Shifting Around: A Four-Year Case Study of Evolving Curriculum, Pedagogy, and School Policies for Classroom Technologies

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

Abstract

Looking across four years of qualitative data of a media-rich qualitative research course at a small high school in the Northeast, I examine how three teachers regularly reimagined the curriculum in response to an evolving personal, social, political, and technological landscape. Given the teachers’ personal (and professional) predilections toward media experimentation, the social world of their students and school, shifting political ideologies and policies around digital technologies in classrooms, and continual changes in the affordances and relevance of various tools that enable multimodal text creation and sharing, this study looks broadly at how digitally minded educators revised their curriculum and pedagogy over time. Moving beyond a simple look at the tools, which have shifted from blogs and school-owned audio-recorders to Google classroom and student smartphones, I examine the teachers’ ideas and innovations and students’ responses, sitting with both the intention and messiness of their curricular shifts and attendant outcomes. I consider the various motivations for the curricular unfolding: efficiency, integration with personal digital life (of teachers and students), new affordances, and revision of curriculum to meet mandated and also justice-oriented objectives. I examine the benefits, challenges, tensions, and problems that emerge as tools offer both new affordances and new limitations for multimodal literacies in schools (Jewitt, 2008). I look to see what stays constant when teachers work with adolescents to build curriculum that rests at the “edge” of the comfort level of most members of the classroom community -- and work to account for the additional labor, advocacy, and discomfort that accompanies pushing the boundaries of (standard) curriculum and pedagogy, especially of the digital nature.

To answer the question, “How do digitally-minded educators shift and grow curriculum in response to changing personal, social, political, and technological factors?”, I examine curricular artifacts such as curriculum maps, lesson plans, teacher journals, field notes, and student work samples from each of four years as well conduct extensive interviews with the novice and experienced teachers who have built the course over time. Looking across discourses and semi-structured interviews with teacher participants, I seek to understand the messiness -- the various factors and influences in digital curricular decision-making. Findings point to a multi-faceted conglomeration of influences -- including tech determinist discourses in school, professional commitments to critical literacies, personal media use, and an abiding interest in youth and popular culture.

By analyzing the curricular revisions and unfolding ideologies of teachers who have become invested in multimodal text production and understanding youth culture, and who have little trepidation when facing unfamiliar tools and “racy” pop cultural narratives, this longitudinal ethnographic study highlights the failures, successes, and overall messiness borne of and despite technological nuance and (in)capacity. It also points to possible directions for teachers and teacher educators seeking to both foster innovation and honor its situatedness in human frailty.

Author

• Tiffany A. DeJaynes, Park University