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Civic Writing on Digital Walls
Abstract
Civic writing has appeared on walls over centuries, across cultures, and in response to political concerns. This article advances a civic interrogation of how civic writing is publicly authored, read, and discussed as openly accessible and multimodal texts on digital walls. Drawing upon critical literacy perspectives, we examine how a repertoire of 10 civic writing practices associated with open web annotation (OWA) helped educators develop critical literacy. We introduce a social design experiment in which educators leveraged OWA to discuss educational equity across sociopolitical texts and contexts. We then describe a single case of OWA conversation among educators and use discourse analysis to examine shifting situated meanings and political expressions present in educators’ civic writing practices. We conclude by considering implications for theorizing the marginality of critical literacy, designing learning environments that foster educators’ civic writing, and facilitating learning opportunities that encourage educators’ civic writing across digital walls.
... Third, productive group discourse is possible as SA encourages learners to easily share their intersubjective interpretations. Whether through creative forms of multimodal self-expression or through shared digital literacy practices (Kalir & Garcia, 2019), SA provisions learners with multiple entry points for expansive and meaningful contributions to group activity. Collectively, these qualitiestexts as problem spaces for sustained interaction, the production of artifacts to guide knowledge construction, and the ease with which interpretations are shared among a group-foreground how SA can catalyze processes of intersubjective meaningmaking. ...
... Since 2016, the Marginal Syllabus has sparked and sustained public conversation about educational equity. Thanks to sustained partnerships with educational organizations and leading education scholars (e.g., Mirra, 2018), the Marginal Syllabus has grown into a public CSCL initiative that uses SA to encourage shared dialogue about equity topics related to civic engagement, literacy, and learning (Kalir, 2019;Kalir & Garcia, 2019 (Kalir, 2018). This case study, which emerged from ongoing inquiry about the Marginal Syllabus as a social design experiment (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016), was an effort to describe how such a project creates the conditions for educator collaboration as an open and professionally relevant practice. ...
... Syllabi annotated during the 2016-2017, 2017-2018, and 2018-2019 academic years, and during the Summer of 2019, have provided over 250 educators with the opportunity to jointly contribute individual interpretations of meaning to over 30 scholarly texts as discursive problem spaces. Annotation conversations evidence groups coordinating shared practices, like educators critically questioning assumptions, providing exposition of ideas, evaluating claims, and participating in other forms of critical and digital literacy (Kalir & Garcia, 2019). Given the breadth of Marginal Syllabus activity, this case study drew upon two data sourceseducator interviews and annotations from a focal conversation-in order to investigate the processes of intersubjective meaning-making and substantiate evidence-based claims about collaboration as an OEP. ...
Collaboration is a conceptually ambiguous aspect of open education. Given inconsistent discussion about collaboration in the open education literature, this article suggests collaboration be defined and studied as a distinct open educational practice. A theoretical stance from the discipline of computer-supported collaborative learning helps conceptualize collaboration as processes of intersubjective meaning-making. Social annotation is then presented as a genre of learning technology that can productively enable group collaboration and shared meaning-making. After introducing an open learning project utilizing social annotation for group dialogue, analysis of interview and annotation data details how social annotation enabled three group-level epistemic expressions delineating collaboration as intersubjective meaning-making and as an open educational practice. A summative discussion considers how the social life of documents encourages collaboration, why attention to epistemic expression is a productive means of articulating open learning, and how to extend the study of collaboration as an open educational practice.
... While Gutiérrez (2008) discusses how a collective Third Space nurtures learning for youth from nondominant groups, other educators have used the design to support teacher learning. For example, the Marginal Syllabus is an online professional development project for K-12 teachers, university students, and university researchers that uses the social annotation tool Hypothesis to facilitate discussions about educational equity scholarship (Kalir & Garcia, 2019). The success of the Marginal Syllabus points to a need for more examples of online collective Third Spaces that realize the possibility of social annotation for educator learning. ...
Online collective Third Spaces can support educators' learning about surveillance-based educational technologies while simultaneously helping educators to develop humanizing practices with technology. In this paper, I discuss AnnotateEdTech, an online collective Third Space that brings together educators to use social annotation to critique educational technology companies' claims about their products. I share one case of an AnnotateEdTech gathering and discuss how participants' annotations are evidence of their learning and humanizing practices with technology.
... The exposition of ideas happens during the annotation conversations. Contributors to a group inquiry develop associative connections, helping them to recognize multiple perspectives (Kalir & Garcia, 2019). Openly networked SA also motivates knowledge construction (Chen, 2019). ...
An important subdomain in research on Human-Artificial Intelligence interaction is Explainable AI (XAI). XAI aims to improve human understanding and trust in machine intelligence and automation by providing users with visualizations and other information explaining the AI’s decisions, actions, or plans and thereby to establish justified trust and reliance. XAI systems have primarily used algorithmic approaches designed to generate explanations automatically that help understanding underlying information about decisions and establish justified trust and reliance, but an alternate that may augment these systems is to take advantage of the fact that user understanding of AI systems often develops through self-explanation (Mueller et al., 2021). Users attempt to piece together different sources of information and develop a clearer understanding, but these self-explanations are often lost if not shared with others. This thesis research demonstrated how this ‘Self-Explanation’ could be shared collaboratively via a system that is called collaborative XAI (CXAI). It is akin to a Social Q&A platform (Oh, 2018) such as StackExchange. A web-based system was built and evaluated formatively and via user studies. Formative evaluation will show how explanations in an XAI system, especially collaborative explanations, can be assessed based on ‘goodness criteria’ (Mueller et al., 2019). This thesis also investigated how the users performed with the explanations from this type of XAI system. Lastly, the research investigated whether the users of CXAI system are satisfied with the human-generated explanations generated in the system and check if the users can trust this type of explanation.
