Adolescent Civic Discourse Across Physical Spaces and Virtual Platforms

• In Event: Whose Knowledge Is Valued in Public? Taking a Critical Intersectional Approach to Youth Civic Reasoning

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the ways in which adolescents engage in civic discourse in online platforms. Studying a cohort of students from across the country who chose to collaboratively explore the topic of immigration, this study looks at how civic reasoning emerges from across cultural-historical contexts that shape students’ lived experiences as well as from the kinds of interactional opportunities that emerged across a year-long curricular project.

Exploring how youth “participatory readiness” (Allen, 2016) is built fundamentally on the relational components of civic discourse, we explore how media literacy in a participatory culture (Garcia, Seglem, & Share, 2013; Kellner & Share, 2007) framed how students bolstered arguments about immigration and built common ground for dialogue.

238 student participants from six high schools across the United States participated in this social design experiment focused on fostering civic dialogue through digital platforms, with twelve students self-selecting immigration as a topic they wanted to explore further. Artifacts were collected from three design cycles in which students shared multimodal narratives and engaged in dialogue with each other about the similarities and differences in their civic perspectives. Culminating in an eight-week period interacting in the online platform Edmodo, we trace how youth introduce themselves to students from other schools and backgrounds, commented on each others’ introductory posts, and posited invitations for civic dialogue prior to the in-depth focus on immigration in this study’s culmination. This interactional analysis allowed us to look at how prior interactions between participants rippled into the immigration discussions at the end of the year. We examined the moves students make when offering evidence, expressing a dissenting opinion and questioning the ideas of another.

While the broader project engaged students, teachers, and researchers in collective inquiry around how civic dialogue shapes classroom instruction, this paper focuses on two intersecting components of the project:

How did students’ interactions prior to discussing immigration shape their civic reasoning in Edmodo?
How did students frame their efforts to express, assert, and defend their positions on immigration? What evidence was used to support their assertions, how was conflict mediated?

Findings from this study demonstrated that similar discursive moves across platforms shaped how students framed their arguments. Further, while geographic commonalities were reflected in the ways youth discussed immigration, these arguments were also rooted in personal experience, and relied on varied research approaches to engaging in this topic. Given that these conversations occurred during the spring of 2019, this study highlighted the ways civic dialogue around a timeline topic was cordoned away from the real-world news happening in parallel to these discussions (e.g. there was no mention of the detainment centers photographed and shared virally and through mainstream news sources during the period of this study). Ultimately, this study demonstrates students interest in and need for spaces for dialogue that cross-multiple kinds of boundaries: geographic, demographic, ideological. In considering how teachers curated digital contexts for interaction, we question how online civic reasoning can be interpreted differently as spaces, communities, or non-neutral sites.

Authors

• Miroslav Suzara, Stanford University

• Stephanie Robillard, Stanford University

• Antero Garcia, Stanford University