Discourses and Discomforts as a (Digital) Literacy Teacher Educator

• In Event: "Inside" Innovation ... "It's Not Pretty": Embodied Responses to Discourses of Technological Advancement and Accountability

Abstract

I am a literacy teacher educator aware of the critical opportunities digital and social media present for everyone (especially young people) to represent narratives multimodally (Vasudevan, 2006), assume public authorship (Stornaiaulo, Higgs, & Hull, 2014), and assert power in their lives (boyd, 2014). As norms for communicative practices have evolved, I adapt mine for personal, professional and pedagogical ends. But translating commitments to practices of digital literacies into teacher education curricula is an awkward journey through fear, shame, self-doubt, disappointment, frustration, embarrassment, and loss. Such affective responses resonate with Burnett’s (2011) finding that teachers who integrate digital literacy practices developed in personal discourses into professional literacies often face affective challenges integrating them into pedagogies.

In 2014, I began collecting auto-ethnographic data about my digital practices in and beyond teaching (online profile tour, classroom “post-mortems”) (Saudelli & Rowsell, 2013), teaching artifacts, online network artifacts, and self-authored multimodal compositions. Part literature review, part narrative inquiry (Brock, 2011), I analyze peer-reviewed research that explores the intersection of teacher educators’ affective (Wetherell, 2012), and digital literacy practices to make meaning of embodied discomforts teaching digital literacy practices to undergraduate pre-service teachers.

To illustrate, I recently moved from teaching at a large public city university system to a small, private liberal arts Hispanic Serving Institution in a mid-sized Southwestern US city. I was struck by institutional discourses and material incentives to perform “technological innovation” made manifest in initiatives to foster “100% digital work-flows,” CFPs for Teaching and Learning with Technology grants and Innovation Institute Fellowships. An administrative request to redesign the Educational Technology Integration curriculum and pilot it as a “21st Century Learning Ecosystem” in a new Learning Management System contrasted with my prior institution of higher education with scant discourses around technology and innovation. There I spearheaded efforts to purchase a class set of wireless enabled tablets as some eschewed regular email use and bemoaned classroom handheld device use. There and then, embracing digital culture was voluntary; positioned pioneering. Here and now, digital composition and multimodal analysis are a minimum standard. Unprepared to navigate the discursive production of innovation in this new digital culture I perform compliance and feel: fear that my curriculum won’t be a recognizable “ecosystem,” ashamed by my reluctance to tweet professional and pedagogical achievements, embarrassed when a session analyzing rhetorical functions of college administrator hashtags falls flat. Voluntary pursuit of personal curiosities turns required professional performances. Yet I press on knowing teachers must navigate these shifting discourses. How do I support their affective responses to institutional discourses while navigating my own?

Digital media creation remains an under-researched area of adult education (Livingstone, Van Couvering, & Thumim, 2006) amidst growing emphasis on digital literacies across K-12 education [e.g., U.S. Common Core State Standards for digital reading, composition, collaboration, research, and publication (Beach, Thein, & Webb, 2012)]. This inquiry contributes to a small, emerging knowledge base on literacy teacher educators’ digital literacies (J. Davies, 2006; Rowsell et al., 2008) as I teach, interrogate, and re-conceptualize new literacies simultaneously (Rosaen & Terpstra, 2012).

Author

• Elisabeth Johnson, College of Staten Island - CUNY