... To date, 62 partner authors have provided the Marginal Syllabus with permission to feature 41 texts for educators to read and annotate, over 600 educators have participated in the project since 2016, and participants have written more than 4,700 public Hypothesis annotations for others to read and discuss. Our interest in this case-with lurking, social reading, and informal learning-is a useful complement to prior Marginal Syllabus research that has examined how this online social community enables educator civic writing (Kalir & Garcia, 2019), ethical debate about digital literacy (Kalir & Dillon, 2019), and collaborative epistemic expressions (Kalir, 2020a). ...
... It may be difficult for a newcomer to design and participatory methodologies to understand the differences. Though equity-focused researchers have begun to take up social design experiments as a methodology, many reports from such projects focus more so on the empirical analyses of learning as opposed to methodologies specific to the social design experiment (Kalir & Garcia, 2019;Mirra & Garcia, 2020;Stornaiuolo et al., 2018), perhaps due to article space limitations as social design experiments require complex decision-making at every level of the design and redesigning process from multiple stakeholders. Following the call by Gutiérrez, Engeström and Sannino (2016) to strengthen "participatory design research"-including social design experimentsthrough "comparisons, discussions, and debates between such theories and methodologies, tested in empirical intervention studies" (p. ...
Traditional educational contexts often silence the literacies of vulnerable BIPOC youth (Kirkland, 2013; Paris, 2012) and our English classrooms must be reconceptualized to interrupt the cycle of deficit-framed literacy instruction and disproportionate referral to remedial or special education services leading to unjust systems such as the “school-to-prison” pipeline (Sealey-Ruiz, 2011). One asset-based direction is to recognize and center youths’ cultural literacies, specifically their recreational fan activities (Emdin & Adjapong, 2018; Magnifico et al., 2018). In this study, I conducted a social design experiment (K. D. Gutiérrez, 2018) around a high school course with the goal of creating space for “conscious reflective struggle” (Beach, 1999, p. 130) for youth regarding their identities in and across discourses. This course centered participation in and contributions to multiple fandom discourses, supporting youth in developing and navigating complex literacy practices through a disciplinary and metadiscursive lens. My first article is an overview of our social design experiment with a focus on how I collaboratively followed “equity trails” (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010) in the design. This paper uses empirical data from this study to systematically describe the ways social design experiments disrupt and transform each stage of the research process. My second article is a portrait of Alex—a Puerto Rican cis-female artist and focal student—her meaningful learning trajectories in this acafandom context across activity systems. In this paper I trace form-function shifts in classroom interactions to trace ways that Alex made sense of syncretic literacies (Gutiérrez et al., 2013) and followed trajectories of collateral, encompassing, and mediational transitions (Beach, 1999). Finally, my third article is a nonrepresentational account of the "affective resonances" (Phillips & Killian Lund, 2019) of BIPOC focal youth’s embodied experiences in the classroom. In this paper I listen for ways these youth’s passions were sustained or dampened as they engaged with certain textual communities throughout the semester. These papers show how is possible to design learning ecologies in diverse public school spaces that not only center youth interests but support them extending their passion and navigating critically across conversations that are meaningful to them.
... In fact, their relevance is perhaps more evident than ever during a global health pandemic and spans into every other topic in literacy including hot topics like the science of teaching reading, dyslexia, and social justice/equity in literacy. Recent impactful works have explored civic literacies in digital spaces (Kalir & Garcia, 2019); "restorying," or the reshaping of narratives to represent a diversity of perspectives and experiences often missing from popular texts and media (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016); and propaganda as well as the intersection of digital texts and critical literacy (Hobb's Media Education Lab's freely available resources https://mediaeducationlab.com/curriculum/materials). ...
The What’s Hot in 2019 survey was conducted to measure the amount of attention currently being given to literacy topics in research and practice. Twenty-five literacy leaders were surveyed; results were subsequently categorized into three levels: a) extremely hot or cold, b) very hot or cold, or c) hot or cold This year, there were four topics deemed “very hot”: digital/multimodal literacies; disciplinary literacies; early literacy; and English learners/ESL. A current analysis of timely research and practice is provided of both “very hot” topics as well as “should be hot” topics like comprehension, policy and advocacy, struggling readers, and writing. Teachers, administrators, and researchers alike can benefit from staying up to date with hot topics and current issues in literacy; implications for policy and practice regarding literacy instruction and developing the needs of diverse literacy learners are discussed.
The concept of “thriving” in educational policy refers to a loosely defined mix of academic, socioemotional, and civic outcomes associated with youth well-being. In this chapter, we analyze three focus areas in K–12 education—social emotional learning, 21st-century skills, and digital citizenship—and conclude that they are currently built on an individualistic neoliberal paradigm of learning and success. We argue that this paradigm is incommensurate with the personal, social, and civic flourishing necessary to sustain equitable multiracial democratic futures and offer instead an alternative collective logic of thriving. Our critical metasynthesis of the emergent field of social-design-based experimentation offers design principles educators can use to reorganize collective learning environments to support expansive youth thriving in schools and society.
To support adolescents with language-based learning disabilities (LLD), speech–language pathologists (SLPs) should adopt a multiliteracies framework that targets critical media literacy skills. Multiliteracies recognize the increasingly digital and collaborative nature of written language that adolescents encounter and promote using online platforms in educational contexts. This article describes critical media literacy pedagogy and how targeted skills align with concepts and Common Core standards that clinicians address in classroom contexts. Examples of clinical applications demonstrate how SLPs can use critical media literacy to target goals related to self-advocacy, digital citizenship, and cognitive flexibility. Embracing multiliteracies increases inclusivity and allows clinicians to target media literacy skills that are essential for adolescents with LLD to become informed citizens. Social media provides relevant platforms that can be adapted across settings to support written expression.
