telephones with all of the implications for
consumer rights that come with those assumptions.
These varied responses, on the level of individual action, design recommendation, and collective action serve to complicate what hacker literacies can look like
when enacted in practice. There is clearly not only one response here that qualifies
as empowered. Rather, underlying the differences in these responses were a range of
value systems, understandings of what it means to be empowered, and decisions about
what an appropriate reaction to the situation was. At the core of each of them
though is a notion that there is something that can be done in the face of a sociotechnical space that is misaligned with one’s values, an idea central in distinguishing
hacker literacies practices as ones that are not only critical but also participatory.
New media as a means of change
On analyzing the data, a final unique property relating to hacker literacies became
clear: the fluidity with which the technological tools and spaces moved back and
forth from norming user behavior through their designs to being themselves the very
means of changing those designs. I saw examples of people first understanding that
Facebook was now norming their behavior in some way, but then saw others who
used Facebook as an organizing tool to advocate for changes. In the example noted
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earlier of a woman who advocated large groups of people changing profile information to “throw off their marketing data,” a link was shared to a page that had been
set up on Facebook to coordinate these efforts. Others again shared more individualistic approaches to using Facebook as a means of resistance: “In my profile all my
‘about me’ fields now contain: ‘As protest to Facebook’s constant change in privacy
rules, I have removed this field’” (Dude, posting on Techcrunch.com).
Facebook, though, was far from the only new media tool that individuals were
employing to share, seek, or enact responsive strategies. Some people shared custom
tools that had been created to make transparent what information was currently
being shared, potentially inadvertently, by a Facebook user: “Lots of tools emerging now to turn the balance of power back to consumers. Here’s ours, for FF and
Chrome users who want to change settings to ‘Friends Only’ and keep them there—
http://onebuttonrule.com/ Gets to *all* settings, works *automatically* to react to
Facebook’s changes” (Ginsu, posting on Mashable.com).
During the month that followed Facebook’s F8 announcement, tools like this
spread widely on the web. Reclaim Privacy, a tool recommended by a user commenting on Techcrunch, provided an open-source method of providing awareness of
Facebook user-privacy settings. The designers of this tool were quite explicit in wanting to create a technical response to Facebook’s changes that embodied the values
they saw missing in Facebook itself:
Our privacy policy is not long:
• we never see your Facebook data
• we never share your personal information
Simple. After the scanner is downloaded from reclaimprivacy.org, it operates entirely
between your own browser and Facebook. (ReclaimPrivacy.org. Retrieved May 2011)
At the time of this writing (December 2011), the Reclaim Privacy tool had been
shared using Facebook’s own “share page” feature more than 271,000 times.
Taken in a broader context, people’s responses to Facebook’s privacy changes in
spring 2010 are notable for a number of reasons. Most significantly, they resulted
in a shift in the way Facebook was formulated: in May 2010 Facebook introduced
a “simplified” privacy interface (Zuckerberg, 2010). And while this response on
Facebook’s part can be problematized as one that in the process also removed the
ability to restrict certain kinds of data from public view (boyd & Hargittai, 2010),
the overall ecology that emerged as a result points to a culture that is characterized
by both participation and criticality. Projects like Diaspora, an open-source decentralized social network, were supported by many in the technology world and elsewhere (Baio, 2010) who saw problems with Facebook’s behavior and sought an
alternative that respected their privacy. Others, like YourOpenBook.org, sought to
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promote awareness of the vast amounts of personal information Facebook made
public through its changes by creating a site that allowed public Facebook status
updates to be searched. The launch of Google+, a privacy-conscious social network
created by the search giant, was seen by some as responding to many of the critiques
people had of Facebook in terms of the ways it deals with privacy issues. Finally, a
settlement between Facebook and the Federal Trade Commission in November
2011 required the company to be subject to a number of checks around privacy issues
including regular privacy audits until 2031 as well as requiring many privacy changes
to be opt-in by users, as opposed to imposing sharing by default (Sengupta, 2011).
These and other examples of mobilization and response are all indicators that the
kinds of critical and participatory mind-sets evidenced in the data were also found
more broadly.
The Origin of the #Hashtag
Despite the case of the Facebook privacy debacle, an oppositional relationship
between users and developers is not a prerequisite to hacker literacies, something
well illustrated by the case of the hashtag on Twitter.
