Platforms, Power, Production: Critical Literacies in a Digital Storytelling Program

• In Event: Critical Literacies With, Within, and Against Digital Platforms

Abstract

Google Classroom, Canvas, Class Dojo, TikTok, YouTube, and others-- platforms saturate the experience of our youth today, particularly in this time of crisis. Platforms are neither neutral nor passive spaces through which students and teachers engage in learning activities; Platform studies and critical algorithm studies have argued that platforms, which are sociotechnical systems composed of users, business models, algorithms and other human and non-human actors, shape public discourse, knowledge production, and our social relations (Gillespie, 2014; van Dijk, 2013). Emerging educational scholarship has corroborated such claims, showing that platforms produce subtle shifts in the relationships and practices of schooling (e.g., Williamson, 2017). These emerging insights have led educational researchers, and in particular literacy scholars, to question what media literacies best serve students today in the face of opaque platform processes that shape and direct social connections, textual interactions, and the learning and development of our students.

This paper reports on a year-long digital ethnographic study of middle schoolers and undergraduate student-mentors who participated in an afterschool digital storytelling program designed to develop students’ critical digital literacies (CDLs) in response to platform processes. The paper, theoretically and methodologically, deploys a material semiotic approach influenced by ANT and poststructuralist theories of discourse to examine how agency is distributed amongst a network of sociotechnical actors such as the platform, devices, students, mentors and teachers and the multimedia texts students’ consume and produce. Data sources include: 1) field notes and video-recordings from program activities, 2) screen-recordings and transaction logs from student computers, 3) weekly multimedia artifacts and final projects produced on the program’s LMS, and 4) in-depth interviews about students’ digital literacies and use of platforms. The paper uses mapping techniques from ANT (Latour, 2005) and critical multimodal discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2001; Jewitt, 2014) to (i) uncover the sociotechnical network that animates students' digital literacy practices in the digital storytelling program and to (ii) identify the various discourses within the platform, multimedia texts, students’ lives and the after school program that frame students’ stories, creative processes, and identity formation.

Emerging findings reveal that social media platforms actively shaped and structured students’ creativity and processes of racial and gender identity construction in video- and multimedia creation. At the same time, students had budding “platform competencies”, or ways of inferring, becoming aware of, and disrupting technically-encoded company motives and narratives. This paper contributes to current efforts within education and literacy studies to define CDL, arguing that CDL should identify and develop students’ budding platform competencies toward socioeconomic and discursive analyses of platforms. The paper also explores the limits of CDL for addressing platform processes.

Author

• Jessica Adams-Grigorieff, University of California - Berkeley