The author argues for annotation as a form of brave writing when it is social, public, vulnerable, and critical.
This chapter examines why the social and technical practice of annotation—and, specifically, annotation that accompanies digital and openly accessible texts—is relevant to the development of learning analytics in open, flexible, and distance learning (OFDL). When annotated, the text of books become a context for discussion, analysis, and shared inquiry. Social annotation is a genre of learning technology that enables information sharing, peer interaction, collaboration, and the production of new knowledge. Collaborative activity mediated by social annotation—and whether anchored to this book, or to texts like ebooks, PDFs, blog posts, and open textbooks—generate digital information that may be gathered, analyzed, reported, and interpreted as discourse data. When texts, like books, anchor social annotation, it is feasible for researchers to derive insight about group activity, meaning-making, and collaboration through the analysis of discourse data. This chapter is a reflective, first-hand account about the co-design of a public dashboard that reports social learning analytics and encourages learners’ collaborative annotation across open texts and contexts. This chapter: (1) names the theoretical stances toward open and social learning that informed design and research; (2) describes key decisions and trade-offs pertinent to four iterations of the social learning analytics dashboard; and (3) considers epistemological, technological, and infrastructural implications for the development and use of social learning analytics in OFDL.
Background: Social annotation (SA) is a genre of learning technology that enables the addition of digital notes to shared texts and affords contextualized peer-to-peer online discussion. A small body of literature examines how SA, as asynchronous online discussion, can contribute to students’ knowledge construction (KC)—or a process whereby learners collaborate through shared socio-cognitive practices. This case study analyzed how SA enabled student participation in seven KC activities, such as interpretation and elaboration.
Methods: We analyzed 2,121 annotations written by 59 students in three undergraduate courses at a Canadian University in the first months of 2019. Using a method of open coding and constant comparison, we coded each annotation for evidence of KC activities.
Results: Results showed a range of KC activities in students’ SA. Across courses, interpretation was the most common KC activity (40%), followed by elaboration (20%). Annotations that were part of peer-to-peer discussion included all seven types of KC activities, but some activities, such as consensus building, support, and conflict, were almost exclusively found in replies to others.
Conclusions: This study suggests that SA is a productive form of online learning through which undergraduate students in multiple disciplinary contexts can interact with peers, make sense of academic content, and construct knowledge by reading and writing together.
Background: Social annotation (SA) is a genre of learning technology that enables the addition of digital notes to shared texts and affords contextualized peer-to-peer online discussion. A small body of literature examines how SA, as asynchronous online discussion, can contribute to students’ knowledge construction (KC)—or a process whereby learners collaborate through shared socio-cognitive practices. This case study analyzed how SA enabled student participation in seven KC activities, such as interpretation and elaboration.
Methods: We analyzed 2,121 annotations written by 59 students in three undergraduate courses at a Canadian University in the Winter 2019 semester. Using a method of open coding and constant comparison, we coded each annotation for evidence of KC activities.
Results: Results showed a range of KC activities in students’ SA. Across courses, interpretation was the most common KC activity (40%), followed by elaboration (20%). Annotations that were part of peer-to-peer discussion included all seven types of KC activities, but some activities, such as consensus building, support, and conflict, were almost exclusively found in replies to others.
Conclusions: This study suggests that SA is a productive form of online learning through which undergraduate students in multiple disciplinary contexts can interact with peers, make sense of academic content, and construct knowledge by reading and writing together.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is threefold: to describe the equity-oriented design of a publicly accessible and openly networked computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) initiative that has supported educator discussion about equity topics; to identify design principles for equity-oriented design in open education; and to propose a model for the design of open learning initiatives that are mutually committed to educational equity and educational openness.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper draws from design-based research methodology, specifically design narrative and the worked example. The paper is one response to the need for more “designerly work” in the learning sciences, generally, and more specifically in domains such as CSCL.
Findings
Four design principles are identified that informed the equity-oriented creation and iteration of the Marginal Syllabus, an open CSCL initiative: leveraging the open web, fostering multi-stakeholder partnerships, working with open content and engaging professional learning as an open practice. This paper also advances the open palimpsests model for equity-oriented design in open education. The model integrates design principles to assist CSCL and open education designers and researchers in creating or iterating projects to be more equity-oriented learning opportunities.
Originality/value
This paper’s design narrative identifies Marginal Syllabus design principles and advances the open palimpsests model for equity-oriented design in open education. The design narrative demonstrates how critical perspectives on the relationship between equity and digital technology can encourage collaboration among diverse project stakeholders, attune to the dynamics of power and agency and respond to the worldly needs of partners and participants.
In February 2018, teachers and other school personnel in West Virginia went on strike over persistently
low salaries and a series of other defunding and deprofessionalizing legislative proposals.
Over nine days, teachers created signs that argued their cause and showcased their messages on
roadsides, in their own communities, en masse at the state capital, and in media outlets across
the globe. In this article, we describe five themes that emerged from a discourse analysis of 50
protest signs. In response to circulating dismissive and demeaning discourses, teachers positioned
themselves as professionals, content specialists, moral authority figures, valuable resources, and
inheritors of cultural legacies.
