Beyond Media Literacy Binaries: Analyzing Affective Dimensions of Youth Digital Democratic Dialogue

• In Event: Toward Responsive Media Pedagogies: Youth Sociopolitical Sense-Making and Platform Politics in Digitally Mediated Worlds

Abstract

Existing curricula targeting youth civic reasoning often conceptualize digital information ecosystems in binary terms: true/false, objective/biased. They also presume that reasoning is a narrowly cognitive process of sorting and selecting logical claims to guide behavior. These assumptions misunderstand both the complexity of digital media environments and the affective and cultural nature of civic cognition (boyd, 2011; Bougher, 2012). Thus, much of what is dubbed “media literacy” or “digital civics” education does not effectively respect youth as critical sense makers or prepare them to pursue their political desires in the multimodal public sphere (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016). This paper analyzes youth discourse moves within a design experiment to demonstrate how dominant approaches to media literacy stifle empathetic connection and consider alternative moves that seed democratic dreaming.

RISE learning theory integrates biological and cognitive aspects of development within social, cultural, and affective activity systems to advocate for collective logics of thriving (Nasir et al, 2021). Speculative civic literacies envisions liberatory futures alongside youth through the cultivation of “expansive, creative forms of meaning-making and communication aimed at radically reorienting the nature and purpose of shared democratic life toward equity” (Mirra & Garcia, 2020, pg. 297).

Social design-based methods involve co-constructing experimental educational settings with participants in order to cultivate syncretic learning (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016). Data for this study emerges from the Digital Democratic Dialogue (3D) Project, a learning collaborative of six high school teachers and their students (n=238) from demographically distinct communities across the U.S. who leveraged digital media to excavate their civic histories, analyze civic experiences, and dream of civic futures.

This paper analyzes discursive practices from a 3-month design cycle during one school year when students self-selected into 30 discussion groups about 14 social topics. 372 exchanges across groups were analyzed (exchange consisted of at least two alternating posts). Coding rounds focused on 1) activity systems in students’ lives; 2) evidence of civic cognition mediated by social and cultural factors; and 3) discourse moves that closed or opened dialogic connections (Schreier, 2012). Descriptive findings and a case study emerged.

83% of exchanges began according to normative media literacy practices such as citing “objective” evidence sources. When students continued using these moves (74% of cases), dialogue ended within three moves (87% of cases). When students instead engaged in vulnerable storytelling or questioning, more expansive dialogue occurred. Cory, a white, male 11th grader living in a small Alaskan town, declared that his choice of sources when discussing racial discrimination was intimately tied to identity groups to which he was affectively attached – Republicans and Mormons. When a dialogue partner attempted to tell a personal story offering an alternative perspective, Cory struggled to engage with it, instead retreating into claims from partisan websites that validated his own experiences. Pointing out the biased nature of these sites – a normative media literacy practice – caused Cory to dig into rather than discard his claims. This study raises important questions for the field about need for new paradigms to support the development of productive and speculative civic dialogue.

Author

• Nicole Mirra, Rutgers University
  Presenting Author