Christina Cantrill’s scientific contributions

We present, and discuss the importance of, justice-oriented media literacy, which we define as an approach to media literacy that enables the critical analysis, use, and production of media to enact more just learning futures. We detail four “building blocks,” or design commitments, that contribute to justice-oriented media literacy. These include: ● Authorship: Invitations for learners’ (both students and teachers) knowledge and ways of knowing as valuable sources of creation and interrogation, disrupting dominant ways of identifying “whose texts deserve reading.” ● Annotation/Commentary: Responding to texts through critical commentary and questioning and making that thinking visible. ● Text Pairings and Youth Media: Building from youth voice using integrated reading and writing practices, including integrated consumption and production of media. ● Digital Technology and Content Standards: Naming specific digital technology and content (literacy) goals to situate this work within the constraints of school contexts as “sites of struggle,” and highlight teachers’ self efficacy and creative agency. We conclude by suggesting “Justice-oriented media literacy is a promising approach to supporting teachers and students to critically read the world around them and to share those readings, or commentaries, as valuable instances of meaning-making.”

The coronavirus pandemic exacerbated long-standing educational inequities associated with technology access, learner agency, and participation in online learning. How were preservice and inservice educators supported in their pursuit of interest-driven professional learning that critically examined the unfolding impact of these inequities? This article describes how the Marginal Syllabus project rapidly iterated three public, online, and equity-oriented social annotation activities for educators that included: Facilitating social reading sessions which combined synchronous social annotation with videoconferencing conversation; a collaborative partnership with the Speculative Education Colloquium to augment reading opportunities for shared dialogue; and supporting teacher education courses participating in social annotation activities under remote learning circumstances. The article details three recommendations for supporting educators’ technical and sociopolitical professional learning via social annotation, and notes directions for future research that can examine how annotation-powered conversation may productively inform more equitable pedagogy and student learning practices.