Supporting collaborative discourse with discussion forums in a typical Learning Management System (LMS) remains challenging. This article reports on a design case of an “unLMS” approach, which aimed to devise a networked learning environment not based on an LMS for collaborative discourse in an online course. To support such discourse, four design principles were proposed based on the literature and then used to guide technological and pedagogical designs. Following the principles, a networked learning environment was configured by harnessing emerging technologies of open textbooks, web annotation, and team communication. The designed environment was piloted in the online course. A survey was distributed at the end of the course to investigate student perceptions of the design. Student perceptions of the environment was overall positive in terms of usefulness and ease of use, despite several suggested refinements to improve the tool integration and to personalize student discourse experiences.
This article argues that building powerful literacies involves the centering of dispositions and practices that thrive on the boundary—spaces that are not always sanctioned as educational. Leveraging youths’ repertoires is particularly important for educators of non-dominant learners who are committed to challenging characterizations of their students as being inept or deficient. To this end, we address how the design of learning opportunities that attend to polylingual repertoires (Gutiérrez, Bien, Selland, & Pierce, 2011)—the use of multiple languages and forms of expression-—can open up opportunities, pathways, for youth to leverage new identities as resources for consequential learning. We advance the idea of organizing learning environments where youth playfully negotiate their nepantla identities that are often in a “state of perpetual transition” (Anzaldúa, 1999, p. 100). We argue that nepantla literacies, or literacies that thrive in the boundary, emerge through negotiations with syncretic (Gutiérrez, 2014) literacies–those that are valued in the academy and across spaces and communities.
Bringing together renowned scholars in literacy education, this volume offers the first comprehensive account of the evolution and future of multiliteracies pedagogy. This groundbreaking collection examines the rich contributions of the New London Group (NLG)—an international gathering of noted scholars who met in 1996 and influenced the direction of literacy scholarship for decades to come. With a focus on design and multimodality as key concerns in literacy pedagogy, these ideas have become even more salient as literacy has become intertwined with digital technologies. The essays in this book not only provide an overview of the fundamental ideas of NLG and their importance across literacy, communications, and media studies, but also explore how these concepts have been adapted by today’s educators to better prepare students for a rapidly changing, globalized world.
Book Features:
- Identifies the major contributions of the NLG and suggests why and how it has been so influential.
- Includes chapters from original members of NLG, as well as contemporary scholars working with the concept of multiliteracies.
- Describes pedagogical approaches and their implications for instruction.
See https://www.tcpress.com/remixing-multiliteracies-9780807758649
Pedagogies of healing and critical media literacy are important, especially in the wake of racial violence when mainstream media work to stigmatize, characterize, and marginalize Black youth by projecting them as dangerous Others. In this article, we offer an overview of how mainstream media reinscribe and reinforce white supremacy, which leads to anti-blackness. Next, we discuss the impact that uncritical consumption of mainstream media narratives of Black people has on media consumers and how Black youth use social media as counterspaces. We then theorize about pedagogies of healing and critical media literacy as tools to encourage Black youth to investigate, dismantle, and rewrite the damaging narratives. We conclude with sample lesson plans and a discussion of how English educators have a responsibility to use our discipline to transform our world and raise awareness of the crisis of racial injustice.
In this article, we advance an approach to design research that is organized around a commitment to transforming the educational and social circumstances of members of non-dominant communities as a means of promoting social equity and learning. We refer to this approach as social design experimentation. The goals of social design experiments include the traditional aim of design experiments to create theoreticallygrounded and practical educational interventions, the social agenda of ameliorating and redressing historical injustices, and the development of theories focused on the organization of equitable learning opportunities. To illustrate how we use social design methodology, we present two examples that strategically reorganized the sociohistorical practices of communities to expand learning as a key goal. We conclude with a discussion of the opportunities this approach creates for learning scientists to form effective research partnerships with community members, as well as the responsibilities it entails for creating a more just society.
Major revision of New Literacies: Changing Knowledge and Classroom Learning (2003)
If Congress passed a law saying that those who earned less than $35,000 a year no longer had the right to vote or influence who gets elected to the U.S. Senate, most of us would be outraged. With such a law, some would ask, "Can we still call ourselves a democracy?" Unfortunately, according to recent research by Larry Bartels of Princeton University, such a law might not make a big difference. Indeed, after reading Bartels's findings, one might be tempted to ask, "Have we already passed this law?".
This article explores civic learning, civic participation, and the development of civic agency within the Council of Youth Research (the Council), a program that engages high school students in youth participatory action research projects that challenge school inequalities and mobilize others in pursuit of educational justice. We critique the neoliberal view of democracy that dominates existing research, policy, and practice around urban school reform and civic education and instead turn to evidence from social movements and critical social theory as a foundation for a reimagined, robust vision of critical democracy. Through our analysis of the activities that the Council students engaged in during and after a five-week summer seminar, we offer findings about the kinds of learning and pedagogy that characterize a critical democratic space. We discuss how students and teachers learn through dialogue that characterizes them as public intellectuals; we explore how students develop new forms of civic participation through their engagement with digital, participatory media and interactive presentations to community stakeholders; and we document the developing sense of agency that students experience as a result of these authentic learning opportunities. We conclude by highlighting the impacts of this program and its potential to create a new paradigm for civic life and civic education.
This article explores the relationship between critical literacy practice, digital media production, and civic agency in the Council of Youth Research, a youth participatory action research program in which Los Angeles high school students conduct research and create dynamic, multimedia presentations as leaders of a growing youth movement for educational justice. We examine theories of critical literacy to articulate a vision of literacy that is tied to societal power structures for the purpose of personal and social transformation. In order to bring critical literacy theory into practice, we explore the ways in which critical pedagogy and participatory digital literacies structure the work of the Council. We use ethnography of communication and visual sociology to analyze literacy events from 1 year of the Council's work to highlight ways in which student digital literacy production manifested powerful civic agency. We conclude by discussing the implications of this work for classrooms and further grounded research in pedagogies of participatory media.
