Keynotes
Feminist perspectives on participatory culture: tools and tales in girls’ digital media production
Negin Dahya, University of Washington
Technology has developed in such a way to put media making in the hands of more people, particular in the Western world, and through digital formats like video recording available on mobile phones. The complexities of this layered and dynamic landscape are evident particularly when the relatively higher potential for access to digital video production is compounded with the possibility for sharing that work online. Building on studies of gender and technology, race and technology, and youth digital media practices, I present research and theory calling attention to the politics of power embedded in and enacted on girls of colour making digital media. It is critical to understand how the politics of participation and representation are (re)produced and challenged in youth digital video productions. In this talk, I will discuss the relationship between technological tools and the production of narratives by young people - particularly girls and young people of color. In doing so, I will articulate a critical theoretical perspective that explores not only how girls of color experience, perceive, and understand the politics of representation and participation in relation to digital media, but also how they use digital and visual tools to express their views and experiences in both digital and material society through their own digital media work. Distinctly, I attend to structural constraints and affordances tied to real and imagined audiences, to the cultural associations between people and production tools, and to the institutional norms and expectations embedded in informal educational production settings.
Artistic methodologies for civic engagement: re-thinking literacy ontologies through co-production
Kate Pahl, University of Sheffield
Now, more than ever, young people require spaces where their voices are heard and their views acted upon. In the UK, more young people voted to remain than leave the EU. Many young people feel distant from government and do not tend to engage with participatory practices constructed by adults. The literacies of civic engagement often rely on ‘old’ literacy practices; that is written texts and formal meetings. Ways of engaging young people in community governance structures are often limited and do not allow for more complex forms of expression. In this talk I explore the potential of artistic methodologies in order to co-produce projects with young people, with a particular focus on social cohesion in neighbourhoods and schools. Drawing on recent projects in which young people wrote poetry, made films and created photographic accounts of the places they live in, I will argue that artistic methods open up new modes of engagement, that are lived, tacit, embodied and materially situated. They are also means to create safe spaces for emergent things to happen that are potentially transformative. I then consider the implications of this kind of work for literacy research. This work challenges researchers to re-think literacy through a lens that might lie beyond representational practice into the ineffable and unknown. I ask the question, what would it be to think differently about civic engagement drawing on the literacy ontologies of young people? Drawing on an approach from socially engaged arts practice (Kester 2004), the new materialism (Bennett 2010) and ‘lived theory’ (Gordon with Sivanandan 2014) I consider the potential for a more open ontological framework to open up creative spaces for young people to re-think civic participation and engagement practices.
Resistance is Futile! Young Cyborgs & Warriors in the Digital Age
Kate Tilleczek, University of Prince Edward Island
This keynote presentation considers a decade of study of youth-machine mediated relationships. It provides selected results from a number of recent studies including my Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) funded project on Digital Media and Young Lives over Time which includes video interviewing, documentary film making and collection of digital data (Facebook YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, etc.) of 150 young people and their digital shadows (those with whom they interact on line). I report not just on what young people are doing on-line, but also how these doings are interpreted and thus command acts of resistance. Unlike the work of other current commentators who insist on complacency and/or hysteria about the digital age, my talk focuses on sociological analyses with and by youth. A rendering of the digital age sets the context for considering youth resistance that both interrupts and interrogates the digital present; one deeply owned by purveyors of digital technology. Young people illustrate their social lives on-line and interrogate gains and losses from their embedded and multiple digital positions. With the generous assistance of these young cyborgs, a youth-attuned, visual and photographic rendering of resistance to digital media is presented for consideration.
Presenters
Attending to Diversity in Language and Literacy Classrooms “The Conversation Begins”
Trudy Cardinal & Lydia Menna, University of Alberta
This paper is intended to be a conversation between two early career scholars as they engage in an inquiry into their experiences teaching undergraduate courses focused on literacy learning in classrooms with increasingly diverse youth and families. The paper will begin with findings from Dr. Trudy Cardinal’s current research project; an inquiry into the pre-service teacher and early career teacher experience and understanding of the practicality, and potential of relational pedagogies, such as Narrative Inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Huber, Clandinin, & Huber, 2006, Huber, Murphy, Nelson, & Young, 2014) and Indigenous knowledge, epistemology, pedagogy and education, (Deloria Jr., 2003; Hanohano, 1999; Lambe, 2003; McLeod, 2007; McNally, 2004). Dr. Cardinal’s research inquired into the ways students in the course Teaching Language Arts in First Nations, Metis and Inuit Context understood the main concepts - Indigenous ways of knowing, story and storytelling, relational pedagogies, and attentive listening - and how they might be carrying these understandings into their practice and living. The paper will move into a discussion of Dr. Lydia Menna’s reflections of teaching a course called Teaching Language and Literacy in Multilingual Classrooms and her research in literacy teacher education. More specifically, research that explores how pre-service teachers construct conceptions of literacy, enact literacy pedagogy, and negotiate identities as teachers of literacy as they engage with multiliteracies and critical literacy concepts (Cope, & Kalantzis, 2000; Kress, 2010; Vasquez, 2013; 2016).
The paper will document how Dr. Cardinal and Dr. Menna honored the knowledge and experience each brought in the co-creation of pedagogical practices designed to attend to diversity in language arts classrooms. By co-composing, and engaging in conversation we hope to animate how it is we also live, as teacher educators, with the complexities of attending to diversity on schooling landscapes. It is also intended to highlight the possibility and potential of weaving together relational pedagogies such as Narrative Inquiry and Indigenous ways of being and knowing with critical literacy, multiliteracies and modality for creating space in Elementary literacy classrooms for the honoring of diverse knowledge and experiences even in our youngest literacy learners.
While our proposed research, and the beginning discussion of which we will bring in the form of the paper, does not directly target the question of “how we might frame digital engagements to examine social justice issues in young people’s lives, including issues arising from race, gender, sexuality, class and other inequalities in the context of global digital networks” we are confident that what we are doing will contribute to those larger conversations.
Re-imagining research partnerships:Thinking through ‘co-research’ and ethical practice with young people
Diane R. Collier, Brock University
Intentions to co-research, as integral to research design, pervade social science research with young people (Bucknall, 2012; James, 2007; Medina & del Rocio Costa, 2010). Community groups and academic researchers together have engaged in collaborative approaches to research (Hackett, Pahl, & Pool, 2017; Wang, Cash, & Powers, 2000). Using snapshots from three research projects, I describe and trouble my own attempts at co-research. I ask how ethical research can be conceived with others who co-research alongside academic researchers.
Firstly, co-research in a two-year ethnographic study that followed a boy and a girl, in elementary school, as they engaged in multimodal text-making practices at home and at school, is discussed. In this study, research positions were shifted by following the children’s lead and interests, resulting in an ebb and flow of children’s interest in the research itself and themselves as researched and researching. The second example involves a classroom study of family photography and arts-based inquiry where Grade 4 students brought family photos to school (as prints or electronically) and engaged in recursive arts inquiry processes using both material and digital tools to tell stories about their families. The ways in which the children understood the research process, and gave or withheld assent, influenced how they engaged as co-researchers. Finally, a larger comparative arts-informed study of youths’ digital practices in Hamilton is explored with an eye to how co-research evolved throughout the project. The creation of research questions, methods, and representations were shared between academic researchers, research assistants, artists, and youth between 13 and 19 years old. The extent to which each of these participants took on co-research positions is described.
Across these snapshots, I look towards a more nuanced understanding of co-research, that involves reflexive ethical practice and an emergent and attentive focus on consent (Warin, 2011). I walk a kind of tightrope here, both wary of co-research and qualitative research in general as ethically murky, and also searching for methods and methodologies that create something new and productive for all involved.
