Dimensions of Authorship in Adolescent Reflections on Digital Tools and AI

• In Event: Disrupting Top-Down Curricular Hierarchies Through Fandom and Media Engagement

Abstract

This paper positions BIPOC youth who are marginalized and often dehumanized in traditional curricular structures, as most equipped to disrupt and challenge curricular hierarchies. In today’s technology-saturated educational contexts, young people have valuable insights as philosophers of technology who employ ethical lenses (Vakil & McKinney de Royston, 2022) and recognize the creative limits of AI technologies (Higgs & Stornaiuolo, 2024). Whether through Spotify playlists, mobile applications, or TikTok feeds, youth’s everyday digital experiences occur in a media landscape driven by algorithms and black boxes of generative AI. In such a context, we ask about young people's literacy practices with digital media: How do they come to question the authorship of algorithms, tools, instruments, and what do they identify as the human connection?
The study’s site is an out-of-school literacy context—a youth-driven newsroom, where journalists ages 14-25, guided by peer and adult educators, produced a series of technology-focused media artifacts for public audiences, including a series of multimedia interviews with BIPOC technology designers. We find a humanizing ethic motivating and urgent to honor the uniquely human aspects of learning, teaching, creating, and expression (Author et al., 2024). Specifically, we explore the importance of “authoring,” which alongside asking, adapting, and analyzing, has been identified as a key practice for learners engaging with AI-driven media and tools in critical and empowering ways (Druga et al., 2021). The study builds from our earlier qualitative study of adolescent and young adult content creators, which yielded a finding of “unveiling authorship” as one of several literacy practices evidenced in well over half (n=13) of young people’s media creations (Author et al., 2024). Building on that framing of authorship of and with digital tools as intertwined with human dynamics and social structures, this study examines what youth-created multimodal digital compositions reveal about what authorship signals to them, including the insights and perceptions they demonstrate as authors themselves.
Using qualitative methods, the 13 youth media artifacts were re-coded to identify themes around “who,” “what” and “why” of authorship revealed by youth authors, asking: Where do they look for information about the authorship behind platforms? What authorial moves of other creators do they highlight? Initial findings point to trustworthiness, audience connections, and inquiry/curiosity as salient components of authorship they identified. We also ask: How does their perception of and relationship with technological tools/platforms shift as they deepen their knowledge and understanding of these instruments?
The study’s findings point to how young people’s practices of media production helped humanize the authorship process to reveal the designer behind the designed, the human behind the bot, and themselves as the creator behind the content. As the study context is an out-of-school setting, its findings help demonstrate the potential of literacy spaces beyond the walls of school, yet it has implications of humanizing authorship for ELA teachers–and literacy educators broadly. The paper concludes with pedagogical takeaways and considerations for how school-based literacy teaching and media education might disrupt curricular hierarchies by centering youth agency and authentic inquiry.

Authors

• Cherise McBride, Stanford University

• Clifford H. Lee, Northeastern University

• Lissa Soep, YR Media