Leveraging Media Creases to Challenge Colonial Meaning-Making: Teacher and Youth TikTok Literacies

• In Event: Examining Intergenerational Cultures of Collaboration, Resistance, and Social Dreaming in Multimedia Learning Environments

Abstract

Technology and digital media are increasingly present in today’s classrooms, often used as tools for learning, connectivity, or even subversion. This paper examines how everyday digital practices are intentionally leveraged in individual and collective meaning-making practices. Specifically, I examine the digital consumption and composition practices on TikTok of a group of undergraduates in an education course and a group of Latinx and Black adolescents. Framed as social design-based research (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016), this project interleaved digital tools, multimodality, translingualism, and other embodied practices (Nordquist, 2017) to position participants to engage in collaborative inquiry, specifically on TikTok, which in turn informed their individual and collective compositions using this platform.

AERA has asked researchers to convey scholarship that cultivates equitable educational systems for the 21st century; this study does so by illuminating how traditional composition and meaning-making practices are transformed in the age of TikTok where the undergraduates and youth in my study routinely took up multiple “media creases” (DeKosnik, 2016) on the platform to reconstitute how knowledge is archived and historicized, and how this archiving and historicity is leveraged to take action in the world (Gutiérrez, Becker, et al, 2019).

This work builds on scholarship that reframes what constitutes composition in today’s digitized, remix world, whereby text production is characterized by perpetual collective collaboration (Scott, Hull, & Dizio, 2018) and “rigorous playfulness” (DiZio, 2017, p. 91). Specifically, I engage with deKosnik’s notion of “media creases” (2016), which are described as visible or sensible traces of the repeated use of a media object, to examine how teachers and youth use TikTok to engage in citational practices, co-create texts, and engage with socio-political issues. Cultural Historical Activity Theory (Engeström, 2001) helped me uncover both the tensions and affordances that come with introducing practices originating in popular culture into an undergraduate course and an afterschool program.

Video, audio, interview, and digital data were collected from 15 undergraduates and 10 5th and 6th grade youth. Video and audio were logged on a variety of metadata, interviews transcribed (Taylor, Bogdan, & DeVault, 2015), and digital artifacts analyzed using multimodal analysis (Hull & Nelson, 2005). Codes were developed inductively (Bogdan & Biklen, 1997).

My findings show how TikTok provided a space that was saturated with a variety of semiotic systems and archival processes by means of which teachers and youth curated their own and their collaborators’ favorite content (cf. DeKoskink, 2016) in order to gain perspective on each others’ lives (Literat, 2021), and also became salient compositional resources for their own videos, specifically those engaging with socio-political issues. These archives and new compositions then informed their changing perspectives of how collaborative sense-making is not necessarily linear or refined, challenging colonial perspectives of meaning-making that can lead to axiological innovations (Bang et al, 2016).

This study has implications for how digital multimodal composition can be integrated into classrooms in ways that expand our common-sense modalities for sense-making, facilitating teachers and students’ traversal of multiple sites of inquiry and knowledge production (cf. Cole, 1996).

Author

• José Ramón Lizárraga, University of Colorado - Boulder