Speculative Civic Literacies: Exploring How Youth Are Redesigning the Digital Public Sphere

• In Event: Reimagining Literacy Education & Research within the Context of Youth Epistemologies
  In Working Group Roundtable: Reimagining Literacy Education and Research Within the Context of Youth Epistemologies

Abstract

Young people are increasingly leveraging affordances of digital communication tools to take part in U.S. civic and political life, practices that have collectively been defined as participatory politics (Kahne, Middaugh, & Allen, 2015). While these social media practices are rapidly changing landscapes of youth civic engagement, their implications for literacy education remain largely under-theorized, particularly in formal school settings. This paper explores a yearlong investigation of how high school students and teachers in six communities across the U.S. engage individually and collaboratively with digital civic storytelling in class, paying particular attention to how they theorize civic engagement today, construct digital political narratives, and dialogue with each other across difference.

The Digital Democratic Dialogue (3D) Project took place in six public high schools in Alaska, California, Colorado, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Texas with English teachers who have demonstrated interest and commitment to experimenting with participatory politics with their students. The school sites were chosen to achieve generative levels of geographic, socioeconomic, and political diversity in order to explore how elements like student demographics or community electoral dynamics contribute to civic literacies.
Rooted in a cultural historical approach to studying digital literacies (Gutierrez, 2008), this study used social design methodology (Gutierrez & Jurow, 2016) to collaboratively explore how participatory politics could inform new opportunities for literacy expression rooted in youth epistemologies of civic life.

Multiple forms of data were collected. Participating students (n=238) took a survey including items adapted from the Youth Participatory Politics Survey Project (YPPSP) that provided baseline data about students’ digital literacy practices and perceptions of civic engagement. Artifacts were collected from three design cycles in which students shared multimodal narratives on a shared digital platform about the civic issues they cared about and then engaged in dialogue with each other about the similarities and differences they noticed. Transcripts were analyzed from 10 monthly teacher team meetings (n=6, 60 minutes each), 33 weekly online individual teacher reflections, and individual interviews (30 minutes each). The first round of coding was inductive, while the second round sought patterns at two analytic levels: civic storytelling and speculative literacies.

Preliminary findings from the student narratives indicate processes of mutual humanization at work, as well as cross-site discussions in which students lean in to difference and discomfort in ways that speak to a re-imagining of an inclusive public sphere. Analysis of digital posts and the dialogue threads they sparked demonstrated that young people rejected narratives of intractable polarization and made inviting discourse moves with their peers to find civic commonality even when life experiences and identities vary greatly. Participants in the study asked questions of each other to spark the formation of common civic inquiry groups in order to explore sources of information and the conditions to support productive talk through conflict. They engaged in collective imagining of what a revitalized democracy responsive to the needs and interests of young people would look like, offering us a roadmap for the further development of the concept of speculative civic literacies.

Author

• Nicole Mirra, Rutgers University