In this article, the New London Group presents a theoretical overview of the connections between the changing social environment facing students and teachers and a new approach to literacy pedagogy that they call "multiliteracies." The authors argue that the multiplicity of communications channels and increasing cultural and linguistic diversity in the world today call for a much broader view of literacy than portrayed by traditional language-based approaches. Multiliteracies, according to the authors, overcomes the limitations of traditional approaches by emphasizing how negotiating the multiple linguistic and cultural differences in our society is central to the pragmatics of the working, civic, and private lives of students. The authors maintain that the use of multiliteracies approaches to pedagogy will enable students to achieve the authors' twin goals for literacy learning: creating access to the evolving language of work, power, and community, and fostering the critical engagement necessary for them to design their social futures and achieve success through fulfilling employment.
Personal mobility is a mundane characteristic of daily life. However, mobility is rarely considered an opportunity for learning in the learning sciences, and is almost never leveraged as relevant, experiential material for teaching. This article describes a social design experiment for spatial justice that focused on changes in the personal mobility of six non-driving, African-American teenagers, who participated in an afterschool bicycle building and riding workshop located in a mid-south city. Our study was designed to teach spatial literacy practices essential for counter-mapping—a discursive practice in which youth used tools similar to those of professional planners to “take place” in the future of their neighborhoods. Using conversation and multimodal discourse analyses with video records, GPS track data, and interactive maps authored by youth, we show how participants in our study had new experiences of mobility in the city, developed technically-articulate criticisms of the built environment in their neighborhoods, and imagined new forms of mobility and activity for the future.
This article examines a praxis model of teacher education and advances a new method for engaging novice teachers in reflective practice and robust teacher learning. Social design experiments—cultural historical formations designed to promote transformative learning for adults and children—are organized around expansive notions of learning and mediated praxis and provide new tools and practices for envisioning new pedagogical arrangements, especially for students from nondominant communities. The authors examine one long-standing social design experiment, the UCLA UC Links/ Las Redes partnership and the work of one exemplary novice teacher to illustrate the importance of mediated, reflective practices in helping apprentice teachers develop a coherent and orienting framework for teaching and learning that has both heuristic and explanatory power. The authors illustrate how cultural historical concepts of learning and development and situated practice become the means for university students to gain distance and reflect on the beliefs and practices that have informed their understandings of teaching and to “rise to the concrete” practices of learning jointly and resonantly.
In this article we provide a perspective on hybridity both as a theoretical lens for understanding diversity and a method for organizing learning. We argue that the use of multiple, diverse, and even conflicting mediational tools promotes the emergence of Third Spaces, or zones of development, thus expanding learning. Using examples from our ethnographic study of the literacy practices of one dual immersion elementary school classroom, we illustrate through an analysis of the discourse and literacy practices of the teacher and students in this culture of collaboration, how hybrid activities, roles, and practices can lead to productive contexts of development.
This book provides a practical and theoretical look at how media education can make learning and teaching more meaningful and transformative. It explores the theoretical underpinnings of critical media literacy and analyzes a case study involving an elementary school that received a federal grant to integrate media literacy and the arts into the curriculum. The voices of working teachers provide many practical ideas and experiences. Their successes and obstacles are analyzed through a critical media literacy framework that provides realistic challenges along with hopeful examples and suggestions. Combining with critical pedagogy, critical media literacy aims to expand the notion of literacy to include different forms of mass communication, information communication technologies and popular culture, as well as deepen the potential of education to critically analyze relationships between media and audiences, information and power. This book could be a valuable addition to any education course or teacher preparation program that wants to promote 21st century literacy skills, social justice, civic participation, media education or critical technology use. It is practical with many examples from practicing teachers as well as theoretical with a multiperspectival approach that engages numerous theories and opportunities for praxis. Communications classes could also find it useful as it explores and applies key concepts of cultural studies and media education.
This article traces the lineage of critical literacy from Freire through critical pedagogies and discourse analysis. It discusses the need for a contingent definition of critical literacy, given the increasingly sophisticated nature of texts and discourses.
This essay argues for a paradigm shift in what counts as learning and literacy education for youth. Two related constructs are emphasized: collective Third Space and sociocritical literacy. The construct of a collective Third Space builds on an existing body of research and can be viewed as a particular kind of zone of proximal development. The perspective taken here challenges some current definitions of the zone of proximal development. A sociocritical literacy historicizes everyday and institutional literacy practices and texts and reframes them as powerful tools oriented toward critical social thought. The theoretical constructs described in this article derive from an empirical case study of the Migrant Student Leadership Institute (MSLI) at the University of California, Los Angeles. Within the learning ecology of the MSLI, a collective Third Space is interactionally constituted, in which traditional conceptions of academic literacy and instruction for students from nondominant communities are contested and replaced with forms of literacy that privilege and are contingent upon students' sociohistorical lives, both proximally and distally. Within the MSLI, hybrid language practices; the conscious use of social theory, play, and imagination; and historicizing literacy practices link the past, the present, and an imagined future.
[Note: The author discusses the research presented in this article in a podcast presented by the “Voice of Literacy”: http:www.voiceofliteracy.orgposts28304 ].
