Golden, N.A. (2017). Critical digital literacy across scales and beneath the screen. Educational Media International, 54, 373-387. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Critical Digital Literacies and the Struggle over What's Common
It is tempting and even useful to imagine stable camps in a warlike contest over common interests in school reform, and it is an ingrained national tradition to portray meaningful struggle between camps, with Jimmy Stewart or Sidney Poitier playing the good guy in the movie version. Web 2.0 activism, a type of critical literacy, challenges that view as teachers and parents, long positioned in the backseat in national education reform, are increasingly able to drive, organize, and disagree with self-selected protagonists of positive change. In this chapter, we examine the connections among Critical Digital Literacies (CDL) and the struggle over what is “common” among stakeholders in American education. Chapter in Digital Networking for School Reform: The Online Grassroots Efforts of Parent and Teacher Activists. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137430748.0006.
Language, Ideology, and Critical Digital Literacy
Technology has revolutionized the way we produce and exchange information and developed new modes of communication and socialization. Implicated in relations of power, these digitally mediated practices are not ideologically neutral. They shape the representation of meanings and identities, the circulation of knowledge, the construction of social networks and formations, redefining notions of private and public space, while privileging and marginalizing ideas, cultures, and people. As technology increasingly becomes an integral component of learning, this chapter asserts that learners must develop a critical digital literacy to become more aware of how power operates in digital spaces, shaping ways of thinking and doing that are implicated in social and cultural reproduction. By sharpening this critical lens, learners equip themselves with the capacity to examine linguistic and nonlinguistic features of digital media, their biases and assumptions, in order to verify information and access the truth.
In the New Literacies and Digital Epistemologies Series (M. Knobel & C. Lankshear, Eds.), 2012
The contributors to this edited volume examine the simultaneous implementation of critical and digital literacies and explore ramifications for the development and assessment of critical digital literacies (CDL) curricula across educational contexts. We ask: How has the increasing ubiquity of digital literacies in and out of school affected our definitions of critical literacies? And how have our ever-changing perceptions of critical literacies affected how we define, teach, and engage in digital literacies? We believe that there is crucial work to be done at these intersections, work that builds upon the extensive bodies of critical and digital literacies research. Some issues and questions that chapters address are:
Assembling "Digital Literacies": Contingent Pasts, Possible Futures
Media and Communication, 2019
In this article, we examine the historical emergence of the concept of "digital literacy" in education to consider how key insights from its past might be of use in addressing the ethical and political challenges now being raised by connective media and mobile technologies. While contemporary uses of digital literacy are broadly associated with access, evaluation, curation, and production of information in digital environments, we trace the concept's genealogy to a time before this tentative agreement was reached-when diverse scholarly lineages (e.g., computer literacy, information literacy, media literacy) were competing to shape the educational agenda for emerging communication technologies. Using assemblage theory, we map those meanings that have persisted in our present articulations of digital literacy, as well as those that were abandoned along the way. We demonstrate that our inherited conceptions of digital literacy have prioritized the interplay of users, devices, and content over earlier concerns about technical infrastructures and socioeconomic relations. This legacy, we argue, contributes to digital literacy's inadequacies in addressing contemporary dilemmas related to surveillance, control, and profit motives in connective environments. We propose a multidimensional framework for understanding digital literacies that works to reintegrate some of these earlier concerns and conclude by considering how such an orientation might open pathways for education research and practice.
