Engaging Data Literacy through Active and Engaged Classroom Discourse Practices

• In Event: Supporting Teachers to Engage in Meaningful Data Literacy and Data Science Practices Across Disciplines

Abstract

Objectives. Visual texts, including data visualizations, are significant to classroom discourse, providing investigative opportunities for learners (e.g., perspective-taking, embodied response, (re)storying, contextual placement, historicizing, and personalization). Teachers are curricular decision-makers (Thorton, 1989) who select and curate texts. This study investigated teacher conversations focused on primary source visualizations within a professional development context. We explore, in what ways humanities teachers use data-based visual texts in discourse about classroom resources?

Theoretical context. This work coheres visual literacy, data literacy, and critical literacy. Visual literacy is the ability to interpret and make meaning from visual information (e.g., graphs, maps, photographs) (Yenawine, 1997). Similarly, data literacy is the ability to understand, analyze, evaluate, and communicate with data (Carlson et al., 2011), most often presented multimodally. Critical literacy involves becoming literate—in ways that support consciousness of “one’s experience as historically constructed within specific power relations” (Anderson & Irvine, 1993, p. 82; Luke, 2013). Critical literacy serves as both an approach to learning and teaching and as an asset-based stance (Ladson-Billings, 2009; Paris & Alim, 2017) towards learners, individually and collectively. Through a critical literacy approach, readers learn to recognize that text (e.g., image, color, symbol, alphabetic) and language are not neutral, and creators’ and consumers’ values influence both the production and interpretation of texts.

Methods. Teacher-participants (n=24) engaged in focus groups aimed to elicit dialogue with curated arrays of primary sources containing scientific visual texts. Using a case study approach, qualitative data was generated by both researchers (e.g., field notes) and participants (e.g., artifacts). Through interpretivist, thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2013) of field notes and artifacts (n=45), we examined the ways in which teacher-participants identified and interpreted visual primary sources and classified interpretations as objective or subjective.

Findings. Initial findings highlight teachers' engagement in critical analysis of data visualizations. We found that the use of text-based discourse provided a venue for teachers to actively develop and revise their content knowledge about data visualizations and their uses. Participants’ construction and negotiation of meaning also brought forward understandings of bias, and assumptions regarding students’ interests and academic abilities that may impact text selection. Within conversations, teachers generated working definitions of “objective/objectivity” as “definitive,” “facts,” and “conclusive,” and subjective/subjectivity as “perceptions,” “perspectives,” and “interpretation.”

Using these working definitions, all participants identified six of the 26 artifacts as objective. These six artifacts included graphs, photographs, and a map. Two artifacts were identified by all participants as subjective were a drawing and census data. The remaining 18 artifacts were identified as “something else,” which we interpret to reflect flexibility in understanding but also uncertainty.
Study Significance. Data visualizations require responsible consideration, as they can lead educators to perpetuate and even amplify negative and harmful tropes and narratives. Most humanities teachers lack intentional, discipline-specific and interdisciplinary opportunities to interrogate these sources. More in-depth and frequent opportunities are needed, such that secondary humanities teachers increase their confidence with data visualizations and their expertise with regards to utilizing these resources to promote students’ learning.

Authors

• Kristy Brugar, University of Oklahoma

• Julianna E. Lopez Kershen, University of Oklahoma