Contemplating Typical White Girls And Other Intersectionalities in Mediated Classrooms
Sara Schroeter, University of Regina
This paper asks what pedagogies needed as we engage in a process of reconciliation and how students and teachers can begin to reconcile colonial pasts with contemporary forms of racism and enduring colonial structures. By sharing what I learned about youth discourses of race as they participated in a year-long ethnography and a multimodal, embodied pedagogical collaboration, I propose ways that multiliteracies frameworks might be updated. This project had the dual aims of exploring discourses of difference used by students in a Francophone minority language school and how drama might work as a multimodal, embodied, and (post)critical pedagogy to unpack differences embedded in the Grade 9 social studies curriculum. I argue that embodiment and subjectivity are central to teaching and learning and illustrate, through excerpts from interviews and fieldnotes, how race and intersectionality influence interactions in the classroom. Finally, I propose that multiliteracies and multimodal pedagogies must pay closer attention to race, and racialization in addition to the modes through which meaning is made and the networks in which literacy practices occur.
Creativity and Innovation with Youth Engagement in Qualitative Research
Giuliana Cucinelli, Concordia University
Research in the field of education is often faced with limitations when collecting research data that involves children and youth. Being able to authentically capture and understand young people’s perspectives and their experiences is a difficult task and often relies on adults situating themselves in children and youth perspectives (Johansson and White, 2011; Somer et al. 2010). Efforts in contemporary education have been made “to make sure that young people are involved in shaping their social, psychological, and educational lives” (Steinberg & Kincheloe, 2004, p.8). Researchers have become increasingly innovative in methodological processes and data collection instruments, which specifically target young people. This presentation provides examples of integrating creative and innovative data collection such as critical role-playing, animation video creation and semi-structured interviews for research-creation in a qualitative involving young participants.
Writing with Ella: Living Affect Theory for Feeling Literacies in Process
Christian Ehret, McGill University
How does affect theory open new ways of knowing and feeling literacies in process that exceed the reach of cultural-historical theories of emotion? This paper argues the necessity of reconceptualizing affect in relation to emotion for literacy studies through the author’s experiences writing with one adolescent, Ella, while she was hospitalized for leukemia treatment. The history of representational and constructivist logic for interpreting emotion in literacy studies is contrasted with the non-representational perspectives of affect theory developed from the process philosophies of Whitehead, Deleuze, and Massumi. This non-representational conceptualization of affect produces new concepts, such as desire, intensities, and emergence, that further problematize how researchers come to know literacies in-the-moment. Beginning with Ella’s experiences in each section, the paper is therefore organized as a set of propositions for knowing and feeling affective dimensions of literacies as they emerge.
Who Are These Girls?: Leadership Literacy, Gender and STEM Identity
Chelsey Hauge, Stanford University
This paper explores the practices and processes of representation as they played out for a team of Stanford University feminist researchers and a video production company. In response to persistent inequity experienced by girls and women in technology spaces, we set out to create curriculum to reinforce what I call leadership literacies for high school and college women interested in STEM. Because the research suggests that is in times of transition that girls and young women turn away from STEM and at the urging of women technology leaders, we set out to create a leadership curriculum designed to help them persist in the face of adversity. The curriculum is centered around a video series that highlights seven high school girls navigating challenges; and it is the creation of this cast of seven girls that I want to examine here. In effort to represent difference without essentializing historically marginalized identities, and in effort to represent not utopia but complex and hopeful reality, I explore the discussions, points of contention, and decisions this team of academics and artists moved through in order to create a cast of seven representative, diverse, hopeful and realistic girls interested in STEM, navigating the challenges of modern girlhood, and serving as fodder for learning and reflection for our cohort of girls and young women working with and through their leadership literacies.
Multimodal Representations of Class, Race, and Gender in Videogames
Jason Hawreliak, Brock University
This paper explores how principles of multimodality can be effectively incorporated into game design and analysis in the context of social justice. More specifically, it looks at how a multimodal framework can aid developers, researchers, and educators to better understand representations of class, race, and gender in videogames. Multimodality is a particularly suitable conceptual framework for videogame design and analysis since videogames are, as James Paul Gee (2013) has observed, the “most” multimodal medium present in the contemporary media landscape. In one sense, all communication is multimodal; however, this is especially true for videogames: Not only do they “remediate” and adopt the representational practices of other media, but also employ algorithmic, procedural, haptic, and interactive forms of expression as well. Like film, videogames are able to represent both groups and individuals through various visual and auditory modes, such as moving image, speech, and gesture. In addition to these filmic modes, videogames are uniquely situated to represent systemic oppression (and privilege) through what Ian Bogost (2007) calls “procedural rhetoric,” the representation of (social) systems through computational systems. Procedural rhetoric allows players to experience and interact with systems of oppression and privilege in ways that other media cannot. When taken together, these diverse modes can create compelling representations of social systems and their impacts on individuals.
To flesh out these concepts, the paper will include examples from several videogames which deal with issues of representation either implicitly or explicitly, including Overwatch (2016), a competitive First-Person Shooter (rated T for Teen); Mafia III (2016), an open-world, action adventure game (rated M for Mature); and Papers, Please (2013), a “dystopian document thriller” (unrated). The paper concludes with a look at how players themselves use modifications or “mods” to tackle representation in games (Taylor, 2009; Shaw, 2014), such as the “gender mod” in the popular game, Minecraft.
More than warm and fuzzy: Children’s and elders’ critical knowledge production in intergenerational multimodal curricula
Rachel Heydon, Western University
Picture two small child’s hands holding up an iPad for an elder whose own hands rest on the arms of a wheelchair. Now imagine the faces of this pair: intent and characterized by mouths parted in wonder with eyes narrowed on a Käthe Kollwitz drawing. Soon, guided by questions invited by their intergenerational art teacher, these viewers will join in conversation at the table with others about the meaning they are making of the Kollwitz and where this transaction (Rosenblatt, 1994) will take them in their artwork. Later, these 4ish-year-olds with these 90ish-year-olds will use the iPads to document their multimodal processes and products—documentation that they will revisit alone as well as with others; and in at least one case, this (re)visiting will memorialize a class member who, like the butterfly he drew, changed.
Intergenerational programs that bring together children and elders have a quality that has been described as making visible the circle of life (Heydon, 2013). The recent popularization of such programs by documentaries like Present Perfect (Briggs, 2015), suggest a quality of young and old together that has been theorized by the Japanese concept of mono no aware—a simultaneous recognition of beauty in the present and its inexorable transformation (Heydon, 2009). The goal of this paper is to understand how this aesthetic, as implicated in case studies of multimodal intergenerational programs that sought to include digital tools as placed resources (Prinsloo, 2005), might connect to social justice. Herein I use ethnographic data concerning participants’ texts and text-making to illustrate how a network of constituents, mobilized through digital tools, allowed participants to generate identity texts (Cummins & Early, 2011) that (re)positioned them as critical, knowledge producers and afforded their semiotic engagement with potentially risky texts (Simon & Simon, 1995) or difficult knowledge. This positioning and what it allowed is radical given that through human capital theory (Becker, 1975) and the proliferation of developmentally appropriate practice in early childhood education (Iannacci & Whitty, 2009), the knowledge of young children and elders can be minoritized (Bishop, 2010), restricting their access to expansive literacy and identity options (Heydon, 2007).
Civic Engagement and Writing for Social Justice: Research and Implications for Education
Michelle A. Honeyford, University of Manitoba
Writing is a significant tool for civic engagement and social justice, but historical and contemporary examples also testify to the power of words to inculcate fear and fuel acts of hatred—with tragic results. Every day, issues of democracy, difference, and disagreement are played out in the multimodal texts that are everywhere around us — published in a tweet, carried on a placard, sprayed in graffiti, or posted on Facebook. In the lives of young people, these messages can convey very different meanings about writing and civic engagement and raise significant questions about how to wield such a powerful tool in the multiple spaces they inhabit. The question then becomes: How—and what—are we teaching young people about writing in school?
