Traversing the Interconnected: Youth Platform Navigation in Gaming and Media Literacy Contexts

• In Event: Cross-Platformization, Digital Media Platforms as Global Ecosystems, and the Shifting Understandings of Critical Platform Practices

Abstract

Objectives
In this paper, we draw on various data types to argue that digital platforms, especially in the current digital classroom ethos, call for more nuanced investigations to make sense of students' and teachers' ideological, cultural, and pedagogical leveraging. The burgeoning presence of technology in students’ everyday lives calls for bridging the platforms students use, including in-classroom and out-of-classroom platforms. The data and developing findings of this paper consider not just the importance of this connection for in-classroom instruction but also the relevance to students’ other technological practices, such as gaming. These considerations can lead to more intentional building of curricula and pedagogy in relation to students' cultural practices around technology.

Perspectives
The perspectives that guide this paper are conceptions of Platform Studies (Bogost & Montfort, 2009), which particularly focus on technology and computing systems in relation to creativity, expression, and culture. We draw on relational orientations to platform studies that conceptualize platforms as an interaction between the social, technical, and political-economic dimensions of these spaces (Authors, 2022; van Dijck, 2013). Additionally, more recent arguments seek to make the connection that platforms, as tools of mixed hardware and software, are so embedded in our society that they become part of our everyday infrastructures (Platin et al., 2018). We build on these arguments to make sense of the relationship between students as users and platforms as part of quotidian learning.

Methods & Data Sources
This paper draws from two distinct yet interconnected data sources. One source draws on data collected from a popular video game platform called Roblox. Through digital ethnographic approaches (Leander, 2010; Ardévalo & Gómez-Cruz, 2014), the designs of the platform, Roblox, and one specific game on the platform, Adopt Me!, were investigated as parameters that invite specific modes of play. The main data collected were in the form of image and video captures that documented playthroughs of the platform and game. The second source draws on data from a case study of a secondary history-social studies educator enacting critical media literacy pedagogies when teaching students to interrogate digital media texts across platforms. Here, interview data, curricular artifacts, and walkthroughs of model lessons offer insights into how a teacher supports students’ critical navigation of algorithms, platform logics, and technologies.

Findings and Significance
Initial findings highlight the complex networks students and teachers navigate on various platforms, in and out of the classroom. Emerging data suggests users can negotiate, interrogate, and leverage platforms’ social, technical, and political-economic dimensions (van Dijck, 2013). Given the ongoing “platformization of education” (van Dijck & Poell, 2018), the field of education needs to consider the impacts of these relationships on learning. What is significant in this work is our offer of possible “worked examples” (Gee, 2010) for educators to unpack digital platforms that students engage with daily. As the definitions of literacy continue to shapeshift along with technology that constitutes youth experiences, these exemplars could prove useful as starting points for educators to build curricula and pedagogical practices.

Authors

• Joel De Jesus Lovos, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Mila Re, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Emanuel Suarez Jimenez, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Roberto de Roock, University of California - Santa Cruz