Engendering Critical Technology and Digital Media Studies in Teacher Education

• In Event: How Critical Literacies Are Changing in a Post-Pandemic World

Abstract

Drawing on the metaphor of a “hard reset” of a smartphone, Ladson-Billings (2021) rejected the “post”-pandemic rush back to traditional schooling, noting: “I want to suggest that ‘going back’ is the wrong thing for children and youth who were unsuccessful and oppressed in our schools before the pandemic. Normal is where the problems reside” (p. 68). Among her recommendations for post-pandemic pedagogy was addressing disparities of technology access and engagement across US schools as part of a fundamental rethinking of education with a more racially and culturally attuned approach. In this paper, we join Ladson-Billings in seeking a radical shift in approaches to technology and digital media in teacher education to be critical, culturally relevant, and humanizing.

Critical literacies argue for us to consider the contexts, power dynamics, and ideologies at play (Pandya et al., 2021), so that we understand what we write and create are informed by where we are, who we are, and how we are engaged in a space but also predicated on the underlying technologies and logics of digital media applications and technologies. Critical digital pedagogies similarly root us in engaging in teaching and learning that interrogates and critiques what, how, and when digital media and technology use can nurture learning (Stommel, Friend, & Morris, 2020). While the role of digital media and new technologies in teacher education has been an ongoing site of inquiry (see: Koehler & Mishra, 2009), the rapidly evolving technology landscape demands that we build on existing critical perspectives to cultivate a critical technology and digital media praxis with new and practicing educators. To do so, we take up Gee’s (2009) worked examples methodology designed for exploring theoretical terrain of emergent phenomenon--in our case, at the intersection of critical pedagogies and digital media studies (see also Anonymized, 2020).

Our first worked example situated in a digital literacies classroom illustrates how pre-service teachers realized a critical technology praxis through the composing, critiquing, and reflecting on the process of composing digital artifacts. Our second worked example draws on a case study of secondary history-social science teachers’ curricular sensemaking to highlight the promise of using a critical race media literacy framework for designing increasingly liberatory, justice-oriented media literacy education. Our third worked example explored the intersection of instructional design and technology (IDT) in an online pedagogy and praxis course where educators and IDT professionals interrogated how they used digital media to design and create content that reinforces inequities in our pedagogical content and practices.

In examining these worked examples, we explore: How do we prepare teachers for an evolving future where there are many unknowns? How do we cultivate educators who are not only using technology but engaging in productive critique of and practices with technology? As bell hooks (1994) writes, “classrooms remain the most radical space of possibility in the academy” (p. 11) which is resonant with this year’s AERA focus on educational possibilities. Thus, we take up hooks’ charge by articulating how our uptake of critical technology and digital media studies is radical.

Authors

• Veena Vasudevan, University of Pittsburgh

• Tinukwa C. Boulder, University of Pittsburgh

• Mila Re, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Anna Smith, Illinois State University