In the national context of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (2015) calls for education to lead in the work of truth and reconciliation, in the provincial context of a new English Language Arts curriculum which calls for the study and use of language for power and agency, and in calls more broadly for education to develop the critical and civic literacies of young people, we need to ask ourselves: To what extent do the pedagogies of our classrooms produce spaces for critical engagement with texts? How frequently are young people provoked to “get up from their seats” (Greene, 1986, p. 72) and “use their voices with vigor, again and again” (Epstein, 2010, p. 363)? How well are we teaching students to write in ways that name and critique injustice, to respond to social issues in ways that acknowledge their complexities, and to act in ways that demonstrate a commitment to compassion, dialogue, and justice?
This paper seeks to address such questions by examining research on writing projects that intentionally entangle writing and civic engagement, with a particular interest in the role of collaborative partnerships in that process. Even for educators keen to respond and lead, the possibilities may be difficult to envision or enact without models. Thus, this study provides a look at writing and civic engagement projects across a broad range of contexts with the intent to develop frameworks to inform school-based writing pedagogy and projects for youth. The study is guided by these questions: What theories of literacy, writing, and civic engagement inform these projects? Who is involved? Where and how do these projects happen? What kinds of writing and civic engagement do they foster? What are the tensions and implications that would be important to understand in developing new initiatives? What do such efforts contribute to critical literacy and civic engagement? By learning from projects that have already begun, and by creating theoretical and pedagogical models for projects that can then be imagined and enacted, there is promise for young people to learn to write, participate, and act in the issues of democracy that are crucial in their lives today and tomorrow.
Lights, Circuits and Sensors: Thinking Computationally through Wearable Design
Jennifer Jenson, Cristyne Hebert and Kelly Bergstrom, York University
This paper details youth’s engagement with wearable technologies during and after school clubs with over 50 youth aged 7 to 10 in the largest school district in Canada. The explicit goal of the project was to engage youth with ‘maker’ technologies as an explicit means of supporting programming and computational skills. Wearable technologies, sometimes referred to as e-textiles, typically refer to adding technologies, for example small microprocessors, sensors, and lights to clothing (ties, hoodies, scarves, pants). Some of the most popular devices that are ‘wearable’ at the time of this writing include Fitbits and Apple watches which have sensors that detect heart rate and count steps. This study approaches the other end of the e-textile/wearable spectrum, with a decidedly low tech approach with programmable lights and sensors (heat and motion) that can be designed into gloves and hats by the youth in this project. E-textiles and wearables, it has been argued are an alternative, and potentially more inclusive way of approaching computer programming as they integrate arts based practices with computer programming concepts. For example, Peppler (2017) states that women make up 65% of the e-textile community, in part because the techniques employed are more aligned to the traditional work of “seamstresses, knitters and crafters” (n.p.). Concomitantly, there has been a surge in the literature regarding the use of these technologies in educational environments as a more gender-inclusive alternative to the increasingly marginalizing and masculine maker spaces (El Mimouni & Rode, 2016; Erete, Pinkard, Martin & Sandheer (2016). In this study, we also pay particular attention to the gender dynamics of engagement with these technological forms (Buechley, Peppler, Eisenberg & Kafai, 2013; Peppler, 2017), however, we also focus on the resources, time (instructional and otherwise), and labour needed to support these kinds of interventions with a view to asking whether and if, at least at this point in time, these technologies can ever be anything more than a kind of ‘niche’ project for some.
Citizen Youth after #Occupy: youth citizenship as governance?
Jacqueline Kennelly, Carleton University
In Citizen Youth: Culture, Activism and Agency in a Neoliberal Era, I argue that ‘youth citizenship’ functions as a form of governance that placates youth participation into acts of charity that do little to challenge state structures of inequality. Dominant ideas about the ‘good citizen’ versus the ‘bad activist’ permeate educational discourse as well as media representations of youth. The wider cultural scripts available to talk about citizenship and activism also infiltrate youth activist cultures, which, like any inter-relational space, inadvertently and unintentionally reproduce wider structures of inequality while also fighting to change these structures.
Citizen Youth was published in 2011, the year that Time magazine declared their person of the year to be The Protester. In this presentation, I will reflect on the massive youth-led social movements that have risen over the past several years, including the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, Idle No More, and current organizing against the Trump administration. Within this context, I will ask whether my analysis still holds: have we moved into a new era of Citizen Youth? Or are we seeing many of the same tensions and contradictions which marked my original study?
The Civic Agency Gap: Identity, Voice & Persistence in the Global Public Sphere
Paul Mihailidis, Emerson College
This research proposes to build on civic engagement and media education scholarship by exploring how a global media literacy project focused on social justice and activism can help build more mindful citizens in global culture. The study draws on 51 in-depth interviews with participants of the Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change – an applied civic media literacy project that annually gathers faculty and students from around the world to examine the role of the media in identifying, framing and solving local and global problems. The Media Academy is focused on the application of knowledge into action, where students work together in cross-national teams to build media responses to “wicked” problems that work on a global level.
The approach we take in this study focuses on the personal reflections and learning experiences of young people themselves. Rather than implementing a top-down analysis of socio-political divides and how these might affect civic learning, our study allows young citizens from diverse backgrounds to articulate, in their own words, the ethno-cultural barriers they faced when trying to interact with others - either because of their own identity (e.g. religion, race, gender, sexuality etc.) or, indeed, because of the background of others, in those cases when their own preconceptions and stereotypes were challenged. Key factors identified by the literature in empowering and disempowering young people - such as the role of media in perpetuating or challenging stereotypes and agendas (Pickering, 2001) and the dangers of ‘filter bubbles’ due to personalization algorithms and habitual media uses (Pariser, 2011) - will again be explored through young people’s own experiences and evaluations of their participation in an innovative, cross-national social justice oriented media literacy program.
The presentation will highlight the results of our in-depth qualitative analysis, along with a participatory action research study in which we reflect on the implementation of applied civic media seminars and workshops focused on social justice in the global public sphere.
Since the Salzburg Media Academy’s founding in 2007, more than 800 students from over 65 countries in North and South America, Africa, Asia and Europe have participated in a range of innovative pedagogical activities intended to inspire them to become agents of social change, to develop an identity as global citizens, and to seek their voice in the digital public sphere, overcoming social, cultural and linguistic barriers.
Youthspaces: Policy and the political economy of urban youth media communities
Stuart Poyntz, Simon Fraser University
While amateur youth cultural production has a long history in many countries, informal youth media production only found its footing in the 1960s and 1970s, before moving through fits and starts in the 1980s, and settling into a global mode of informal cultural production and economy from the 1990s onwards. With the addition of mobile phones, the reach of informal youth media production networks and communities now crosses the globe.
If increasingly prominent, the contexts of informal youth media production have rarely been examined structurally, as part of a political economy of contemporary culture. Yet, community youth media initiatives are part of the collection of resources now present in cities that aid youth transitions by creating participatory spaces to negotiate citizenship and address digital divides in the context of late modern global capitalist life. In this paper, I offer a structural account of a youth media production community as a space of social living in the global city. My account draws on experiences in Vancouver, Canada, a mid-sized city with a global population and a history of alternative media, alongside emerging research on informal digital learning communities in other global North contexts (Blum-Ross and Livingstone, 2016; Blum-Ross, 2016). I draw on a concept of governmentality to account for the role of policy, funding structures, technology change, and labour practices in Vancouver and also track the modes of contestation present across the sector. Informal digital learning communities for youth represent parallel learning economies that are in general state supported and yet increasingly encouraged to operate with entrepreneurial guile to produce training and citizenship resources to enable youth transitions in increasingly risky times. They are spaces of neoliberal governance that operate as precarious incubators of creative expression and social belonging. The scene in Vancouver exemplifies this global form of cultural production that now impacts struggles over youth learning, identity and democratic cultures around the world.