(Re)Conceptualizing Digital Literacies Before and After the Election of Trump
Purpose – As part of a larger global phenomenon, the election of Donald Trump in the USA represents a crucial moment for the (re)conceptualization of digital literacies. The purpose of this paper is to build theory with respect to what this moment means for English education. Design/methodology/approach – This teacher reflection focuses on what digital literacies meant for my teaching before and after the 2016 election. Using a before-and-after format, I argue that the before conceptualization of digital literacies, while still relevant and useful for introducing many important ideas to English educators, was missing a direct treatment of political power. The after conceptualization takes up this topic. Findings – Themes taken up in the before section involve a parallel between digital literacies and disciplinary literacies and a distinction between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 interfaces. Themes in the after section address the propensity for governments and other well-resourced groups to occupy Web 2.0 environments for their own ends. Methods for accomplishing these ends involve restricting, surveilling and targeting flows of information and enacting three populist practices via internet trolling: aggregating the unmet demands of disparate groups, establishing popular subjectivity and dichotomizing the social space through the persistent construction of the enemy. Research limitations/implications – A critically conscious approach to digital literacies must consider the ways in which political entities occupy digital environments. Practical implications – Further research should be done in English education classrooms to understand the ways in which individual online meaning making becomes entangled within a nexus of political activity. Further research should investigate how online meaning making intersects with political power. Originality/value – The role of political entities is often downplayed or ignored in discussions of digital literacies. In an age of alternative facts, fake news and echo chambers, it is important to foreground the interplay between the social, the political and the digital in contemporary meaning making. This contribution offers concepts that can be taken up and expanded, as well as a set of questions for English educators to use in framing a critically conscious conversation about digital literacies.
" The More We Connect; The Better It Gets: " Examining the Cyber Rhetoric of " Global " Literacies
This article aims to excavate nuances about the cyber/digital rhetoric and its impact on conceptualizing " global " literacies to emphasize the importance of reimagining these literacies from a sociocultural perspective. Therefore, with a particular focus on power relations, social issues, and inequality as an under-explored area in the expansion of digital/ " global " literacies, this article explores the techno-utopian underpinnings of the cyber narrative. This narrative is implicated in the Facebook-led initiative to spread " connectedness " to the two-thirds of the world who, according to Internet.org (2015), are not " connected " yet. In focusing on the Facebook-led initiative in this article, I am not attempting to promote this initiative as the only option to examine the cyber narrative, but to reveal with great specificity in what ways the current cyber narrative repackages the " autonomous " model of literacies that emphasizes the dualistic ideology of " literate " vs. " illiterate. " This article also uncovers serious implications of this cyber narrative on people from economically disadvantaged nations and communities in terms of reinforcing a sense of dis-citizenship, marginalization, disempowerment, and inequality.
His interests and research include cultural-historical and usage-based approaches to language development, language use and learning in new media and online gaming environments, and theoretical investigations of language, communication, and development. He is currently working on a variety of projects that examine technology-mediated language learning occurring within and outside of formal educational settings, ancestral language maintenance and revitalization among the Yup'ik in Alaska, computational approaches to the assessment of linguistic complexity, and with colleagues at the University of Groningen, is exploring the conceptual consequences of divergent theories of second language development. His
The Handbook of Critical Literacies, 2021
Definitions of CDL have their genesis in the nexus between sociocultural understandings of literacy, digital literacy and critical literacy. As a result of the 'sociocultural turn' among researchers and educators, conceptualizations about literacy have shifted from something which is the sole domain of schools, to something that takes place everywhere, and from the singular "literacy" to the plural "literacies." This has created space for thinking more broadly about what it means to be literate and reconsidering how literacy educators prepare learners for the literacy demands of adult life (Luke & Freebody, 1999). With the shift to literacies in the plural have come efforts to explore the social and cultural factors associated with new technologies and their relationship to self-making and identity practice (Alvermann, 2004). Early interest in digital literacies tended to focus on the provision of computers and the skills necessary to operationalize this technology (Molnar, 1978). However, the notion that digital literacy is more than the skills which operationalize new technologies has become central to the thinking of those who argue that what we do with the digital is always sensitive to contextual factors and tied to negotiations of identity and self (Alvermann, 2004; Hagood, 2009; Lankshear, Green, & Snyder, 2000). For Bulfin and North (2007), digital literacy practices are never simply at-school or at-home. Rather, they are traced and sourced across our whole lived experiences, and intricately tied to ongoing identity work. Critical dimensions of digital literacies can be understood in terms of the critical movement and its emphasis on education for social change and