Multimodality, Digital Literacies, and the Digital Divide

• In Event: A Multimodal Mindset: Examining 21st Century Educational Problems Through a Critical Digital Literacies Lens

Abstract

The “digital divide” about which scholars prophesied at the turn of the 21st century has narrowed over the course of the global pandemic, with the gap between those with access to the Internet and those without bridged out of necessity. Certain literacies still require pedagogical attention, and reimagining what is possible as reading and writing migrate from the page to the screen require educators to embrace digital technology yet not to lose sight of the centuries of innovative approaches for literacy education. With multimodality enhancing how students interact with text: through video, audio files, images, emoji and gestures, a new aspect of the divide reinforces the inequality that is less about who has access and more about what sort of mindset benefits within such a system. Computational thinking and its bias towards STEM subjects are prevalent in digital literacies that largely reinforce the technological determinism of a competitive global marketplace hungry for innovation. Thus, learning as machines gets promoted while entrepreneurs and influencers are idolized for the products they deliver rather than the process of creation. The wide range of modalities active across curricula that promote social-emotional learning and ecological equanimity, with uncertain problems and ambiguous answers that are “hard to quantify and difficult to model” (Bridle, 2019, p. 44) in the computational mindset. The pandemic and increasing incidents related to the climate crisis demand more holistic systems of learning than this current mode offers.

The call for critical digital literacies (Pangrazio, 2016; Pötzch, 2019) offers the potential to have a self-reflective perspective of technology in classrooms beyond the consumer-centered need to improve education. Episodes in the series Inanimate Alice chronicle the journey of a home-schooled girl interacting with her digital device as she learns the coding skills as well as makes meaning of her constantly changing world. In addition to Alice’s use of digital technology helping to define her world, critical research into the digital text allows for an “exploration of social issues and provide[s] a multimodal space for agency and learning” (Garcia, Fernández & Okonkwo, 2020, p. 348) as the audience of Alice’s stories discover their personal connections through digital technology. Our inquiry deploys a two-stage critical framework (Polizzi, 2021) to examine both the utopian aspirations of Alice as a videogame designer in the making, and the imaginaries seen through the perspective of her digital-saturated audience in both online and real-world civic life. A word of caution, however, comes from Selwyn (2018) to examine carefully the potentiality as well as the limits of digital technology as a force of change within the field of education. While coding and game design skills are important for many learners as they are for Alice, there is still a need to embrace what is unknown and emerging above the systematic acquisition of knowledge. 21st century learners have access to an evolving set of tools to read Alice’s story, finding their own place as they learn from and with her. Together each models self-sufficiency and project-based solutions from one episode to the next.

Author

• Kyle J. Stooshnov, College of the Rockies