本文认为有需要转换一个新的思维典模，去看清楚青年所学习的，与所接受的读写教育，什么是最重要。本文着重两个相关的建构: 集体性第三空间与会批判式的读写能力。集体性第三空间这个建构，是从文献记载的研究中建立而成，它可以视作为一种特殊的最近发展区。这观点质疑一些最近发展区的流行定义。社会批判式的读写能力这个建构，把日常与制度上的读写惯例与篇章历史化，并给予新的框架作为指导批判性社会思想的总方针。本文所描述的理论建构是从一个洛杉矶加州大学移民学生领导能力协会(MSLI)的经验个案推究得出的。在这个移民学生领导能力协会的学习生态里，一个集体性第三空间因互动而产生。在这个集体性第三空间里，对学术性读写能力的传统看法，以及为弱势社群学生所提供的教学，均受质疑。取而代之是多样读写能力的看法。这些多样读写能力是因学生不同的實際生活情況的需要而有有选择性的差异，而这些實際生活情況是与学生的远距离与近距离的社會歷史息息相关。在这个移民学生领导能力协会里，混合的语言惯例、社會理論的自覺运用、 玩耍、想像、以及把读写惯例历史化的做法等都与过去、现在、和想象的将来连接起来。
[Podcast: http:www.voiceofliteracy.orgposts28304 ].
Cet essai fait état d'un changement de paradigme relatif à ce qui est important en termes d'apprentissage et d'enseignement pour les jeunes. L'accent est mis sur deux concepts liés l'un à l'autre: le Troisième Espace collectif et le lettrisme sociocritique. Le concept de Troisième Espace collectif repose sur un corpus de recherche existant et peut être considéré comme une sorte de zone de prochain développement. La perspective adoptée ici met en question certaines définitions habituelles de la zone de prochain développement. Un lettrisme sociocritique historicise le quotidien, les pratiques de lettrisme institutionnelles et les écrits, et les restructure en tant que puissants outils orientés vers une pensée sociale et critique. Les concepts théoriques présentés dans cet essai sont issus d'une étude de cas empirique de l'« Institut de Direction des Etudiants Immigrants » (Migrant Student Leadership Institute ‐ MSLI) de l'université de Californie à Los Angeles. Au sein de l'écologie de l'apprentissage de cet institut un Troisième Espace collectif s'est constitué de façon interactive, dans lequel les conceptions traditionnelles du lettrisme académique et de l'instruction destinée aux étudiants des communautés non dominantes ont été contestées et remplacées par des formes de lettrisme qui privilégient et sont contingentes à la vie socio historique des étudiants, aussi bien proche que lointaine. Au sein de l'Institut, des pratiques hybrides de langage, l'utilisation délibérée de la théorie sociale, le jeu et l'imaginaire, et l'historicisation des pratiques de lettrisme font le lien entre le passé, le présent et le futur imaginé.
[Podcast: http:www.voiceofliteracy.orgposts28304 ].
يقدم هذا المقال حججاً لتحويل نموذجي في ما يُعتبَر تعلم وتعليم القراءة والكتابة للشباب. ونذكر منظورين مترابطين: المكان الثالث الجمعي والقراءة والكتابة في النظرية الاجتماعية النقدية. يبني منظور المكان الثالث الجمعي على أعمال بحثية قائمة ومن المستطاع أن يُعتبَر نوعاً خاصاً من منطقة النمو القريب المدى. يتحدى الموقف المأخوذ ها هنا بعض التعريفات الحديثة لمنطقة النمو القريب المدى. تتأرخ معرفة القراءة والكتابة الاجتماعية النقدية ممارسات يومية ومعرفة القراءة والكتابة المعهدية ونصوصها ويعيد إطارها كأدوات قوية تتوجه إلى تفكير اجتماعي نقدي. اشتقت المفاهيم النظرية الموصوفة في هذا المقال من حالة دراسة ميدانية لمعهد قيادة طلاب المهاجرين بحامعة كاليفورنيا في لوس أنجليس. ومن ضمن البيئة التعلمية لدى المعهد، يتكون المكان الثالث تفاعلياً بحيث المفاهيم التقليدية لمعرفة القراءة والكتابة التعلمية والتعليمية للطلاب من مجتمعات أقلية متحدية وبالتالي مستبدلة بأشكال معرفة القراءة والكتابة التي تميز وتعتمد على حياة الطلبة الاجتماعية التاريخية من قريب وبعيد. وفي المعهد، تربط ممارسات اللغة الهجينية، واستخدام النظرية الاجتماعية عن عمد في اللعب والتخيل، وتأرخ ممارسات معرفة القراءة والكتابة إلى الماضي والحاضر والمستقبل المتخيل.
[Podcast: http:www.voiceofliteracy.orgposts28304 ].
В данном эссе приводятся доводы в пользу изменения парадигмы, используемой при обучении молодежи и становлении грамотности среди молодых людей. Основное внимание уделяется двум взаимосвязанным категориям: коллективному третьему пространству и социокритической грамотности. Само понятие коллективного третьего пространства основано на существующих исследованиях и может рассматриваться как один из типов зоны ближайшего развития. Предложенная в статье точка зрения на зону ближайшего развития коренным образом отличается от современных представлений об этом явлении. Социокритическая грамотность рассматривает практику и тексты, существующие в рамках бытовой и институциональной грамотности, как исторические явления, а затем создает из них мощные инструменты, ориентированные на развитие критической общественной мысли. Теоретические конструкты, описанные в данном эссе, берут свое начало в эмпирическом социологическом исследовании, проведенном Институтом лидерства студентов‐иммигрантов (MSLI) Калифорнийского университета Лос‐Анджелеса. В соответствии с практикуемыми в MSLI подходами к обучению, коллективное третье пространство формируется в интерактивном взаимодействии, когда ломаются традиционные концепции академической грамотности и обучения студентов из недоминантных сообществ, и им предлагаются формы грамотности, которые обеспечивают им привилегии и всецело – и в зоне ближайшего, и в зоне отдаленного развития – зависят от социоисторических параметров жизни студентов. На территории MSLI практикуется смешение языков, сознательное использование социальной теории, игры, полета фантазии и исторического подхода к развитию грамотности, что позволяет связать прошлое, настоящее и предполагаемое будущее.