In August 2007, an open-web advocate named Chris Messina posted a proposal
for how people might self-organize on the microblogging social network Twitter
using “hashtags,” pound signs followed by a distinct signature that were placed at
the end of posts on twitter (Messina, 2007). By early 2010, this was a common social
practice used by millions of Twitter users from around the world to participate in
wide-ranging conversations relating to real-world events and to organize around
important issues (Carvin, 2009; Gannes, 2010).
Hashtags gained positive public attention during the “Arab Spring” of 2011,
when a series of revolutions, some successful, some less so, broke out across the Arab
world. The posts associated with Hashtags became sources for mainstream news
media, including #Jan25, the date when protests broke out across Egypt that eventually led to the downfall of the Mubarak regime, and #sidibouzid, which referred
to the town in Tunisia where its equally successful protest movement started.
What is unique here aside from the incredible organizing power that hashtags
have is that the hashtag itself was a “hack” of Twitter. Chris Messina didn’t work for
Twitter; he just saw a tool that wasn’t meeting his needs and values, and he proposed
a solution and started to use it. His understanding of both the technical dimensions
of search and the social dimensions of the needs that people had on Twitter led to
an innovation that had mass public appeal. This also leads back to the point that
hacker literacies are implicitly sociotechnical in nature in that Messina’s hack could
not have been achieved solely through a technical understanding of Twitter’s fea-
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tures, nor would he have been able to come up with this innovation if he were only
attuned to social behaviors and needs and not to the technical formulation of the
medium. Like the spaces it aims to affect, hacker literacies involve understandings
and practices of both the technical and social variety.
While it is important to note that Messina did not have an oppositional relationship with Twitter (he merely saw that there was a way that it could be better
aligned with his values around group organization), equally important is Twitter’s
response to this and other innovations that have emerged from its community: it
embraced them. Part of why Twitter might have been more likely to respond in this
way has to do with its comparatively pared-down design when placed next to a platform like Facebook, which has a much more robust and complex feature set. At the
same time, Twitter’s ability to adapt according to the values and innovations users
bring to it points to a potentially supporting trend when it comes to hacker literacies: the iterative and responsive culture of “Web 2.0.”
In general, the diverse ecology of the Internet has made web developers much
more attuned to user experience and desires as a key factor in determining features.
With a potential competitor a click away, participatory websites are often in “perpetual beta,” an environment where untested features are regularly rolled out and
users are treated as “co-developers” (O’Reilly, 2005). On a technical level, the features are relatively easy to change, and so on a social level, a culture of responsiveness to user desires has developed. At the same time, we cannot conflate wanting a
better widget on the part of the user as wanting a participatory experience that
embodies the values they want to live by, as so often more base desires for ease and
function overshadow living according to more deeply held values.
If the case of Twitter and hashtags points to the cultural aspects of Web 2.0 that
make it receptive to practices associated with hacker literacies, then the case of
Facebook might point us to some of the challenges to hacker literacies that come
up as a result of engineering culture. As Flanagan, Howe, and Nissenbaum (2008)
note in “Embodying Values in Technology,” the part of the academy that is most
developed in engaging in systemic reflection about values is the humanities. They
note that while computer science, design, and engineering programs can draw on
lessons from those disciplines, these sorts of reflections are not central, and designers can often experience the limitations of their training. The case of Facebook’s privacy practices itself was construed by some as resulting from engineers in that
company who were “tone deaf ” with regards to what users’ values were, which
alludes to this broader point about the limitations of technical culture’s ability to
reflect on values at play in designs.
We can look at Twitter, with its embrace of the hashtag as well as other usergenerated practices that have affected the design of the platform as a case where the
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designers of a sociotechnical space actively valued the priorities of their users and
responded to user innovation accordingly. The degree to which a “hacker-literate”
individual such as Messina is able to reformulate a medium according to his values
is not only dependent on the depth of his understanding and innovative nature of
his actions, but also on the culture within and surrounding a given sociotechnical
space and how that affects its technical makeup and social landscape.
“Grid unification” and teen protest in a virtual world
For the final case, I return to a previous life, one where I would stay late at work,
after all my other colleagues had left for the day, to explore vast landscapes with people from around the world. Occasionally I would go skydiving into an active volcano with a young man wearing a Godzilla costume. If my boss stayed late too, we
would sometimes get into snowball fights, no matter what time of year it was. I was
working in the 3D, user-generated virtual world of Second Life, a space where the
surreal was always possible, and if you could imagine it, you could build it—that is,
if you had facility with the world’s extensive 3D modeling and scripting tools.
