Restorying Data Practices: Educators' Critical Approaches to the Role of Platforms in Online Discussions

• In Event: #TheMoreYouKnow: Critical Data Practices With New Digital Media and Technologies Toward Justice

Abstract

Introduction, Perspectives, and Background
The expansion of online instruction during the multi-pandemic illuminated the influence of digital platforms in education, rendering visible the infrastructural role they play as intermediaries (Gillespie, 2010) shaping teaching and learning (Sefton-Green, 2021; Williamson, 2021). By seeming to be neutral content moderators, platforms (e.g., GoogleClassroom, Flipgrid) elide tensions around raced/classed surveillance, commercialization, and datafication (Gillespie, 2018; van Dijck et al, 2018). Such elision requires critical approaches to examining the cultural, political, and economic dimensions of these “platform ecologies” in teaching and learning (Garcia & Nichols, 2021).

This paper focuses on how educators might co-construct critical inquiry into the role of data in shaping teaching and learning. We share findings from the Digital Discourse Project (DDP), a longitudinal collaborative inquiry into how partner teachers, experts at facilitating online discussions in English classrooms, studied their own practices with data and platforms as they facilitated online discussions.

Methods and Context
Rooted in participatory design research (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016), this study worked alongside 16 secondary English teachers engaged in collaborative critical inquiry about how to facilitate online discussions about literature. Educators developed critical approaches to questioning what counted as data across different platforms and sought insight into how those narratives perpetuated racial and economic injustices.

Teachers met twice-monthly in two groups for 1.5 years to study discussion across platforms (e.g., Youth Voices, Kumospace, Now Comment, Hypothes.is, Flipgrid, Zoom, Google Classroom). Data include audio-visual recordings of site-based inquiry group meetings (n=30), all-team meetings (n=4), transcripts/screenshots of online discussions (n=6), and interviews (N=32). We engaged in critically mediated discourse analysis (Scollon & Scollon, 2004) to understand the cultural, political, social, economic, educational, and ideological dimensions of teachers’ practices.

Findings and Significance
Our findings indicate that while platforms profoundly shaped how learners participated in online discussions, those effects were often transparent for participants, leading educators and students to ascribe narratives about participation to individuals (e.g., ‘the quiet student’) rather than to a critical interplay of material resources and distant stakeholders.

In developing critical approaches to address these deficitizing effects, the group collectively turned to ‘restorying’ (Authors, 2016). Drawing on centuries of efforts by people from nondominant groups to make their humanity legible through counterstories, restorying represents a tool for resistance against mainstream narratives that have historically excluded and silenced those perspectives. Through their collaborative restorying work, teachers resisted normative, singular stories of individual students by expanding the epistemological and ideological locations from which they theorized and used data, centering youth’s lived social locations as sources of knowledge by deliberately collecting different kinds of ‘data’.

Our findings point to the need for understanding platforms not only as spaces through which mainstream narratives are shaped, represented, and circulated but as potential sites of resistance. Restorying represents only one critical data practice for educators interested in challenging normative and limited narratives about youth, with implications for how collaborative teacher inquiry opens possibilities for developing expansive, justice-oriented pedagogies that make visible the multiple injustices experienced by youth.

Authors

• Amy Stornaiuolo, University of Pennsylvania

• Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, University of Pennsylvania