Guns, Schools, and Digital Storytelling: Redesigning Media Literacy Education for Uncertain Futures

• In Event: Examining Intergenerational Cultures of Collaboration, Resistance, and Social Dreaming in Multimedia Learning Environments

Abstract

U.S. educational systems need to be reimagined to support youth as they navigate the effects of not only the Covid-19 pandemic, but the continuing gun violence pandemic as well. This paper illuminates the organization of learning within an intergenerational design collaborative engaged in imagining equitable social futures through the practice of critical multimodal literacy pedagogy. The Digital Democratic Dialogue (3D) Project included six high school English teachers and 238 students from across the United States who, with two university researchers, formed a collective aimed at resisting today’s polarized public life through digitally-mediated empathetic storytelling.

We focus on discourse related to guns to organize our analysis in this paper because guns emerged as an urgent concern for the young people over the course of the 3D Project across the multiple ecological systems in their lives in ways that expose the insufficiency of normative paradigms of democratic education and demand new pathways forward for reconstituting media literacy education in today’s fractured civic context.

We examine how 3D Project members enacted a process of prolepsis (Cole, 1996; Gutiérrez, 2016) through participation in learning experiences that helped them understand how guns “mattered” amid their cultural, historical, and political identities, as well as the media they consumed. We analyze how the structures of the collective’s activity system, which was mediated across digital and geographic space, honored expansive expressive repertoires of practice among adult and youth participants and encouraged heteroglossic dialogue (Bakhtin, 1981) to elicit speculative dreams of a new public sphere (Mirra & Garcia, 2020).

Grounded in cultural historical activity theory (Cole & Engestrom, 1993) and social design-based methodology (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016), we draw upon participant observation of multiple events– classroom instruction, team meetings, and interviews – to show the learning about guns that occurred as participants moved between the activity systems of the 3D Project, their individual communities, schools, and social media. We focus upon interactions about guns that occurred between students from all six schools through a digital communication platform to demonstrate how moments of transformative relationality occurred via multimedia artifacts.

We found that while the young people in our study held nuanced views about guns, their ability to engage in productive dialogue with others about these views was often stymied when structured by mainstream approaches to civics and media literacy education such as analysis of information sources and argumentative policy debate. By contrast, opportunities to share personal experience and learn what guns meant in the lives of peers outside their familiar social contexts fostered generative moments of sociopolitical learning. These vulnerable moments of perspective-taking, while difficult to sustain as acts of gun violence intruded into learning contexts, catalyzed creative thinking about possible shared social futures that offset prevalent fears that students held about the violent society they are poised to inherit.

Based on these findings, we argue that normative school-based efforts to apprentice young people toward democratic engagement must be replaced by transformative community pedagogies and research agendas that foreground students’ lived experiences and perspectives rather than dysfunctional systems they live within.

Authors

• Nicole Mirra, Rutgers University

• Antero Garcia, Stanford University