[Podcast: http:www.voiceofliteracy.orgposts28304 ].
Este ensayo aboga por un cambio en el paradigma sobre lo que se considera enseñanza y educación de la cultura escrita en los jóvenes. Se enfatizan dos constructos relacionados: el Tercer Espacio colectivo y la cultura escrita sociocrítica. El constructor del Tercer Espacio colectivo se basa en una fuente existente de investigación y puede ser considerado como una zona de desarrollo proximal. El punto de vista que se aboga en este ensayo pone en tela de juicio algunas de las definiciones corrientes de la zona de desarrollo proximal. La cultura escrita sociocrítica interpreta desde una perspectiva histórica los textos y las prácticas de alfabetización institucionales y rutinarias, y los vuelve a enmarcar como instrumentos poderosos orientados al pensamiento social crítico. Los constructos teóricos descritos en este ensayo proceden del estudio empírico de un caso del Instituto de Liderazgo de Estudiantes Migratorios (MSLI) en la Universidad de California, Los ángeles. Dentro de la ecología de aprendizaje del MSLI, se constituye de forma recíproca un Espacio Tercero en el cual los conceptos tradicionales de instrucción y alfabetización académica para los estudiantes de comunidades no predominantes son cuestionadas y remplazadas con formas de alfabetización que privilegian y dependen de las vidas sociohistóricas, tanto cercanas como lejanas, de los estudiantes. Dentro del MSLI, prácticas híbridas de lengua, el uso conciente de teoría social, el juego y la imaginación, y la historización de prácticas de alfabetización enlazan el pasado, el presente y el futuro imaginado.
[Podcast: http:www.voiceofliteracy.orgposts28304 ].
In this article, we take a critical look at the growing interest in U.S. political participation as it exists in the youth civic engagement literature. Our critique draws from principles of liberation and developmental psychology, and from the incisive writings of experts in youth organizing. Youth Organizing evolved from the Positive Youth Development (PYD) and Community Youth Development (CYD) perspectives but its addition of social justice activism is consistent with liberation psychology. The essence of our critique is this: Although there is certainly value in the current civic engagement literature, much of it focuses on the maintenance of social and political institutions rather than on action for social justice. To promote a better balance, and one more relevant to the lives of youth of color and other marginalized young people, we offer a framework for empirical research on youth sociopolitical development. The focus is on the relationship between social analysis (including critical consciousness) and societal involvement that includes the full range of service and political work. Because youth is the focus, we also include a brief discussion of a distinctive challenge that adults face in doing just work with young people—namely, adultism. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Comm Psychol 35: 779–792, 2007.
Many scholars in the area of citizenship education take deliberative approaches to democracy, especially as put forward by
John Rawls, as their point of departure. From there, they explore how students’ capacity for political and/or moral reasoning
can be fostered. Recent work by political theorist Chantal Mouffe, however, questions some of the central tenets of deliberative
conceptions of democracy. In the paper I first explain the central differences between Mouffe’s and Rawls’s conceptions of
democracy and politics. To this end I take Eamonn Callan’s Creating Citizens as an example of Rawlsian political education and focus on the role of conflict and disagreement in his account. I then address
three areas in which political education would need to change if it were to accept Mouffe’s critiques of deliberative approaches
to democracy and her proposal for an agonistic public sphere. The first area is the education of political emotions; the second
is fostering an understanding of the difference between the moral and the political; the third is developing an awareness
of the historical and contemporary political projects of the “left” and “right.” I propose that a radical democratic citizenship
education would be an education of political adversaries.
This article explores how speculative civic literacies can support youth engagement in policy discourse in digital and analog contexts. We broaden the scope of civic literacies by emphasizing core principles of Afrofuturism and participatory culture. Articulating a specific framework for applying these principles to contemporary conceptions of civic literacies, we identify six digital civic literacy practices that may be leveraged in classrooms. We then analyze two case studies of youth engaging with digital tools and web-based platforms, providing examples of how youth participate in educational policy discourse in online contexts.
For years, pundits have trumpeted the earthshattering changes that big data and smart networks will soon bring to our cities. But what if cities have long been built for intelligence, maybe for millennia? In Code and Clay, Data and Dirt Shannon Mattern advances the provocative argument that our urban spaces have been “smart” and mediated for thousands of years. Offering powerful new ways of thinking about our cities, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt goes far beyond the standard historical concepts of origins, development, revolutions, and the accomplishments of an elite few. Mattern shows that in their architecture, laws, street layouts, and civic knowledge-and through technologies including the telephone, telegraph, radio, printing, writing, and even the human voice-cities have long negotiated a rich exchange between analog and digital, code and clay, data and dirt, ether and ore. Mattern’s vivid prose takes readers through a historically and geographically broad range of stories, scenes, and locations, synthesizing a new narrative for our urban spaces. Taking media archaeology to the city’s streets, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt reveals new ways to write our urban, media, and cultural histories. © 2017 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved.
Educating for Empathy presents a compelling framework for thinking about the purpose and practice of literacy education in a politically polarized world. Mirra proposes a model of critical civic empathy that encourages secondary ELA teachers to consider how issues of power and inequity play out in the literacy classroom and how to envision literacy practices as a means of civic engagement. The book reviews core elements of ELA instruction―response to literature, classroom discussion, research, and digital literacy―and demonstrates how these activities can be adapted to foster critical thinking and empathetic perspectives among students. Chapters depict teachers and students engaging in this transformative learning, offer concrete strategies for the classroom, and pose questions to guide school communities in collaborative reflection.
