Sociocritical Inquiry: A Digital Reading Curriculum for Examining Systems of Disinformation

• In Event: The Question of Curriculum in (and for) a World of Disinformation

Abstract

Objectives
This qualitative study examines the work of five middle-school English teachers as they developed a digital reading curriculum designed to be responsive both to contemporary internet features such as filter bubbles and algorithmic content filtering, as well as to the funds of knowledge of the diverse student body with whom they worked.

Perspectives
Research on pedagogical approaches to digital reading comprehension and critical media literacy over the last twenty years has traditionally emphasized the search for objective information, the evaluation of individual texts and sources for objectivity, and the analysis of representation and meanings as autonomous from larger rhetorical and sociocultural systems (Salmerón, 2018). Recently, scholars have called for more research exploring digital reading and media literacy curricula that account for a greater diversity of theoretical perspectives and changing cultural and technological contexts (Coiro, 2021; Janks, 2018; Hobbs, 2020).

Methods
This instrumental, qualitative case study (Stake, 2005) draws on the tradition of participatory research (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016) to foreground teachers’ theoretical and practice-based knowledge in data analysis (Mirra et al., 2016). Data sources were ethnographic and included interviews, recordings of curriculum design sessions, and curricular artifacts. Data were first analyzed using open codes, and then collapsed using a process of thematic analysis and mapping (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). Member checking, peer debriefing, and triangulation were used to support trustworthiness.

Results
The teachers’ curriculum framed digital reading around student-led inquiries into existing digital funds of knowledge. These inquiries served as a contextual space within which students analyzed disinformation, manipulative internet rhetoric, the role of emotions in digital activities such as trolling, and the organizational structures of social media sites. A final central feature of the curriculum was an emphasis on students’ sociocultural positionality as central to meaning-making in an algorithmically-mediated information environment.

Significance
The work of this group of teachers highlights a transformative approach for structuring digital reading curriculum in which critical digital reading strategies are taught and applied within the sociocultural context of students’ own existing literacies. Digital literacies are becoming further integrated into every aspect of life, mediating each person’s understandings of reality, relationships, and democracy. Within this context, curricula that merge criticality with culturally-situated literacies only become more essential as educators seek to prepare students to live as conscious, agentive, critical citizens in and of the world.

Author

• Brady L. Nash, Miami University (OH)
  Presenting Author