Alex Harbinger, one of the amazing people I had the fortune to meet in Second Life
during my years working in this space, was a person with such skills.
Alex was not only talented at creating complex virtual objects and landscapes,
but in the time I knew him, he also created an empire. Harbinger Industries was
Alex’s “in-world” business. It sold any variety of virtual goods including clothing for
“avatars” (the physical character of Second Life residents) to wear, accessories such
as virtual paintball guns and grappling hooks, and games that could be set up on virtual properties and played by groups of Second Life residents that congregated in
these spaces. His goods were not just sold in the virtual shopping centers that
could be found on the more commerce-oriented areas of the virtual world; eventually Alex himself set up a number of virtual islands (the largest unit of land available for purchase within Second Life) where he both set up shop and also rented
space to other entrepreneurial residents. These “sims” (in-world parlance for islands)
not only made Harbinger Industries into a sustainable business, they also became
extremely popular areas where people would gather not just for commerce but also
for socializing.
There are a couple of details that I haven’t mentioned yet though: Alex accomplished all of this by the time he was 15 in what may have been the world’s only teenrun economy. In Second Life, those between the ages of 13 and 17 did not have
access to the adult-only “Main Grid.” Instead, they were restricted to the “Teen
Grid,” a much smaller collection of “sims” with a decidedly Lord of the Flies feel. I
was working as one of the few adults cleared for access to this space. As an educa-
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tor at Global Kids, a New York–based nonprofit that focuses on international
affairs and human-rights education, I was part of a program within our organization that aimed to leverage new media in innovative ways to achieve our mission,
hence my involvement in the Teen Grid of Second Life. As an adult, I was restricted
to the “sims” that my organization owned, never able to visit the “mainland” of the
Teen Grid, but I interacted with many teens who turned out for a range of workshops, camps, and competitions that we ran over the years. It was in this context that
I got to know Alex, and his political views about the issue of “grid unification.”
While some of the Teen Grid population enjoyed having their own space within
Second Life, others felt that the separation of the grids was a problem. The teen population and physical land-space of the grid was small, and many residents felt like it
was a less dynamic space than it could have been. Many complained that the economy was depressed. More than any of these, there was a strong sentiment that next
to the Main Grid where the adults were located, those on the Teen Grid were
treated like second-class citizens, and were subject to a form of age discrimination.
This is where “grid unification” came in. The idea could be considered by some
to be the first age-based civil-rights issue in a virtual world, and by others to be an unrealistic pipe-dream put forth by naïve young people who didn’t understand the issues
at play in designing complex online communities. In its essence, grid unification was
about creating a common space between the main and teen grids where parents could
hang out with their kids, where teens could engage in commerce with a much larger
market, where adults could mentor teens, and where teens in turn could showcase their
creativity for a larger world. The teen-only space of the Teen Grid would be maintained, and “mature” areas of the Main Grid would be off limits to teen residents. The
idea was essentially to create a bridge that would “unify” the two grids of Second Life.
“Imagine a world free of segregation, a world without discrimination—A world
that we live in? Not quite, but the goal is within our reach. Grid unification is the
first step—one to remove unneeded censorship and age discrimination. A movement
that benefits everybody.” These are Alex’s words, which preceded a public debate he
held on Global Kids Island in early May 2007 (Harbinger, 2007). When I asked him
about grid unification for this chapter, Alex told me that it wasn’t his idea originally.
“It was a communal thing—we didn’t want to be the small 1 percent. We wanted
to be part of the whole thing. The idea of unification was floating around, but
nobody was really doing anything.” Alex decided that something should be done,
and in the process created a movement.
In a 20-page document titled “The Grid Unification Proposal” that circulated
around the Teen Grid in mid-2007, Alex artfully outlined his vision for unification.
It was a proposal aimed directly at Linden Lab, the company that owns and runs
Second Life. It outlined what unification would look like, how potential legal and
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social issues would be mitigated, and included potential alterations and additions
to the proposed policies that could be taken under consideration. He even included
a Q&A section that addressed major questions that both adults and teens had raised
about the idea of unification. Staff members at Linden Lab at the time reported to
me that the document was influential during internal discussions regarding the issue,
and was printed out and hung in the offices of those responsible for the Teen Grid.