As seen in Wired and Time
A revealing look at how negative biases against women of color are embedded in search engine results and algorithms
Run a Google search for “black girls”—what will you find? “Big Booty” and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in “white girls,” the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and un-moderated discussions about “why black women are so sassy” or “why black women are so angry” presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society.
In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.
Through an analysis of textual and media searches as well as extensive research on paid online advertising, Noble exposes a culture of racism and sexism in the way discoverability is created online. As search engines and their related companies grow in importance—operating as a source for email, a major vehicle for primary and secondary school learning, and beyond—understanding and reversing these disquieting trends and discriminatory practices is of utmost importance.
An original, surprising and, at times, disturbing account of bias on the internet, Algorithms of Oppression contributes to our understanding of how racism is created, maintained, and disseminated in the 21st century.
This chapter challenges dominant narratives about the civic disengagement of youth from marginalized communities by reconceptualizing what counts as civic participation in public life and how youth are positioned as civic agents. We examine ideologies that undergird traditional forms of civic education and engagement in the United States and offer an alternative vision of civic life grounded in recognition of systemic inequality and struggle for social justice. We consider the ways in which digital media has fundamentally transformed the public sphere and expanded opportunities for youth civic expression and action, as well as the ways that youth participatory action research literature offers a framework for civic education that forefronts youth experience and voice. Our analysis culminates in the development of a new conceptual model for civic learning and engagement that pushes past participation into the realms of interrogation and innovation.
A firsthand account and incisive analysis of modern protest, revealing internet-fueled social movements' greatest strengths and frequent challenges. To understand a thwarted Turkish coup, an anti-Wall Street encampment, and a packed Tahrir Square, we must first comprehend the power and the weaknesses of using new technologies to mobilize large numbers of people. An incisive observer, writer, and participant in today's social movements, Zeynep Tufekci explains in this accessible and compelling book the nuanced trajectories of modern protests-how they form, how they operate differently from past protests, and why they have difficulty persisting in their long-term quests for change. Tufekci speaks from direct experience, combining on-the-ground interviews with insightful analysis. She describes how the internet helped the Zapatista uprisings in Mexico, the necessity of remote Twitter users to organize medical supplies during Arab Spring, the refusal to use bullhorns in the Occupy Movement that started in New York, and the empowering effect of tear gas in Istanbul's Gezi Park. These details from life inside social movements complete a moving investigation of authority, technology, and culture-and offer essential insights into the future of governance.
Social studies scholars consider the role that schools, and in particular teachers, play in preparing young students to be active participatory citizens in a democracy. Yet, the research on teachers learning to be democratic teachers overwhelmingly focuses on the social studies methods course rather than field experiences. This study examines how teacher candidates experienced, conceptualized, and enacted democratic education while immersed in a semester-long elementary field experience in a democratic classroom. In particular, this paper focuses on two case studies which represent the most clear, as well as disparate, conceptions and enactments of democratic education; one engaged in a critical examination of society through curriculum, while the other focused on the inculcation of particular discussion and deliberation skills necessary to be an engaged democrat. While each classroom afforded the teacher candidates a thick conception of democratic education that drew on critical curriculum and pedagogy, as well as democratic skills, the teacher candidates' lived experiences and prior conceptions of democracy shaded their learning and created missed learning opportunities. Classrooms as sites of knowledge about democratic education provide robust learning opportunities for teacher candidates; however, like any transformative learning experience, those opportunities need mediation to realize their full potential.
Despite what students and teachers believe about their own engagement with New Literacies and their connection with print-based, school sanctioned literacies, New Literacies and print-based literacies are not unconnected (Alvermann, 2001; Alexander, 2006; Baird & Fisher, 2005-2006). Ad-olescents are able to navigate adeptly the old and New Literacies (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006). They move through and between paper-based and New Literacies for academic, economic, and social purposes at school, at work, and at home. Given the quantity of time students spend online, it seems foolish to ignore the role of the Internet in the lives of students and the effects of enabling the instantiation of that role in students' academic lives. This paper describes the experience of introducing a blog into an English literature classroom in an alternative education classroom over the course of two years and how the students there reconstructed the blog into a third space for identity construction. It also discusses the effects of student online literacies on pedagogy and students and to what use knowledge of that role can be put in the classroom.
The purpose of the present study is to investigate the relationships between and among teaching, social, and cognitive presence. To this end, Spearman's rank correlation and partial correlation analyses were employed. The results referred to (a) positive large bivariate correlational relationships between presence types, and (b) the dependence of these pairwise relationships on the third presence to a certain extent. For instance, it was found that cognitive presence may have a strong effect on the relationship between teaching presence and social presence because the relationship between teaching presence and social presence may disappear when cognitive presence is controlled for. On the other hand, results also suggested that the relationship between cognitive presence and social presence, and the relationship between teaching presence and cognitive presence may largely be independent of the effect of the other third presence.
Bringing together papers written by Norman Fairclough over a 25 year period, Critical Discourse Analysis represents a comprehensive and important contribution to the development of this popular field.
The achievement gap is one of the most talked-about issues in U.S. education. The term refers to the disparities in standardized test scores between Black and White, Latina/o and White, and recent immigrant and White students. This article argues that a focus on the gap is misplaced. Instead, we need to look at the “education debt” that has accumulated over time. This debt comprises historical, economic, sociopolitical, and moral components. The author draws an analogy with the concept of national debt—which she contrasts with that of a national budget deficit—to argue the significance of the education debt.
The Web is critical not merely to the digital revolution but to our continued prosperity—and even our liberty. Like democracy itself, it needs defending