Social Change-Oriented Vlogs of Young Canadians
Rebecca Raby (Brock University), Sophie Théwissen-LeBlanc (University of Ottawa), Jessica Prioletta (OISE), Caroline Caron (Université du Québec en Outaouais) and Claudia Mitchell (McGill University)
Teenagers are frequently discussed with concern, deemed irresponsible and at risk, self-absorbed and isolated, disconnected and apathetic. These concerns coalesce around several topics, but two recent, prominent ones are their involvement online and their lack of involvement in political citizenship. Despite these trends, there is a counter-discourse which argues that many teenagers are responsibly engaged with the world around them, both off- and online, and valuable participants across a range of social contexts, including the political. Reflecting these counter-discourses and specifically responding to concerns about youth as politically disengaged, we report on our research on Canadian teenagers seeking to make social change through producing and posting video blogs (vlogs) on YouTube.
Through locating and studying twenty teenage vloggers’ YouTube channels (or collections of videos), we contribute to a growing body of research that documents young people’s engagement with the politically-charged world around them. We draw on a poststructural orientation to agency to identify themes across the social change-oriented YouTube channels of these young Canadian vloggers: we highlight the diverse political issues they address, the creative strategies they use, and their advocacy for social change and youth voice. Furthermore, in contrast to the representation of young people as isolated and vulnerable online, we discuss how these video creators present and understand themselves as part of a thriving, supportive online community, albeit one that is corporate and commercial.
These tactics illustrate ways that these young video-makers reflect a humanist orientation to agency as they position themselves as agentic, engaged choice-makers and rhetors, or people making a specific, pitched argument in an attempt to win over their audience (Kress 2010). Yet we can also examine this participation through an orientation to agency that decentres the humanist subject by highlighting their agency as thoroughly contextual. This approach allows us to see the multiple ways that young vloggers are embedded within a certain time, place, technological moment, set of discourses, and so forth. We thus highlight how social media have become an important venue for some young Canadians’ agentic and contextual engagement with the political world around them.
Trudy Cardinal & Lydia Menna, University of Alberta
This paper is intended to be a conversation between two early career scholars as they engage in an inquiry into their experiences teaching undergraduate courses focused on literacy learning in classrooms with increasingly diverse youth and families. The paper will begin with findings from Dr. Trudy Cardinal’s current research project; an inquiry into the pre-service teacher and early career teacher experience and understanding of the practicality, and potential of relational pedagogies, such as Narrative Inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Huber, Clandinin, & Huber, 2006, Huber, Murphy, Nelson, & Young, 2014) and Indigenous knowledge, epistemology, pedagogy and education, (Deloria Jr., 2003; Hanohano, 1999; Lambe, 2003; McLeod, 2007; McNally, 2004). Dr. Cardinal’s research inquired into the ways students in the course Teaching Language Arts in First Nations, Metis and Inuit Context understood the main concepts - Indigenous ways of knowing, story and storytelling, relational pedagogies, and attentive listening - and how they might be carrying these understandings into their practice and living. The paper will move into a discussion of Dr. Lydia Menna’s reflections of teaching a course called Teaching Language and Literacy in Multilingual Classrooms and her research in literacy teacher education. More specifically, research that explores how pre-service teachers construct conceptions of literacy, enact literacy pedagogy, and negotiate identities as teachers of literacy as they engage with multiliteracies and critical literacy concepts (Cope, & Kalantzis, 2000; Kress, 2010; Vasquez, 2013; 2016).
The paper will document how Dr. Cardinal and Dr. Menna honored the knowledge and experience each brought in the co-creation of pedagogical practices designed to attend to diversity in language arts classrooms. By co-composing, and engaging in conversation we hope to animate how it is we also live, as teacher educators, with the complexities of attending to diversity on schooling landscapes. It is also intended to highlight the possibility and potential of weaving together relational pedagogies such as Narrative Inquiry and Indigenous ways of being and knowing with critical literacy, multiliteracies and modality for creating space in Elementary literacy classrooms for the honoring of diverse knowledge and experiences even in our youngest literacy learners.
While our proposed research, and the beginning discussion of which we will bring in the form of the paper, does not directly target the question of “how we might frame digital engagements to examine social justice issues in young people’s lives, including issues arising from race, gender, sexuality, class and other inequalities in the context of global digital networks” we are confident that what we are doing will contribute to those larger conversations.
Re-imagining research partnerships:Thinking through ‘co-research’ and ethical practice with young people
Diane R. Collier, Brock University
Intentions to co-research, as integral to research design, pervade social science research with young people (Bucknall, 2012; James, 2007; Medina & del Rocio Costa, 2010). Community groups and academic researchers together have engaged in collaborative approaches to research (Hackett, Pahl, & Pool, 2017; Wang, Cash, & Powers, 2000). Using snapshots from three research projects, I describe and trouble my own attempts at co-research. I ask how ethical research can be conceived with others who co-research alongside academic researchers.
Firstly, co-research in a two-year ethnographic study that followed a boy and a girl, in elementary school, as they engaged in multimodal text-making practices at home and at school, is discussed. In this study, research positions were shifted by following the children’s lead and interests, resulting in an ebb and flow of children’s interest in the research itself and themselves as researched and researching. The second example involves a classroom study of family photography and arts-based inquiry where Grade 4 students brought family photos to school (as prints or electronically) and engaged in recursive arts inquiry processes using both material and digital tools to tell stories about their families. The ways in which the children understood the research process, and gave or withheld assent, influenced how they engaged as co-researchers. Finally, a larger comparative arts-informed study of youths’ digital practices in Hamilton is explored with an eye to how co-research evolved throughout the project. The creation of research questions, methods, and representations were shared between academic researchers, research assistants, artists, and youth between 13 and 19 years old. The extent to which each of these participants took on co-research positions is described.
Across these snapshots, I look towards a more nuanced understanding of co-research, that involves reflexive ethical practice and an emergent and attentive focus on consent (Warin, 2011). I walk a kind of tightrope here, both wary of co-research and qualitative research in general as ethically murky, and also searching for methods and methodologies that create something new and productive for all involved.
Contemplating Typical White Girls And Other Intersectionalities in Mediated Classrooms
Sara Schroeter, University of Regina
This paper asks what pedagogies needed as we engage in a process of reconciliation and how students and teachers can begin to reconcile colonial pasts with contemporary forms of racism and enduring colonial structures. By sharing what I learned about youth discourses of race as they participated in a year-long ethnography and a multimodal, embodied pedagogical collaboration, I propose ways that multiliteracies frameworks might be updated. This project had the dual aims of exploring discourses of difference used by students in a Francophone minority language school and how drama might work as a multimodal, embodied, and (post)critical pedagogy to unpack differences embedded in the Grade 9 social studies curriculum. I argue that embodiment and subjectivity are central to teaching and learning and illustrate, through excerpts from interviews and fieldnotes, how race and intersectionality influence interactions in the classroom. Finally, I propose that multiliteracies and multimodal pedagogies must pay closer attention to race, and racialization in addition to the modes through which meaning is made and the networks in which literacy practices occur.
Creativity and Innovation with Youth Engagement in Qualitative Research
Giuliana Cucinelli, Concordia University
Research in the field of education is often faced with limitations when collecting research data that involves children and youth. Being able to authentically capture and understand young people’s perspectives and their experiences is a difficult task and often relies on adults situating themselves in children and youth perspectives (Johansson and White, 2011; Somer et al. 2010). Efforts in contemporary education have been made “to make sure that young people are involved in shaping their social, psychological, and educational lives” (Steinberg & Kincheloe, 2004, p.8). Researchers have become increasingly innovative in methodological processes and data collection instruments, which specifically target young people. This presentation provides examples of integrating creative and innovative data collection such as critical role-playing, animation video creation and semi-structured interviews for research-creation in a qualitative involving young participants.