More than that, the proposal was the articulation of a larger civic movement
that had developed around the idea of unification. In early May 2007, following the
initial release of the document, Alex organized hundreds of teens to participate in
a non-violent protest walk called “The Walk for Intergrid Commerce.” A version
of the Grid Unification Proposal that was updated after the walk reported on it:
After months of planning, Teen Grid residents organized and commenced a grid-wide
walk to promote Grid Unification and cross-Grid commerce. The Walk took place on May
6th, 2007 officially starting at noon and ending near 1:30 PM. The walk consisted of hundreds of residents gathering to join in a non-violent walk across the Teen Grid.
What is so amazing about this story is not just that it is a powerful example of
teen civic engagement, but it is that these teens couched their desires around the
reformulation of a communications medium using the language of rights, discrimination, and censorship. Hacker literacies were implicit in their behaviors the entire
time. To them, Second Life was not “just a game,” a derisive jab commonly aimed
at the virtual world, but a valid social and cultural space in which they could engage
in acts of self-determination.
At the same time, they also held robust debate about the technical affordances
of the medium, the potential social implications of varying governance policies and
how the medium’s current formulations were implicitly biased in certain ways. And
they took for granted that these were things that could be changed.
C ONCLUSION
Beyond these examples, the broader world and current digital literacy movement
both offer a lot to be hopeful for in terms of the development of hacker literacies.
The rapid pace of technological change is beginning to make the malleability
inherent in all technologies more transparent. Just as media watchdog groups and
ombudsmen emerged as important voices in the broadcast media space, strong
voices in mainstream media, academia, the blogosphere, and civil society are emerging to ask important questions about the ways that technology is formulated and
how that affects society. More importantly, there are many burgeoning subcultures
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that youth are already involved in including the game modding, DIY, and “Maker”
spaces that place a high value on tinkering with, customizing, and pushing back
against existing designs to create what one wants.
Likewise, increased interest in digital literacies and design thinking within the
education community will likely be a boon for the development of hacker literacies.
More and more projects, especially those oriented towards Papert’s Constructionist
learning principles, are aiming to position youth as designers of technology using
tools like Scratch (Resnick et al., 2009), Gamestar Mechanic (Salen, 2007), Mozilla’s
Hackasaurus, and many others. Projects like these have strong potential to develop
fundamental building blocks of hacker literacies, and put young people in the role
of creators and makers of their own technosocial world. As a society, we need to be
prepared to let that happen.
With appropriate development, critical participation with popular new media
tools can come to occupy a similar space within participatory culture as has been
filled by critical voices in other mainstream concerns. In the domain of consumer
apparel, a movement of fair-trade-oriented consumers ask where, how, and by
whom something is made, and with those answers are then empowered to make
choices that affect the lives of others who lie at the other end of the supply chain.
That example, however, serves as cautionary as well, as we still live in a world
where exploitative labor practices associated with clothing manufacturing are rampant. While I believe participatory culture cannot, by virtue of its many-to-many
structure, be completely dominated by one player, interest, or type of interactive
approach, without incorporating critical practices into participatory ones, without
the development of hacker literacies, people may find themselves living in a digitally mediated culture dictated by interests other than their own.
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to express my deep gratitude to Michele Knobel, Jenna McWilliams, Joshua
Danish, Henry Jenkins, James Paul Gee, Susan Herring, Kylie Peppler, and the editors of this volume, JuliAnna Ávila and Jessica Zacher Pandya, for providing valuable feedback on the ideas in and drafts of this chapter. And of course to Alex
Harbinger, who for me embodied what a hacker-literate teen can look like.
N OTE
1. Those within the computer programming world apply the word “crackers” to those who
use technological knowledge and skills for ill intent. Alternatively, these individual are
referred to as “black-hat hackers” in contrast to “white-hat hackers.”
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AFTERWORD
So Now You Know.
What Are You Going
to Do about It?
M ARGARET C. H AGOOD
Lankshear and Knobel (2008) offer a definition of digital literacy as “myriad social
practices and conceptions of engaging in meaning making mediated by texts that
are produced, received, distributed, exchanged, etc., via digital codification” (p. 5).