the emancipatory capacity of schooling (Freire, 1972). Allan Luke defines critical literacy as the "use of the technologies of print and other media of communication to analyze, critique and transform the norms, rule systems and practices governing the social fields of everyday life" (2012b, p. 5). This definition addresses two important aspects of this movement, developing understanding and action. The former is interested in all kinds of technologies, old and new, at-school and out-of-school, and understanding how they are designed and how they position us. The hope is that developing new understandings about how texts are constructed will impact how they are consumed. The latter is focused on the transformational capacity that arises from this new knowledge. It emphasizes the importance of literacies as tools that have the capacity to change power relations between people and systems. Critical digital literacies (CDL), as a broad, descriptive term brings together digital technologies with a dual interest in knowing the world and acting upon the world. As Avila and Pandya state,
The Extension of the Coloniality of Power into Digital Culture
Symbolic Interaction, 2016
In a time when media, social media, nations, and educational settings feed ideas to us in increasingly small sound-bites that are digested on the run, it is refreshing to find a book which takes the time to delve into ontological and epistemic questions relevant to our digitally infused world today. Stingl disentangles the meaning of digital culture and how power and inequality become manifest within digital realms with great care. His main purpose is to problematize the legitimacy of the digital age by taking a necessarily irreverent approach in considering digital culture, from social media to health care to education, and how this impacts us as political beings. He finds that the digital realm does not create inequality, but rather extends preexisting divisions and power relations, thus extending colonial relations into our online worlds and creating an extension of the coloniality of power and Being; a "Digital Coloniality of Power." Of the seven main chapters, the first, and longest, lays out the philosophical, political theory, and sociological underpinning of the book. Here, Stingl confronts, and revels in, questions such as; what constitutes a political actor? What is the relationship of individualism and democracy? How is Digital Culture implicated? What of the silent/silenced Other? Beginning with the relationship of Digital Culture to democracy, he pulls together an impressive array of literature. He finds that fascination with the "Individual" compounds the digital coloniality of power. He explores the idea of the individual in depth, mulling over every aspects that has arisen in the literature since the Greek concept of the oikos. Stingl ranges across topics as one idea leads into another, including defining publics and states, narratives, mulitiplicity, capitalism and forms of government, acceleration, the cyborg, power, the difference between empowerment and enablement, and what it means to "think with" things. He argues that the relationship among capitalism, democracy, and power is not only problematic, but also carries over into the digital realm where it is exacerbated by a modern
2008
My research explores the challenges and questions that pre-service teachers in two English Education programs confronted with respect to the role of technology in their professional practices and identities. It is evident from the data that the decision to incorporate different technologies in their professional practices implied much more than using an accessory to enhance their pedagogical effectiveness. These technologies were linked to significant changes in the activities of reading and producing texts in our society. Dominant discourses about technology and literacy are predominantly deterministic, and this tendency was represented in the way that the pre-service teachers who participated in my study approached technology. Echoing policy discourses that promote technological innovation as a synonym of socioeconomic progress, participants in many cases assumed a vision of technology as a means to teaching-effectiveness. This entailed separating the means from the curricular ends, which were not significantly reexamined when incorporating digital technologies. In other cases, participants expressed fear of digital texts because they sensed that they were displacing more traditional literacy. This reactionary position, equally deterministic, was associated with efforts to teach students how to ward off the negative influence of digital texts by being "critical." I argue that in teacher education it is important to engage with these discourses and address their implications. Identification with deterministic discourses closes down the possibilities for participation in powerful literacies because meanings are constructed as predetermined , and efforts focus on "what works" without engaging in a critical examination of the purposes of education. iv Nevertheless, along with deterministic moments, there were instances of dialectical engagement with technology among the study participants. These were associated with a meaningful integration of digital texts as part of the inter-text of the English classroom, and with the construction of a community of collaborative inquiry. In these cases, students were producing and sharing multiple kinds of texts, including essays, multimedia stories, videos, comic strips, online discussions, and podcasts, among others. The concept of critical media literacy, in dialectical teaching practices, did not separate analysis from productive ability, so students were taught to simultaneously produce multimedia and be critical about it. I contend that in teachereducation programs it is important to promote this concept of dialectical praxis, because it engages students with critically participating in socially relevant discourses. For this purpose, it is crucial to integrate cultural studies and critical theory with the production of multiple kinds of texts, and to promote experimentation within an inquiry community. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One.