Writing with Ella: Living Affect Theory for Feeling Literacies in Process
Christian Ehret, McGill University
How does affect theory open new ways of knowing and feeling literacies in process that exceed the reach of cultural-historical theories of emotion? This paper argues the necessity of reconceptualizing affect in relation to emotion for literacy studies through the author’s experiences writing with one adolescent, Ella, while she was hospitalized for leukemia treatment. The history of representational and constructivist logic for interpreting emotion in literacy studies is contrasted with the non-representational perspectives of affect theory developed from the process philosophies of Whitehead, Deleuze, and Massumi. This non-representational conceptualization of affect produces new concepts, such as desire, intensities, and emergence, that further problematize how researchers come to know literacies in-the-moment. Beginning with Ella’s experiences in each section, the paper is therefore organized as a set of propositions for knowing and feeling affective dimensions of literacies as they emerge.
Who Are These Girls?: Leadership Literacy, Gender and STEM Identity
Chelsey Hauge, Stanford University
This paper explores the practices and processes of representation as they played out for a team of Stanford University feminist researchers and a video production company. In response to persistent inequity experienced by girls and women in technology spaces, we set out to create curriculum to reinforce what I call leadership literacies for high school and college women interested in STEM. Because the research suggests that is in times of transition that girls and young women turn away from STEM and at the urging of women technology leaders, we set out to create a leadership curriculum designed to help them persist in the face of adversity. The curriculum is centered around a video series that highlights seven high school girls navigating challenges; and it is the creation of this cast of seven girls that I want to examine here. In effort to represent difference without essentializing historically marginalized identities, and in effort to represent not utopia but complex and hopeful reality, I explore the discussions, points of contention, and decisions this team of academics and artists moved through in order to create a cast of seven representative, diverse, hopeful and realistic girls interested in STEM, navigating the challenges of modern girlhood, and serving as fodder for learning and reflection for our cohort of girls and young women working with and through their leadership literacies.
Multimodal Representations of Class, Race, and Gender in Videogames
Jason Hawreliak, Brock University
This paper explores how principles of multimodality can be effectively incorporated into game design and analysis in the context of social justice. More specifically, it looks at how a multimodal framework can aid developers, researchers, and educators to better understand representations of class, race, and gender in videogames. Multimodality is a particularly suitable conceptual framework for videogame design and analysis since videogames are, as James Paul Gee (2013) has observed, the “most” multimodal medium present in the contemporary media landscape. In one sense, all communication is multimodal; however, this is especially true for videogames: Not only do they “remediate” and adopt the representational practices of other media, but also employ algorithmic, procedural, haptic, and interactive forms of expression as well. Like film, videogames are able to represent both groups and individuals through various visual and auditory modes, such as moving image, speech, and gesture. In addition to these filmic modes, videogames are uniquely situated to represent systemic oppression (and privilege) through what Ian Bogost (2007) calls “procedural rhetoric,” the representation of (social) systems through computational systems. Procedural rhetoric allows players to experience and interact with systems of oppression and privilege in ways that other media cannot. When taken together, these diverse modes can create compelling representations of social systems and their impacts on individuals.
To flesh out these concepts, the paper will include examples from several videogames which deal with issues of representation either implicitly or explicitly, including Overwatch (2016), a competitive First-Person Shooter (rated T for Teen); Mafia III (2016), an open-world, action adventure game (rated M for Mature); and Papers, Please (2013), a “dystopian document thriller” (unrated). The paper concludes with a look at how players themselves use modifications or “mods” to tackle representation in games (Taylor, 2009; Shaw, 2014), such as the “gender mod” in the popular game, Minecraft.
More than warm and fuzzy: Children’s and elders’ critical knowledge production in intergenerational multimodal curricula
Rachel Heydon, Western University
Picture two small child’s hands holding up an iPad for an elder whose own hands rest on the arms of a wheelchair. Now imagine the faces of this pair: intent and characterized by mouths parted in wonder with eyes narrowed on a Käthe Kollwitz drawing. Soon, guided by questions invited by their intergenerational art teacher, these viewers will join in conversation at the table with others about the meaning they are making of the Kollwitz and where this transaction (Rosenblatt, 1994) will take them in their artwork. Later, these 4ish-year-olds with these 90ish-year-olds will use the iPads to document their multimodal processes and products—documentation that they will revisit alone as well as with others; and in at least one case, this (re)visiting will memorialize a class member who, like the butterfly he drew, changed.
Intergenerational programs that bring together children and elders have a quality that has been described as making visible the circle of life (Heydon, 2013). The recent popularization of such programs by documentaries like Present Perfect (Briggs, 2015), suggest a quality of young and old together that has been theorized by the Japanese concept of mono no aware—a simultaneous recognition of beauty in the present and its inexorable transformation (Heydon, 2009). The goal of this paper is to understand how this aesthetic, as implicated in case studies of multimodal intergenerational programs that sought to include digital tools as placed resources (Prinsloo, 2005), might connect to social justice. Herein I use ethnographic data concerning participants’ texts and text-making to illustrate how a network of constituents, mobilized through digital tools, allowed participants to generate identity texts (Cummins & Early, 2011) that (re)positioned them as critical, knowledge producers and afforded their semiotic engagement with potentially risky texts (Simon & Simon, 1995) or difficult knowledge. This positioning and what it allowed is radical given that through human capital theory (Becker, 1975) and the proliferation of developmentally appropriate practice in early childhood education (Iannacci & Whitty, 2009), the knowledge of young children and elders can be minoritized (Bishop, 2010), restricting their access to expansive literacy and identity options (Heydon, 2007).
Civic Engagement and Writing for Social Justice: Research and Implications for Education
Michelle A. Honeyford, University of Manitoba
Writing is a significant tool for civic engagement and social justice, but historical and contemporary examples also testify to the power of words to inculcate fear and fuel acts of hatred—with tragic results. Every day, issues of democracy, difference, and disagreement are played out in the multimodal texts that are everywhere around us — published in a tweet, carried on a placard, sprayed in graffiti, or posted on Facebook. In the lives of young people, these messages can convey very different meanings about writing and civic engagement and raise significant questions about how to wield such a powerful tool in the multiple spaces they inhabit. The question then becomes: How—and what—are we teaching young people about writing in school?
In the national context of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (2015) calls for education to lead in the work of truth and reconciliation, in the provincial context of a new English Language Arts curriculum which calls for the study and use of language for power and agency, and in calls more broadly for education to develop the critical and civic literacies of young people, we need to ask ourselves: To what extent do the pedagogies of our classrooms produce spaces for critical engagement with texts? How frequently are young people provoked to “get up from their seats” (Greene, 1986, p. 72) and “use their voices with vigor, again and again” (Epstein, 2010, p. 363)? How well are we teaching students to write in ways that name and critique injustice, to respond to social issues in ways that acknowledge their complexities, and to act in ways that demonstrate a commitment to compassion, dialogue, and justice?
This paper seeks to address such questions by examining research on writing projects that intentionally entangle writing and civic engagement, with a particular interest in the role of collaborative partnerships in that process. Even for educators keen to respond and lead, the possibilities may be difficult to envision or enact without models. Thus, this study provides a look at writing and civic engagement projects across a broad range of contexts with the intent to develop frameworks to inform school-based writing pedagogy and projects for youth. The study is guided by these questions: What theories of literacy, writing, and civic engagement inform these projects? Who is involved? Where and how do these projects happen? What kinds of writing and civic engagement do they foster? What are the tensions and implications that would be important to understand in developing new initiatives? What do such efforts contribute to critical literacy and civic engagement? By learning from projects that have already begun, and by creating theoretical and pedagogical models for projects that can then be imagined and enacted, there is promise for young people to learn to write, participate, and act in the issues of democracy that are crucial in their lives today and tomorrow.