It probably goes without saying, but digital literacies are part and parcel of 21stcentury life. Just from general exposure to youth today, few would argue about the
role that digital literacies plays in the overall spectrum of literacy development, and
that role continues to grow. Long-range studies have shown increases in youths’ digital-literacy habits in a relatively short time period. The Kaiser Family Foundation
study Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds reports on the
changes of this age group’s digital-literacy uses at three different periods. Youth
between the ages of 8 and 18 have increased their daily media usage from 7:29 hours
in 1999 to 8:33 hours in 2004 to 10:45 hours in 2009 with media including TV,
music, computer, video, print, and movies (Rideout, Foehr, & Roberts, 2010).
Across these three time periods, youth spent an average of 43 minutes daily on
print-based texts in 1999 and 2004, and 38 minutes in 2009. With those averages,
it’s not uncommon to see youth plugged in with cell phones equipped with texting
capabilities, cameras, and digital recorders; ereaders or tablets; or laptop computers—and rarely with a book in their hands. (Not to say that they aren’t reading;
they’re reading differently.)
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So it makes sense that literacy acquisition at the intersection of digital literacies is also part and parcel of the buzz of literacy initiatives concerned with impacting and positively affecting instruction that is not only relevant now but attends to
the preparation of learners for life after graduation from high school (be it post-graduate studies or workforce). National organizations such as the International Reading
Association (IRA) and the National Council for the Teachers of English (NCTE),
and the Common Core Standards (CCSS), noting the changes in youths’ literacy
practices and proclivities, have coupled teaching spoken, written, and visual dimensions of literacy, including print and nonprint texts, with uses of digital tools. For
example, IRA and NCTE share a set of 12 standards for English/Language Arts
that highlight the intersection of print, nonprint, and media in order develop students’ reading, writing, listening, speaking, viewing, and designing of texts
(International Reading Association, 1996). IRA’s position statement on new literacies also focuses attention on the integration of ICTs (information and communications technologies) and on the development of critical thinking into literacy
practices (International Reading Association, 2009). In addition, the CCSS standards recognize the relationship between digital tools and the development of print
literacy (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, 2010). In some
senses, the coupling of print literacies and digital literacies isn’t a newly formed venture. Since 1970, NCTE has actively created resolutions that explore the relationships between literacy, media, and technology to the benefit of students’ literacy
development (see http://www.ncte.org/positions/21stcenturyliteracy). But rather
than set forth explicit standards related to media uses for the development of digital literacies, these documents embed these throughout the standards.
Standards also designate that literacy professionals should assume digital literacies as part of the literacy repertoire to be taught. IRA Standards for Reading
Professionals, for example, which outline the standards by which many literacy educators are evaluated, state, “Traditional print, digital, and online reading and writing
experiences that incorporate multiple genres, multiple perspectives, and media and
communication technologies are necessary to prepare learners for literacy tasks of the
21st century” (Standard 2) (http://www.reading.org/General/Current
Research/Standards/ProfessionalStandards2010/ProfessionalStandards2010_Standar
d2.aspx). And the CCSS website states that the standards “clearly communicate what
is expected of students at each grade level. This will allow our teachers to be better
equipped to know exactly what they need to help students learn and establish individualized benchmarks for them” (http://www.corestandards.org/the-standards).
Furthermore, the CCSS (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices,
2010) gives teachers full rein for instruction with digital literacies, explaining,
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While the Standards focus on what is most essential, they do not describe all that can or
should be taught. A great deal is left to the discretion of teachers and curriculum developers. The aim of the Standards is to articulate the fundamentals, not to set out an exhaustive
list. (p. 6)
Interestingly, despite all of the mandates to corral teachers and students into
functioning via the same parameters and outcomes, teachers actually have a great
deal of autonomy about how to address digital literacies. And while this autonomy
might fit nicely with some teachers’ backgrounds, expertise, and comfort levels to
teach this subject matter, others may well feel at sea for a variety of reasons. Issues
of teaching with and using digital literacies have been well documented in both
reviews of technology uses and in teacher perception surveys (Hew & Brush, 2007;
Hutchinson & Reinking, 2011). Several barriers to integration of technologies
persist, including lack of resources and institutional support, the culture of the
subject to be taught, teachers’ attitudes and beliefs, teachers’ knowledge and skills,
and the lack of professional development and assessment. The majority of 1,441
teachers in grades K–12 surveyed by Hutchinson and Reinking (2011) viewed
technology instruction as a component of ICTs related to the “know-how” of using
digital tools (e.g., creating a word-processing document or PowerPoint presentation)
rather than using the tools to develop digital literacies of the kind defined by
Knobel and Lankshear at the opening of this Afterword.
