Innovative Student Research for Digital Literacy and Critical Civic Engagement

• In Event: The Youth Shall Lead Us: Student-Conducted Research as the Ultimate Educational Innovation

Abstract

This paper explores how the Council of Youth Research re-conceptualizes research and action about civic engagement for working class students by combining civic skills and digital literacy skills into a hybrid we call critical digital civic literacy. This paper was co-written by high school students and teacher-researchers, and students will be present at the session to provide the youth perspective on innovative educational research.

In her discussion of the civic empowerment gap, Meira Levinson explains that the lack of civic opportunities has produced stark civic inequality and is a threat to the fabric of our democracy. This “civic achievement” gap creates differences in civic engagement between poor and middle class students and minority and white adults (Levinson, 2007). Youth with less civic knowledge often lack the skills and cultural capital needed to advocate on behalf of their interests. Furthermore, urban youth too often are not offered meaningful opportunities to use reading and writing to formally engage in political and civic life and analyze the conditions that they experience on a daily basis. Reform efforts in schools and other social institutions often define literacy in narrow terms that correspond to standardized assessments rather than students’ civic development. While there is burgeoning research around the role that participatory media plays in learning and promoting civic engagement (Cohen & Kahne, 2012), few models exist that triangulate digital media, civics, and critical literacies.

Driven by concern for the democratic outcomes of students, this paper will analyze how the Council employed a curriculum that aimed to increase civic engagement opportunities of its students through using social media to conduct and disseminate youth participatory action research (YPAR) projects.

This study employs the lenses of ethnography of communication (Barton and Hamilton, 2001; Cook-Gumperz &Hymes, 1972; Heath, 1983) and visual sociology (Kress, 2010) to analyze major literacy events from YPAR projects created by students in the Council in order to highlight the ways that student digital literacy production manifested a powerful form of civic agency. It first analyzes how the teacher researchers strove to develop digital literacy pedagogy that enabled critical learning and literacy practice (Morrell, 2008); it then details the ways that the research project aided students in the development of academic literacy skills critical civic identities. Finally, it explores the unique potential of participatory media to provide opportunities for socially transformative literacy production. It concludes by discussing implications of this work for classroom pedagogy and for further grounded research in critical literacy.

Using the 2011-2012 school year as a case study, the paper focuses on students’ literacy practices in digital spaces, highlighting their blog posts and digital documentaries, and also analyzes the dialogue that emerges on participatory sites between students and people from around the world who encounter their work as a form of democratic community literacy. Findings indicate increased student engagement and achievement on both traditional and portfolio-based literacy indicators, and recommendations point to the potential for new urban critical civic pedagogies of reading and writing.

Authors

• Nicole Mirra, University of California - Los Angeles

• Antero Garcia, Colorado State University

• Laurence Tan, University of California - Los Angeles