The Spaces of Civic Identity Within Letters to the Next President

• 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

During the 2016 presidential election season, Letters to the Next President, a project led by the National Writing Project and PBS affiliate KQED, launched an online platform that collected 11,000 letters, written by students from 325 schools in 47 states. This work was not done independently of the instructional goals of classroom teachers; to ensure this youth-focused space was free of online trolls, teachers moderated and approved each letter by their students. In their role as teachers and online content moderators, these educators read and helped produce the entire corpus of letters that students drafted.

This paper looks at how Letters to the Next President reimagines the space, place, and central actors in civic identity development in secondary ELA classrooms. Though schools are often seen as neutral spaces devoid of bias and political engagement, this paper looks at the materials and engagements that make schooling a practice that shapes both student and teacher civic identities.

Focusing on sociocritical literacy practices (Gutierrez, 2008) within ELA secondary classrooms, this study is grounded in research on spatiality (e.g. Leander & Sheehy, 2004; Massey, 2005) and materiality (Bennett, 2010) in literacies research.

The data for this paper comes from interview and survey data from participating teachers conducted after the conclusion of the Letters to the Next President project. Further, by looking across the spaces of school participation this study seeks to understand how the “place” (Tuan, 1977) of sociopolitical teacher education is mediated through the fluidity of in-person instruction and online engagement. In this regard, five case study schools were identified based on their locations in states identified as “swing states” in the 2016 presidential election, with student demographics that included predominantly students of color, and from courses that were available to all students (i.e. not AP or Honors). Student grade levels spanned 8th-12th and letter sets included 13-46 letters per school. Letters were coded using both a priori and emergent coding frameworks and interrater reliability was established through multiple phases of coding until consensus was reached across the research team.

Analysis of the data for this study reveal parallel civic practices; teacher and student civic identities are mediated by the dialogues and interactions that occurred in both digital and analog spaces. Further, the places of civic writing—from one school and state to another—shaped the kinds of civic topics that were emerged. Student civic engagement was mediated by local socioeconomic, cultural, and linguistic contexts.

This paper emphasizes how civic issues move across time and space. Pointing to how some teachers have continued to develop their work in the Letters project even years after it concluded, the topics of civic engagement fluidly move from one topic and civic space to another, highlighting the spatial contexts of newly emerging civic interrogations.

Authors

• Antero Garcia, Stanford University

• Amber Maria Levinson, Stanford University

• Emma Carene Gargroetzi, Stanford University