So teachers have much leeway in their instructional approaches to teaching digital literacies, but obstacles still exist. Some research reports that teachers resist teaching with digital literacies, even as they are aware of the centrality of these literacies
in students’ lives. Alvermann (2011) found that teachers and teacher educators (of
pre-service and in-service teachers) choose to exclude these forms of literacies in
their instruction, mostly because they feel that students already have plenty of time
with digital literacies outside of school. Other teachers call attention to the dissonance between instruction that addresses digital literacies and standardized assessments that measure functional literacies of reading and writing print text, explaining
they can’t justify spending valuable time (especially in “underperforming schools”)
teaching digital literacies when they aren’t assessed on statewide high-stakes tests
(Burke & Hammett, 2009; Hagood, Provost, Egelson, & Skinner, 2008). And still
other teachers recognize the importance of teaching digital literacies, but see these
literacies as technological supplements rather than central curricula to the literacy
being taught (Hutchinson & Reinking, 2011).
To be sure, teachers consistently recognize the import of digital literacies in students’ lives. Hutchinson and Reinking (2011) also found that although most of the
K–12 teachers they surveyed (98 percent) have access to a computer and Internet
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at school or in their classroom (86 percent), two-thirds of them believed that technology needs to be integrated into instruction as supplemental—not central—to the
curriculum. Many teachers are still unclear about the import of integration and
instruction (and without standards that point to those issues, many teachers are
stymied about how to utilize and teach digital literacies). Hence it seems that now
the focus of digital tools has shifted from the intersection of digital literacies and
students’ literacy practices to the intersection of definitions of digital literacies and
of instruction. How are digital literacies defined and taken up and taught as part of
a global society (which the standards state as a goal of standards’ mastery)? I believe,
like Ertmer (2005), that forms of instruction with digital literacies stem from
teacher belief systems. He succinctly said:
The decision regarding whether and how to use technology for instruction rests on the shoulders of classroom teachers. If educators are to achieve fundamental, or second order, changes
in classroom teaching practices, we need to examine teachers themselves and the beliefs they
hold about teaching, learning, and technology. (p. 27)
Ertmer’s directive rang in my ears as I read Critical Digital Literacies as Social Praxis.
The ideas expressed throughout this text are exemplars for considering belief systems, the relationships, and the kinds of instruction necessary for literacy acquisition that accounts not only for digital literacies but also for the needed development
of critical digital literacies. The chapters in this volume take seriously the portion
of the Knobel and Lankshear’s (2008) definition of digital literacies that includes
“social practices and conceptions of engaging in meaning making.” Connecting to
this definition, the contributors to this volume add another key layer to the discussion of the development of digital literacies with their commitment to critical digital literacies. Critical digital literacies stem from critical literacy education and are
concerned with teaching learners to identify and work within understandings of the
relations between language and power.
The chapters in this volume illustrate how the variables connected to “social
practices of engaging in meaning making” influence the design and implementation of developing critical digital literacies. These chapters also illustrate classroom
practices for teachers who want to reconsider their belief systems about the differences between digital literacies and those infused with critical literacy; their instructional practices that will move beyond seeing digital literacy as technology tools,
making digital literacies a central (rather than ancillary component) of the curriculum; and their comfort levels with moving from teaching with digital literacies to
critical digital literacies.
For practitioners to move into the space of implementing critical digital literacies beyond digital literacies as ICTs, they may consider several areas related to teach-
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ing, learning, and technology that were explored throughout this text. These include
the following:
1. Determining a working definition of digital literacies and critical digital literacies;
2. Creating connections between critical digital literacies and functional/
foundational literacies;
3. Considering the changes in relationship identities needed between
teachers and students who engage in critical digital literacies; and
4. Mapping out changes in instruction to reflect these ideas.
Such an exercise isn’t intended for those who aren’t interested in real changes in oneself, in relationships with students, and in instructional practices. As Merchant
(2009) notes, reflections on critical practices including digital literacy “can have a
destabilising effect in that it begins to make its users see the possibilities for different kinds of learning relationships, different kinds of interactions, and of course different genres and purposes for literacy” (p. 54). This text has pushed me to think
about how shifts in my own instruction using critical digital literacies impact my
own belief systems, relationships, and instruction.