Lights, Circuits and Sensors: Thinking Computationally through Wearable Design
Jennifer Jenson, Cristyne Hebert and Kelly Bergstrom, York University
This paper details youth’s engagement with wearable technologies during and after school clubs with over 50 youth aged 7 to 10 in the largest school district in Canada. The explicit goal of the project was to engage youth with ‘maker’ technologies as an explicit means of supporting programming and computational skills. Wearable technologies, sometimes referred to as e-textiles, typically refer to adding technologies, for example small microprocessors, sensors, and lights to clothing (ties, hoodies, scarves, pants). Some of the most popular devices that are ‘wearable’ at the time of this writing include Fitbits and Apple watches which have sensors that detect heart rate and count steps. This study approaches the other end of the e-textile/wearable spectrum, with a decidedly low tech approach with programmable lights and sensors (heat and motion) that can be designed into gloves and hats by the youth in this project. E-textiles and wearables, it has been argued are an alternative, and potentially more inclusive way of approaching computer programming as they integrate arts based practices with computer programming concepts. For example, Peppler (2017) states that women make up 65% of the e-textile community, in part because the techniques employed are more aligned to the traditional work of “seamstresses, knitters and crafters” (n.p.). Concomitantly, there has been a surge in the literature regarding the use of these technologies in educational environments as a more gender-inclusive alternative to the increasingly marginalizing and masculine maker spaces (El Mimouni & Rode, 2016; Erete, Pinkard, Martin & Sandheer (2016). In this study, we also pay particular attention to the gender dynamics of engagement with these technological forms (Buechley, Peppler, Eisenberg & Kafai, 2013; Peppler, 2017), however, we also focus on the resources, time (instructional and otherwise), and labour needed to support these kinds of interventions with a view to asking whether and if, at least at this point in time, these technologies can ever be anything more than a kind of ‘niche’ project for some.
Citizen Youth after #Occupy: youth citizenship as governance?
Jacqueline Kennelly, Carleton University
In Citizen Youth: Culture, Activism and Agency in a Neoliberal Era, I argue that ‘youth citizenship’ functions as a form of governance that placates youth participation into acts of charity that do little to challenge state structures of inequality. Dominant ideas about the ‘good citizen’ versus the ‘bad activist’ permeate educational discourse as well as media representations of youth. The wider cultural scripts available to talk about citizenship and activism also infiltrate youth activist cultures, which, like any inter-relational space, inadvertently and unintentionally reproduce wider structures of inequality while also fighting to change these structures.
Citizen Youth was published in 2011, the year that Time magazine declared their person of the year to be The Protester. In this presentation, I will reflect on the massive youth-led social movements that have risen over the past several years, including the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, Idle No More, and current organizing against the Trump administration. Within this context, I will ask whether my analysis still holds: have we moved into a new era of Citizen Youth? Or are we seeing many of the same tensions and contradictions which marked my original study?
The Civic Agency Gap: Identity, Voice & Persistence in the Global Public Sphere
Paul Mihailidis, Emerson College
This research proposes to build on civic engagement and media education scholarship by exploring how a global media literacy project focused on social justice and activism can help build more mindful citizens in global culture. The study draws on 51 in-depth interviews with participants of the Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change – an applied civic media literacy project that annually gathers faculty and students from around the world to examine the role of the media in identifying, framing and solving local and global problems. The Media Academy is focused on the application of knowledge into action, where students work together in cross-national teams to build media responses to “wicked” problems that work on a global level.
The approach we take in this study focuses on the personal reflections and learning experiences of young people themselves. Rather than implementing a top-down analysis of socio-political divides and how these might affect civic learning, our study allows young citizens from diverse backgrounds to articulate, in their own words, the ethno-cultural barriers they faced when trying to interact with others - either because of their own identity (e.g. religion, race, gender, sexuality etc.) or, indeed, because of the background of others, in those cases when their own preconceptions and stereotypes were challenged. Key factors identified by the literature in empowering and disempowering young people - such as the role of media in perpetuating or challenging stereotypes and agendas (Pickering, 2001) and the dangers of ‘filter bubbles’ due to personalization algorithms and habitual media uses (Pariser, 2011) - will again be explored through young people’s own experiences and evaluations of their participation in an innovative, cross-national social justice oriented media literacy program.
The presentation will highlight the results of our in-depth qualitative analysis, along with a participatory action research study in which we reflect on the implementation of applied civic media seminars and workshops focused on social justice in the global public sphere.
Since the Salzburg Media Academy’s founding in 2007, more than 800 students from over 65 countries in North and South America, Africa, Asia and Europe have participated in a range of innovative pedagogical activities intended to inspire them to become agents of social change, to develop an identity as global citizens, and to seek their voice in the digital public sphere, overcoming social, cultural and linguistic barriers.
Youthspaces: Policy and the political economy of urban youth media communities
Stuart Poyntz, Simon Fraser University
While amateur youth cultural production has a long history in many countries, informal youth media production only found its footing in the 1960s and 1970s, before moving through fits and starts in the 1980s, and settling into a global mode of informal cultural production and economy from the 1990s onwards. With the addition of mobile phones, the reach of informal youth media production networks and communities now crosses the globe.
If increasingly prominent, the contexts of informal youth media production have rarely been examined structurally, as part of a political economy of contemporary culture. Yet, community youth media initiatives are part of the collection of resources now present in cities that aid youth transitions by creating participatory spaces to negotiate citizenship and address digital divides in the context of late modern global capitalist life. In this paper, I offer a structural account of a youth media production community as a space of social living in the global city. My account draws on experiences in Vancouver, Canada, a mid-sized city with a global population and a history of alternative media, alongside emerging research on informal digital learning communities in other global North contexts (Blum-Ross and Livingstone, 2016; Blum-Ross, 2016). I draw on a concept of governmentality to account for the role of policy, funding structures, technology change, and labour practices in Vancouver and also track the modes of contestation present across the sector. Informal digital learning communities for youth represent parallel learning economies that are in general state supported and yet increasingly encouraged to operate with entrepreneurial guile to produce training and citizenship resources to enable youth transitions in increasingly risky times. They are spaces of neoliberal governance that operate as precarious incubators of creative expression and social belonging. The scene in Vancouver exemplifies this global form of cultural production that now impacts struggles over youth learning, identity and democratic cultures around the world.
Social Change-Oriented Vlogs of Young Canadians
Rebecca Raby (Brock University), Sophie Théwissen-LeBlanc (University of Ottawa), Jessica Prioletta (OISE), Caroline Caron (Université du Québec en Outaouais) and Claudia Mitchell (McGill University)
Teenagers are frequently discussed with concern, deemed irresponsible and at risk, self-absorbed and isolated, disconnected and apathetic. These concerns coalesce around several topics, but two recent, prominent ones are their involvement online and their lack of involvement in political citizenship. Despite these trends, there is a counter-discourse which argues that many teenagers are responsibly engaged with the world around them, both off- and online, and valuable participants across a range of social contexts, including the political. Reflecting these counter-discourses and specifically responding to concerns about youth as politically disengaged, we report on our research on Canadian teenagers seeking to make social change through producing and posting video blogs (vlogs) on YouTube.
