Out-of-School Writing Community as Remedy: Learning from Youth’s Digital Texts

• In Event: Making Space for Youth-Produced Digital Texts as Remedy in a Time of “Crisis”: Inviting in Joy and Artistic Flourishing

Abstract

Shifts in popular literacy practices require writing educators to grapple with the place of “vernacular writing” (understood here to include the multimodal and hybridized nature of digital texts) in the formal writing curriculum (Sefton-Green, 2021). For master’s student preservice educators (MSPE), English education courses can provide exposure to digital writing practices of youth. This paper will consider how an online youth-centered writing community supported MSPEs to embed youth-produced digital texts into their educational praxis.

This research study invited MSPEs to join the fall fellowship of an online youth-centered writing community (hosted on Discord, a voice, video, and text-based social platform) and engage in intergenerational inquiry projects (Lyiscott et al., 2020) as their field placement for the semester. The study, part of a larger participatory design research project (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016), is rooted in an inquiry stance (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999; 2009), bringing together high school students, MSPEs, and teacher educators to inquire into their digital writing practices. Guided by the principle that student voice (Cook-Sather, 2006) is central to understanding young peoples’ literacies, each MSPE met weekly with a small group of high school students via Zoom. During these collaborative sessions, they discussed their inquiries, shared writing, and engaged in moderation of the Discord server.

The methodology of this study draws on practitioner inquiry (Cochran Smith & Lytle, 2009) which centers the situated experiences of educators and students as key sites of knowledge-generation to advance educational research. To that end, the data sources for this study included written reflections, artifacts of practice, and multimodal representations of the MSPE’s fieldwork experiences. To analyze this multimodal data, the study drew on auto-ethnographic reflections (Chang et al., 2013) to conceptualize the experience of the online writing community as itself a youth-centered digital text.

By delving into Author4’s experience with her small group, composed of four high school aged youth in the Philadelphia area, the study surfaces how the digital writing community created via Zoom formed a digital text. First, the writing group expressed that they valued their smaller community over the broader digital writing community on Discord. This finding highlights the power of the digital writing group as a space for student voice in determining youth’s activities. Second, youth shared digital writing, such as one member’s fantasy novel-in-progress, that then grounded the group’s research inquiries. These findings underscore the need to broaden the scope of what is considered “legitimate” literacy in educational contexts (Sefton-Green, 2021) and who gets to produce knowledge about adolescents’ digital literacies. By recognizing and incorporating young people’s existing out-of-school digital writing practices within schools (Author & Colleague, 2001), future educators can engage more authentically with young people and validate their myriad forms of meaning-making. This approach ensures that youths’ writerly identities are heard, read, and valued, fostering a more inclusive understanding of literacy.

Authors

• Mary Elizabeth Talian, University of Pennsylvania

• Jennifer Freed, University of Pennsylvania

• Clara Abbott, University of Pennsylvania

• Julia Adler, University of Pennsylvania

• Amy Stornaiuolo, University of Pennsylvania