Equitable Conversations about/with/through Texts: A Framework for Facilitating Digital Discourse in English Classrooms

• In Event: Practical and Conceptual Tools for Teacher Learning About Equitable Classroom Discussion

Abstract

Objectives
Since the pandemic, English educators have become increasingly attuned to the challenges of fostering equitable classroom conversations with digital technologies – whether because of issues of access, commercialization, surveillance, or engagement or because fostering robust classroom discussions about texts has always been challenging (Applebee et al., 2003). This paper shares findings from a study about the humanizing potential of digitally-mediated literary discussions in secondary English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms. We present the Digital Discourse Practices framework as a tool that emerged from collaborative inquiry with experienced teachers.

Framing
We theorize digital discourse as technologically-mediated communication (Thurlow & Mroczek, 2011; Thurlow, 2018) intertwining the technological/material as people communicate across modes and media in everyday language-in-use (‘little d’ discourse) that always entails people’s identities and ideologies (‘big D’ discourse; Gee, 1990). We frame teacher learning about how to facilitate digital discourse as situated in their repertoires of practice (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003) that develop through collaborative inquiry in relation to “larger social, cultural, and political issues” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999, p. 250) that shape and are shaped by digital technologies (Nichols & Garcia, 2022).

Methods/Data
In the context of a four-year research-practice partnership (Coburn & Penuel, 2016), a team of 18 teacher-researchers, two community organization leader-researchers, and 11 university researchers collected multiple forms of data, including transcripts of bimonthly inquiry team meetings (n=88), yearly interviews (n=72), student and classroom artifacts, and teaching portfolios and reflections. Using the constant comparative method (Lincoln & Guba, 1985) to analyze the data collaboratively (via web Atlas.ti), we focused first on how the team defined ‘digital discourse’ and then developed a framework that elaborated key practices for facilitating digital discourse in ELA classrooms. We were guided by the question: How do teachers learn to facilitate equitable discussions with digital technologies in secondary ELA classrooms?

Findings
This paper presents the digital discourse framework that emerged from the team’s collaborative inquiry. The framework centers three practices ELA teachers used to engage with digital discourse in their classrooms – social annotating, social exchange, and social making. This focus on classroom discourse practices was an important shift from an earlier, more instrumental tool emphasis. We analyze what entailed this shift, as teachers centered the question - digital discourse for what? – as a way to foreground the humanizing purposes of not just talking about texts but with and through them. This centered students’ voices (not just the texts) and was enacted via five moves: creating space, facilitating connection, fostering criticality, supporting understanding, and building relationships.

Significance
In a world in which public discourse is increasingly fraught, this framework offers educators a concrete tool to foster equitable classroom conversations about/with/through texts, centering students as complex readers, writers, critics, and makers of texts. Built through a sustained partnership with educators, researchers, and community organizations and rooted in the justice-oriented work of experienced ELA educators, this framework is one way of engaging in remedy and repair of top-down educational initiatives by centering practitioners’ practices and moves that work toward educational equity.

Authors

• Amy Stornaiuolo, University of Pennsylvania

• Latrice Ferguson, University of Pennsylvania

• Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, University of Michigan