The chapters in this volume push the envelope regarding what constitutes
digital literacies instruction as a component of literacy curricula. Ultimately, the studies and theories described use digital literacies for raising and changing consciousness though a focus on the critical literacies of language and power. The focus on
developing critical literacies of students as they engage with new media and digital tools takes the discussion of the inclusion of digital literacies in instruction one
step further. Alvermann and Hinchman (2011) caution that “awareness is one
thing; acting on that awareness is quite another” (p. 273). To engage in critical digital literacies is to move from awareness to action. These chapters set a path for others who would like to follow suit. The conditions are right. So, now you know. What
are you going to do about it?
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Author Biographies
JULIANNA ÁVILA is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the
University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she teaches undergraduate and
graduate courses in English Education. A former high school teacher and literacy
coach, she received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley and has
published in Theory Into Practice, Pedagogies, and Teachers College Record. She is the
recipient of the 2011 AERA Writing and Literacies Steve Cahir Award. Her current research focuses on the ways in which teacher-education students gain knowledge of critical literacies using digital tools.
CANDANCE DOERR-STEVENS is a doctoral candidate in Critical Literacy and
English Education from the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the
University of Minnesota. She has taught writing at the elementary, junior high, and
college levels and currently teaches education courses for pre-service and practicing teachers. Her current research interests include the emergent literacy practices
involved in digital writing, in particular the rhetorical affordances of online roleplay and identity practices of digital media composition.
ANTERO GARCIA, incoming assistant professor in the English department at
Colorado State University, will receive his PhD in Urban Schooling at the Graduate
School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los
Angeles. His research focuses on the role of digital media and game play in English
education and critical literacies. He taught English and ESL at a high school in
South Central Los Angeles for seven years.
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MARGARET C. HAGOOD is an associate professor at the College of Charleston.
She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in literacy, including foundational and
new literacies. She does research on adolescents and adults’ literacies related to pop
culture and identities, and is the co-editor of the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy.
GLYNDA HULL is Professor of Education in Language, Literacy, and Culture at
the University of California, Berkeley, and Visiting Research Professor at New York
University. Her research examines digital technologies and new literacies, afterschool as a space for learning, and community/school/university partnerships.
CHARLES K. KINZER is Professor of Communication and Technology, and
coordinator of the program in Communication, Computing, and Technology in
Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. He received his PhD in
Language and Literacy from the University of California, Berkeley. His research
interests include new literacies, and opportunities within virtual worlds and games
for educational research and practice; recent work has appeared in Educational
Technology Research and Development (ETR&D), Reading Research and Instruction,
Instructional Science, and Reading Research Quarterly. Dr. Kinzer has received the
Computers in Reading Research Award from the International Reading
Association. His work has been funded by the IERI/NSF, the U.S. Dept. of
Education, FIPSE, the Office of Special Education Projects, and the Robert Wood
Johnson Foundation.
CYNTHIA LEWIS is Professor of Critical Literacy and English Education at the
University of Minnesota, where she holds the Emma M. Berkmaier Professorship
in Educational Leadership. Her current research focuses on the relationship between
literacy practices, social identities, and learning in urban schools. Her books include
Literary Practices as Social Acts: Power, Status, and Cultural Norms in the Classroom and
Reframing Sociocultural Research: Identity, Agency, and Power (with Patricia Enciso
and Elizabeth Moje). Both books were awarded the Edward Fry book Award from
the National Reading Conference.
ALTHEA SCOTT NIXON is a visiting assistant professor at the Rossier School
of Education at the University of Southern California. Prior to joining Rossier, she
was a two-year University of California Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at the
Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition at the University of California, San
Diego, and she received her PhD in Education at the University of California, Los
Angeles. Dr. Nixon’s research focuses on the ways children and adolescents from culturally, linguistically, and ethnically diverse backgrounds draw on new media technologies in learning and play.
ARNE OLAV NYGARD is a lecturer at the Norwegian National Center for Reading
Education and Research, University of Stavanger. He holds a master’s degree in
Literacy Studies from the University of Stavanger and is currently a PhD candidate.
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His field of research is the use of digital technologies for reading and writing in school.
