Digital Literacies and Me: Connecting Online
Prof. Blog Post #1
Starting this new blog is a blast from the past for me! In 2006, when I traveled to Thailand to begin teaching abroad, Facebook was still in its infancy and people beyond my college friend group did not use it. So I decided to start a blog, right here on blogger. It was difficult to maintain as I found myself with inconsistent internet access and uploading pictures took forever! Then life abroad became less about the “new” and more about everyday living and it felt like a chore. Fast forward a decade, I came back to America and deleted the half-formed attempt.
In late 2015, when I moved back to the US, I created an Instagram account as a way to keep in contact with my many students, their parents, and friends. I still maintain that account and keep access to that pretty limited. I love photography, and I chose to show my more creative work there along with poetry or deep thoughts!
Through the years, Facebook has seen it all! That makes me old, right? I miss the days when people actually used it to communicate and show off their lives. These days between the ads and the reposts and invites to Farmville, there isn’t a lot of connection. The best thing that has come out of it for me is a “Buy Nothing” group, which is trying to both reduce the amount of stuff in landfills but also a way for people to lend or borrow items, creating a neighborhood amongst strangers. I have introduced many people to this group, and being socially and civically engaged in this way has allowed me to help others by jumping someone’s car stranded with her kid at Walmart, providing fresh food from my garden, and getting clothes to a family devastated by fire.
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| Chard goes so fast! One woman who came to pick some up gave me a great recipe to use. |
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| Hot humid days makes for big harvests! Sharing fresh produce improves all our lives. |
My engagement in and understanding of participatory culture has allowed me to see that students, while clearly interacting with participatory culture through multiple modes of digital literacy, are often not doing so reflexively or responsibly. Even as early as 2006 in the emerging age online platforms such as Facebook, Myspace, Friendster and blogs, studies like MacArthur Whitepaper (Jenkins et al.) address the idea that while students are already out there–engaging, schools needed to provide the pedagogical landscape to help kids navigate access, issues of transparency and ethics. Youth need opportunities to understand how their media usage and presence shapes their views and a chance to be reflective about their abilities such as performance, appropriation, multi-tasking, judgment and networking (pp.3-4). By embracing digital literacies, teachers can engage students in rhetorical agency needed in the real world.
One of the most exciting aspects of multi-modal digital writing is the audience. By nature, this work is meant to be posted, shared, liked and commented on. The internet is a wide wide web! Too many times, as an English teacher, no matter how we pose an assignment, the audience is still that of the teacher. Even with peers, they feel their role is to edit and shape for the teacher’s eyes, not those of the public or larger community. Research on youth participatory action research projects like that of DeJaynes & Curmi-Hall (2019), highlight how critical inquiry into a topic can become more than a flat, research essay, but a multi-modal experience whose audience is the whole school–civically engaging students, teachers, and parents in difficult discussions that have the power to reshape a community. What will continue to remain a challenge with progressive, future oriented curriculum such as these action research projects, is the fight to change a school system developed around a points system. As DeJaynes & Curmi-Hall (2019) point out, “YPAR projects risk being schoolified, its aims of inquiry and action transformed into mere graded assignments” (pp.2). Until schools focus on a skills-based over knowledge/content based evaluation system, the desire to use digital literacies will be pushed to the periphery.
Resources:
DeJaynes, T., & Curmi-Hall, C. (2019). Transforming School Hallways Through Critical Inquiry: Multimodal Literacies for Civic Engagement. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 63( 3), 299– 309.
https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.991
MacArthur Whitepaper, Jenkins et al. (2006). "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture:
Media Education in the Twenty-First Century" Access online @ https://www.macfound.org/media/article_pdfs/JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF
Hi Becky. Your comments about audience are so true. I am trying to figure out ways to increase the audience of my students' work beyond me and beyond their writing workshop groups of peers. I have recently thought about partnering with our school's digital newspaper publication so that my students can submit their work for publication on that platform. Any other ideas for me that are not completely public platforms?
ReplyDeleteIt is funny as I read your post because I too wrote about students and how they are clearly immersed in media, and fully partake in the "participatory culture." However, they completely lack those deeper ethical dives of the role of media on their perspectives. I am really curious what lessons you do on transparency and ethics of digital media because I feel like I need to do better at that with my AP Seminar students before they beginning their first performance task. So please share. :)
ReplyDeleteI also struggle (with my freshmen) with authentic audience. I am thinking I want to shift some of their creative composition to multi modal, maybe then have them create posters on Adobe Express with QR codes and put them up around the building. Thinking, if they knew that their fellow students, and teachers would be viewing their work, besides just me. It is worth a try, right!? :)
Its Tiffany Hagey- I am not sure how not to be anonymous. Someone will have to teach me next class! :)
DeleteHi Becky, your blog post was a joy to read! Your experience of teaching in Thailand sounds so interesting, and I hope to read more about it in following blog posts. I also wanted to point out that I also have had experience with "buy nothing" Facebook groups, as my girlfriend has used them often in the past. They're a great example of the internet being used to harbor a positive community and actually has a real like impact outside of the online world.
ReplyDelete