Through locating and studying twenty teenage vloggers’ YouTube channels (or collections of videos), we contribute to a growing body of research that documents young people’s engagement with the politically-charged world around them. We draw on a poststructural orientation to agency to identify themes across the social change-oriented YouTube channels of these young Canadian vloggers: we highlight the diverse political issues they address, the creative strategies they use, and their advocacy for social change and youth voice. Furthermore, in contrast to the representation of young people as isolated and vulnerable online, we discuss how these video creators present and understand themselves as part of a thriving, supportive online community, albeit one that is corporate and commercial.
These tactics illustrate ways that these young video-makers reflect a humanist orientation to agency as they position themselves as agentic, engaged choice-makers and rhetors, or people making a specific, pitched argument in an attempt to win over their audience (Kress 2010). Yet we can also examine this participation through an orientation to agency that decentres the humanist subject by highlighting their agency as thoroughly contextual. This approach allows us to see the multiple ways that young vloggers are embedded within a certain time, place, technological moment, set of discourses, and so forth. We thus highlight how social media have become an important venue for some young Canadians’ agentic and contextual engagement with the political world around them.
Graduate Student Participants
Researching with non-dominant groups in language and literacy education: Posthuman methodologies for becoming a better white ally
Daniella Birlain D’Amico, McGill University
This paper argues that Indigenous epistemologies and anti-colonial theories can assist white allies in conducting more ethical research (e.g. Dei, 2006). Specifically, it argues how posthuman theories (e.g. St-Pierre, 2013, 2016, 2016, 2017) can align with the anti-colonial aims of Indigenous methodologies by rejecting, for instance, logical empiricism as a form of academic colonization (e.g. St-Pierre, 2016). By implementing a post-human methodology, researchers might de-center themselves from the process of research and instead focus on the forces and bodies (human and non-human) that are always becoming and re-becoming with already existing forces that inform a complex ontology of how anything becomes and becomes possible (e.g. Ehret & Leander, forthcoming). By focusing on the how instead of the what (St-Pierre, 2016), researchers do not suppose a transcendental power to point and solve settler colonial dynamics through research (St-Pierre, 2017), and therefore reject dominant models of inquiry that reify the historical relationship of colonizer and colonized in the formation of knowledge production (e.g. Tuhiwai-Smith, 1999). Instead of rushing to application and production, post-humanism struggles with questions of representation, knowledge production, and language—how could anyone ever claim a right to interpret/represent for others, or to decide what knowledge counts? How is research to be written when language is itself a mode of representation? (e.g. D’Amico & Ehret, forthcoming; St-Pierre, 2016)
The paper addresses these questions through an exploration of how post-human methodologies can aid the author to address her position of privilege as a dominant white body in her research with non-dominant groups across two settings: (1) as a language teacher to young Syrian refugees and (2) as a mentor to Mohawk teens in developing their digital literacies in processes of decolonization. Developing posthuman theory for other graduate students who desire to be white research allies to non-dominant groups, the author addresses the anxieties she felt in working with these non-dominant groups, as over-scientized/colonized qualitative methodologies (e.g. St-Pierre, 2013; Tuhiwai-Smith, 1999) unsupported her. And so, this paper focuses on “assemblages of actors”(e.g. Watson & Huntington, 2008) and “genetic conditions” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) for becoming-with language-with-media-with-literacies-and with this-and-that to think about how white literacy researchers might a) develop anti-colonial identities through posthuman methodologies and therefore support frameworks of desire (Tuck & Yang, 2012) and b) use affective writing such as fictocriticism (e.g. Stewart, 2008; Muecke, 2016) to change dominant forms of academic writing that reify the colonial/colonized relationships.
A Look Through the Lens: Social Justice, Multiliteracies and Diverse Learners
Julianne Burgess, Mohawk College/Brock University
Scholars in the field of literacy and language studies have noted the transformative promise of multiliteracies could be more fully realized by connecting classroom design work with learners’ cultural plurality and movements for social change. I bring a social justice lens to my English as a Subsequent Language (ESL) teaching practice with young adult newcomers. This project offers a glimpse inside our multiliteracies classroom, exposing a dynamic landscape in which the global is always present, traditional and progressive literacy practices often come into conflict, and issues of gender, class, ethnicity, religion, family and community intersect and bump up against each other in unexpected ways. Sometimes multiliteracies magic happens. And sometimes unsettling questions about ethics, pedagogy and power force their way to the surface and cannot be ignored. This project will be presented as a multimedia VoiceThread to accompany a paper.
Multimodal pedagogy and the Ontario Language Arts Curriculum: A document analysis
Emma Cooper, Western University
This document analysis of the Ontario Language Arts Curriculum: Grades 1-8 (OME, 2006) examines the extent to which supports are already in place to assist educators in implementing multimodal pedagogy in their 21st century classrooms. Already, scholars have established multimodal pedagogy as a practice that assists students in expanding their communication options (Heydon, 2013) through the use of modal resources (Pantaleo, 2012; Serafini, 2012), and considering literacy practices that are developed outside of the classroom in the classroom, such as digital media (Shaw, 2014; Walsh, 2010, Unsworth, 2014). Multimodal pedagogy has also been established as one which seeks to develop an inclusive and communicative classroom (Ajayi, 2008; Jewitt, 2009; Stein & Newfield, 2006) where all “students’ histories, identities, cultures, languages and discourses can be made visible” (Stein & Newfield, 2006, p. 11) within their literacy practices.
Through this acknowledgement that multimodal pedagogy encourages students to involve outside literacy practices in the classroom space, a need has arisen to understand if supports are available for teachers in terms of assessing and supporting students in their creation of complex multimodal digital texts with their increasing access to participatory media. As such, this paper expands on a document analysis currently being conducted as part of my doctoral research to specifically consider the Media Literacy expectations in an effort to understand how multimodal pedagogy is supported at a curricular level for a 21st century classroom. Framed within social semiotic theory (Halliday, 1978), multimodal theory (e.g., Bezemer & Kress, 2008), and curriculum studies (Albers, 2007; Ajayi, 2008; Heydon, 2012), this paper examines if 1) the document is soundly grounded within multimodal theories and 2) if students are provided multiple ways to represent their learning via multiple modes. To do so, the qualitative document analysis consists of three parts; a key-word search of the document according to words identified within the theoretical framework (e.g., “representation”, “meaning-making”, “modes”), a recording of the frequency of modes found (as detailed in Cope and Kalantzis [2009]), and a manual analysis of the Media Literacy section to explore themes identified from the multimodal pedagogy literature review conducted as part of my doctoral research.
Thus, these three sources of analysis will be compared and contrasted to draw conclusions for the study. While a relatively narrow analysis (i.e., only one curriculum document), the initial results may be used (following feedback from the symposium) as the foundation to develop a large-scale study (that is, one which would consider multiple curriculum documents and secondary-level coding) to determine how the programmatic curriculum may be responsive to creating more inclusive classrooms where students are supported to make meaning and represent their knowledge across a digitally mediated classroom space.
Rethinking Teacher Education Programs: An Experience in a Brazilian Context
Karla Costa, University of Manitoba
The proposed presentation will explore the findings of an investigation about a teacher education course for elementary school teachers from public schools in Campo Grande, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. It was a qualitative-interpretative research based on ethnographic and auto-ethnographic views, supported by theories of literacies (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000, 2013; Lankshear & Knobel, 2008), particularly based on critical literacies (Cervetti, Pardalles, & Damico, 2001; Monte Mór, 2010, 2011, 2013; Jordão, 2013; Menezes De Souza, 2011). The research plan aimed at promoting a shift in the views of the teacher-educator/ researcher and teacher-collaborators. A collaborative teacher education work considers the co-responsibility and agency of the teacher-collaborator, placed in a globalized world characterized by the ephemerality and the velocity of choices posed by the advent of connectivity. Regarding this discussion, research data points out to the relevance of continuous education that considers rethinking hegemonic and acritical education, in order to promote more contextualized, informed and critical practices. The possibilities for continuous education emerge in practical contexts when experiencing encounters and disencounters of practices and thoughts about what it means teaching and learning the English language. These findings led me to the need of more investigations about teacher education programs that consider the challenges and possibilities of a contemporary, connected, complex and globalized world. In this perspective, as a future work I would like to conduct a qualitative interpretative research study through ethnographic fieldwork about teacher education programs, in Canadian and Brazilian contexts.