He has published about design in digital media, most recently in M. Engebretsen’s
2010 Skrift/bilde/lyd: analyseavsammensattetekster (Script/Image/Sound: Analysis of
Multimodal Texts). He is active in professional development for high school teachers in Norway.
JESSICA ZACHER PANDYA is an associate professor at California State University,
Long Beach, in Teacher Education and Liberal Studies. At CSULB, she teaches
courses on literacy and urban education to undergraduate pre-service teachers. In her
last project, she investigated the ways that urban children, including second-language
learners, experience high-stakes assessments and highly structured language-arts
curricula in high-poverty schools. She recently published a book in the Teachers
College Press Language & Literacy Series about this project, titled Overtested: How
High-Stakes Accountability Fails English Language Learners (2011). She has published
about children’s literacy practices in journals such as Research in the Teaching of
English, Review of Research in Education, Language Arts, Educational Studies, and
Pedagogies: An International Journal. She is currently collaborating with teachers in an
urban bilingual K–12 school to operate to create critical digital literacies projects.
DANA E. SALTER is a doctoral candidate in Curriculum and Instruction at
McGill University in Canada where her research focuses on issues in literacy, inclusion and exclusion, teacher education and digital media, and learning in alternative
high school education contexts. Salter is also the North American program manager for the Beyond the Bricks Project. Salter has been a literacy, writing, and digital media and learning teacher for 12 years and has taught and designed curricula
for middle school through graduate school courses in these disciplines in several
countries (United States, Canada, South Korea, Turkey). Her most recent writing
(2010) has been published in Cultural Studies of Science Education.
RAFI SANTO is an educator, researcher, technologist, and activist. He is currently
pursuing his PhD in the Learning Sciences at Indiana University, with research and
professional interests focusing on the intersection of new media, educational design,
interest-driven learning, and online participatory cultures with a particular eye
towards how to leverage these areas to create greater equity and democratization in
society. He has consulted with foundations, community groups, NGOs, and educators to think about how they can add value to their work through meaningful integration of digital media, and he has more than 10 years of experience in youth
development and education. Prior to starting his doctoral work, Rafi was a senior
program associate at the youth development organization Global Kids.
CASSANDRA SCHARBER is an assistant professor of Learning Technologies
and co-director of the Learning Technologies Media Lab at the University of
Minnesota. Her research explores the nexus of literacy, power, and the possibilities
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that technologies offer in aiding the transformation of teaching and learning. For
the past four years, Scharber has served as the co-editor for the Digital Literacies
column for the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy.
STEPHANIE ANNE SCHMIER is an adjunct assistant professor in the Rossier
School of Education at the University of Southern California and holds an EdD
in Curriculum and Teaching from Teachers College, Columbia University. She is
interested in how youth take up new digital technologies, the ways in which adolescents’ digital literacy practices travel across in- and out-of-school spaces, and the
meanings that they make of these practices across multiple contexts in their lives.
A recipient of a National Academy of Education Adolescent Literacy Fellowship,
she has published in the journals E- Learning and Language Arts.
ANNA SMITH is a teacher, teacher educator, and educational researcher in
English Education at New York University. Her dissertation research examines the
transcontextual writing development of urban adolescent males. Anna’s recently published co-authored book, Developing Writers: Teaching and Learning in the Digital
Age, is available through Open University Press. Her work can also be found at
www.developingwriters.org.
JESSICA DOCKTER TIERNEY is a doctoral candidate in Critical Literacy and
English Education at the University of Minnesota. Her research examines how literacy practices with media shape racial identities with a particular interest in how
white students imagine themselves as allies in anti-racist and social justice work. Her
co-authored publications include “Redefining Rigor: Critical Engagement, Digital
Media, and the New English/Language Arts” in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult
Literacy, and “Reading Literature in Secondary School: Disciplinary Discourses in
Global Times” in The Handbook on Research on Children’s and Young Adult Literature.
SARAH LOHNESWATULAK is an assistant professor in the Department of
Educational Technology and Literacy, College of Education, Towson University,
Maryland. She earned her EdD in Communication and Education from Teachers
College, Columbia University. Dr. Lohnes Watulak’s research, which primarily
focuses on undergraduate students’ new literacies and technology practices, has
been published in the British Journal of Educational Technology, Digital Culture &
Education, the Journal of Language and Literacy Education, Innovate, and Educational
Technology: The Magazine for Managers of Change in Education.
*As of July 1, 2012.