Examining Critical Digital Literacies With Canadian Secondary Teachers

• In Event: Tensions in Practicing and Researching Critical Digital Literacies for/in Platformized Environments

Abstract

Purpose
Rapidly evolving technologies have changed and continue to change what it means to be literate in today’s world (Ávila & Pandya, 2013). As we engage with everyday digital platforms, they collect and commoditize our behaviour within them (Zuboff, 2015). Our clicks, likes, searches, facial expressions, and more are then used to manipulate our attention, affective responses, and behaviour through "mass individualization” (Leander & Burriss, 2020, p. 1266), or personalization, of platforms. We have become increasingly aware of the ways platforms act on us as individuals, in addition to how they often act to reinforce and perpetuate systemic issues of power and oppression (Noble, 2018; Benjamin, 2019). Yet, how platforms influence literacies practices is not yet fully understood by researchers and is seldom addressed by professional development or literacies instruction in schools (Garcia, 2018). In this paper, I considered how a group of three secondary English teachers conceptualized digital literacies (DL) and critical digital literacies (CDL) for a new digital era and generated practical approaches for how they might address them with their students. I examined our group conversations and interviews to identify pedagogical opportunities and tensions.

Framing
Examining these questions is crucial as for nearly three decades scholars have
emphasized a multiplicity of literacies by highlighting how diverse communicative practices (i.e., gesture, visual, audio, and spatial) exist alongside understandings of literacy (i.e., linguistically-based practices) and how multiliteracies contribute to society (New London Group, 1996). Moreover, as digital technology advanced in the late aughts, scholarly discussions again shifted to also include digital literacies (McLean & Rowsell, 2019; Mills, 2010). Scholars are again (re)conceptualizing critical digital literacies (CDL) to better account for platformization, datafication, and mass individualization (Nichols et al., 2021). While more scholars across disciplines are now engaging in CDL, especially as related to educators' and youth’s understandings of digital platforms’ underlying structures (Nichols et al., 2021), there remains a need for more practitioner-led, youth-centered, classroom-based empirical studies in this area if we wish to better understand how educators might address CDL with youth.

Methods
I drew on data gathered from four weekly Zoom meetings with three secondary English teachers in Ontario (n = 5 hours) in which we discussed readings from scholarly and popular texts (including games and interactives) related to algorithmic and platform literacies. Additionally, we discussed our experiences teaching DL and CDL in the classroom and how we might approach teaching CDL in particular. I supplemented this dataset with interviews I conducted with two of the teachers. In my analysis, I identified several pedagogical opportunities and tensions.

Findings & Significance
Findings suggest teachers identify several threats related to youths’ literacies practices, identity formation, and agency within digital platforms, which they argue demand new pedagogical approaches to DL and CDL. Additionally, they recognize learners come to CDL with different kinds of knowledge, experiences, and positions from which to interrogate digital technologies. To address this, they suggested pedagogical approaches to CDL that would center learners and engage them in critical self-reflection to bridge the personal and ideological (Pangrazio, 2016).

Author

• Melissa Arasin, University of Toronto