All Politics Is Glocal: Reimagining Critical Democratic Community Through a Digital Civic Learning Collaborative

• In Event: 35.077 - MTCC Roundtable Session 13
  In Roundtable Session: 35.077-1 - Co-Designing (Analog and Digital) Social Futures: Leveraging Multimodality to Foster Educational Justice Locally and Globally

Abstract

The adage “all politics is local” speaks to the way that immediate spatial context mediates understandings of national and global civic issues. At the same time, digital media has fostered communication across time and place in ways that expose parallels between localities in ways that can potentially support multi-site solidarity and intersectional political movements. This paper explores a social design experiment (Gutierrez & Jurow, 2016) in which teachers and students in six demographically distinct classroom communities attempted to bridge local and global discourses through collaboratively designed, multimodal learning experiences aimed at fostering a more empathetic public sphere. Specifically, it focuses on the similarities and differences in the rhetoric these communities encountered across their local contexts in the year leading up to the 2018 midterm elections (both online and offline) and how they produced their own counter-stories to re-imagine civic identity and equitable democratic dialogue.

The Digital Democratic Dialogue (3D) Project is led by a group of high school English teachers (one each from Alaska, California, Colorado, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Texas) who are connected through the National Writing Project (NWP) network. The 3D Project took as its starting point the idea that teachers and students are determining what it means to be civic actors within a participatory culture that is reshaping civic literacy and action practices (Jenkins et al, 2009). Technology has democratized media production, blurring the lines between producers and consumers of information and fostering a dynamic flow of interaction and collaboration that leverages and influences all aspects of our lives, including politics (Kahne, Middaugh, & Allen, 2015). Participatory politics offers the opportunities for multiple stories to be told and highlights a sociocultural understanding of citizenship as negotiated practice rather than a universal possession (Nasir & Kirshner, 2003).

Rooted in a cultural historical approach to studying civic literacy learning (Gutierrez, 2008), study data was gleaned from a variety of sources, including individual interviews (6) and focus groups (2) with the teachers focused on their sociopolitical identity development and its influence on their classroom civic practice, monthly design meetings (5) in which the teachers collaboratively designed learning civic learning experiences that they implemented in their classrooms, interviews (10) with students across classrooms about their own civic identity development, ethnographic observations of each teacher’s classroom, and classroom artifacts (lesson plans, transcripts of class discussions, etc.).

Findings indicate that when students and teachers communicate about political issues with others outside of their local contexts with a common, co-constructed purpose of fostering understanding, their discourse manifests moments of both identity, in which global constructs of race, class, gender, etc. are translated through their personal experiences; and of invitation, in which they make linguistic moves to cultivate connection and find a common civic theme that can spark public action. The learning experiences that 3D project members created and implemented in their classrooms were characterized by attention to context, civic identity, and collectivity and the co-design element offered authentic purpose to student media production. The study pushes critical democratic education to attend to solidarity across local contexts.

Author

• Nicole Mirra, Rutgers University