Teaching and Learning in Maker Spaces: Engagement and 21st Century Competencies
Cristyne Hébert, York University
The promotion of STEAM subjects in K-12 education (Barr & Stephenson, 2011) has contributed to the rising popularity of creative forms of digital production that include making, maker spaces, and project-based learning in K-12 classrooms (Bullock, 2015; Hughes, Gadanidis & Yiu, 2016; Justice, 2016). Yet, as young people increasingly engage in “participatory culture” (Jenkins, 2006) within the context of this digital age, classrooms have been struggling to revise literacy education in light of these changes. Curricular modifications generally focus on the utilization of multimodal texts or electronic platforms (Green & Beavis, 2013) as a means of aiding young people in the cultivation of skills that align with 21st century competencies (Ministry of Education, 2016). Missing, however, is a broader discussion about pedagogy and the shifts required of teachers to promote a classroom ecology conducive to 21st century learning, including maker spaces. Instead, teachers are regularly vilified for not including enough digital content in their classroom or presumed to be “digital immigrants” with a static skill set that cannot be built upon (Prensky, 2001; 2007). This text discusses the recent development of a wearables technology curriculum with a classroom teacher in Ontario, highlighting challenges in identifying the pedagogical moves required to move away from what remains an industrial model of education, to promote creative thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity and thinking within these spaces.
Bringing the Magic of Matilda into the Classroom: Teaching 21st C Literacy through Literature
Susan Ibdah, Western University
Framed as a unit on a novel study using Matilda by Roald Dahl, I will present how to teach 21st century communication skills using multiliteracies approaches. I have created an outline of a kindergarten novel study curriculum using Matilda. The novel study is divided into two main activities: Writer's Workshop, where students reflect on the read aloud in their journals each day using guiding questions, and multimodal extension activities based on the text, which allow students to express themselves through different modes, media, and avenues. Multi-modal extensions are also cross-curricular and socially engaging, building on both interpersonal and academic skills. Key points to be discussed include defining multililieracies, the four pedagogical principles of multiliteracies, the rationale for choosing Matilda as a novel for study, multiliteracies-oriented activities to teach 21st Century communication skills based on the content of Matilda, and ultimately, the importance of multiliteracies pedagogy to teach 21st Century skills across the curriculum.
Unleashing youth’s reading engagement practices: Private processes, public participation
Amélie Lemieux, McGill University/Brock University
Recent reading research studies have shown that variables other than interpretation alone shape readers’ engagement with texts. As such, gender (Brozo, 2010; Cremin, 2007; Krasny, 2013; Moss, 2007) as well as cultural (Brooks & Browne, 2012; Galda & Beach, 2001), linguistic (Leggo, 2001), sociocultural (Enciso, 1994; Smagorinski, 2001) and socio-economic (Hynds & Appleman, 1997; Thein, Guise, & Sloan, 2012) backgrounds, and even physical states (Krieger Cerra, Watts-Taffe, & Rose, 1997) have either direct or indirect effects on students’ reading engagement. Additionally, Street (2013) found that aesthetic transactions with texts may prove problematic as evaluation techniques can fail to consider these dimensions. To this end, Franzak (2006) calls for a model that teachers might follow to reflect student readers’ identities and address the aspects that influence reading experiences. A recent model based on White’s (1998, 2011, 2013) aesthetigram strategy fills that gap. Indeed, Lemieux (2015; 2016) proved that the representations of one’s individuality might be noticed as the reader charts her aesthetic experiences in aesthetigrams. Building on the findings from a larger qualitative project, this workshop presents the traces of reading engagement of adolescent boys who used aesthetigrams to respond to monomodal and multimodal versions of a narrative. The analysis showed alternative conditions for reading engagement, such as fictional empathy, axiological judgment, aesthetic impact, fantasmic activity, mimetic coherence, and reader’s malaise. These findings have implications for definitions and framings of reading engagement, especially as they relate to adolescent boys.
ReWriting Early Literacy Pedagogies: A multiple case study of early primary educators creating and enacting multimodal pedagogies into classroom literacy lessons
Lori McKee, Western University
Digital technologies are available for use in many Canadian classrooms, but it can be challenging for teachers to design multimodal pedagogies that include technologies to support early literacy learning. This exploratory, multiple case study examined the ways that early primary teachers (Kindergarten-Grade 2) designed literacy lessons that included digital technologies within a collaborative learning structure. Study questions concerned the ways that the teacher professional learning activities supported the teachers to create and enact multimodal pedagogies that included digital technologies and the learning opportunities afforded to the students within the enacted curriculum. Participants included 2 early primary teachers in each case (n=4), and their students (n=38). Data were collected through ethnographic-type methods as teachers collaborated with each other and the researcher to design literacy lessons and in the classrooms when the co-constructed lessons were implemented. Themes were identified through a juxtaposition of data sources in relation to the research questions. Results indicate that print literacy pedagogies strongly influenced the ways that the teachers designed literacy lessons that included digital technologies and that teachers followed a process of rewriting their pedagogies as they layered digital resources on top of existing print literacy resources and practices in the classrooms. Study findings emphasize the complexity of combining digital and print based resources in the design of multimodal pedagogies. This study contributes to understandings of digital literacies and multimodal pedagogies in early primary classrooms, the processes that can support teachers’ innovations of digital literacy pedagogies and practices, and the ways such pedagogies can expand meaning-making opportunities for students.
Professional learning in multiliteracies and the need for a critical social media literacy
Joelle Nagle, Western University
For multiliteracies pedagogies to be promoted within education, it is necessary for teachers to be exposed to multiliteracies in their professional learning. Drawing on an exploratory case study of teachers, both preservice and in-service, which explored their lived experiences within their professional learning in multiliteracies, my aim was to understand what components of multiliteracies teachers draw on to inform and expand their pedagogy. Further to this discussion, however, as the digital component and participatory communities are significant within multiliteracies, an interrogation of the digital tools used for literacy education is needed. Within online social media spaces, there are communities (i.e., Twitter) that can dangerous and exclusionary for certain students (i.e., women, people of colour, LGBTQ communities). Therefore, multiliteracies needs to include a critical awareness of, not just the affordances of digitals tools for learning, but also a critical examination of the digital tools themselves and how they may limit learning. Teachers who build their practice on multiliteracies pedagogies need to be able to support their students in developing a critical social media literacy so that all students can participate fully in online digital media spaces.
Teaching and Learning the Multimodal Dissertation
Annie Tran, Western University
Graduate students are using multiple communicative forms to make meaning in their PhD dissertation. Multimodal dissertations, which employ multiple modes in meaningful ways to communicate research, have changed the way knowledge is produced and shared, challenging scholars and educators to rethink literacy, equity, and civic engagement. In my research, I frame multiliteracies pedagogy and multimodal literacy to address the problem of understanding how research can be argued, represented, and presented in multimodal ways. Real learning needs of graduate students are left unmet when their multimodal research must be presented in a monomodal, linear, print-based way. There is much to learn about multimodality and the dissertation; for example, how can multimodality be used to forward argument, how does multimodality change research in a dissertation, how is technology changing the format of the dissertation, and how might all of the above change the experience of composing a dissertation? There are ever-more diverse groups of graduate students entering the academy, and there is a shifting relationship of language in relation to increasingly present global networks.