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Literacy Learning in a Digitally Rich Humanities Classroom

2015; Wiley; Volume: 59; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/jaal.470

1936-2706

Mary Frances Buckley‐Marudas,

Digital Storytelling and Education

Journal of Adolescent & Adult LiteracyVolume 59, Issue 5 p. 551-561 Feature ArticleOpen Access Literacy Learning in a Digitally Rich Humanities Classroom Embracing Multiple, Collaborative, and Simultaneous Texts Mary Frances Buckley-Marudas, Mary Frances Buckley-MarudasSearch for more papers by this author Mary Frances Buckley-Marudas, Mary Frances Buckley-MarudasSearch for more papers by this author First published: 22 July 2015 https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.470Citations: 5AboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Abstract Understanding what happens when teachers embrace digital media for literacy learning is critical to realizing the potential of learning in the digital era. This article examines some of the ways that a high school teacher and his students leverage digital technologies for literacy learning in their humanities classrooms. The author introduces the concept of layering as essential not only to understanding the possibilities of digital media in classrooms but also to harnessing digital technologies for literacy learning. The article is organized around three key aspects—multiple texts, collaborative texts, and simultaneous texts—that are central to the author's conceptualization of layering. Whereas the near-constant stimulation and text density associated with learning environments that are saturated with digital media, networked devices, and always-on technologies are often understood as interferences to what is often considered "real" learning, the author argues that they are fundamental components of the learning environment. At any moment in these classes, there existed the possibility for students to access multiple sources, communicate with a range of people, and engage with various modes and texts. I like the forums because it gives you a chance to read what everyone else's thoughts are and how they took different things from the same thing you're reading or doing, and get their opinions on it. After a couple of sentences, if it doesn't appeal to me, I'll scroll down, but most of the time, I read through and I always read my friends' posts. (Sue, personal interview, May 27, 2011) There is increasing concern and much debate about what it means to teach and learn in today's digital era. Much of the research and scholarship on school-based digital literacy learning has focused heavily on questions of how to use digital media to support existing learning agendas, often with the intention of contributing to increased academic achievement, as defined by federal, state, and district standards. Many accounts put digital literacies at odds with traditional print culture (Jenkins & Kelley, 2013) or posit digital media as either effective or ineffective (Cuban, 2001) in light of preset agendas and, thereby, overlook the possibility that digital media may be used for qualitatively new kinds of school-based literacy learning (Alvermann & Hinchman, 2011; Kist, 2010). Recent qualitative studies have reported a more complex understanding of digital media's role in classrooms and the potential to use digital media to support traditional learning in new ways and to facilitate new kinds of learning (Alvermann, 2010; Ito et al., 2010; Parker, 2010). The inaugural Handbook of Research on New Literacies (Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear, & Leu, 2008) includes multiple accounts of how technology is changing and expanding literacy and not simply how technology can enhance learning based on current standardized tests. This growing body of scholarship puts forth new understandings of what happens when teachers embrace various digital media as integral parts of the curriculum. Yet, persistent limitations with media in our nation's schools keep much of this work on the periphery of the core curriculum or tied to one teacher or department (Kist, 2010). Although nearly 100% of U.S. classrooms are reported as having access to the Internet, a limited number of teachers are reported as drawing on and integrating the Internet and other digital media into classroom instruction (Purcell, Heaps, Buchanan, & Friedrich, 2013). Researchers remain constrained by a limited number of digitally rich schools because many continue to adopt highly controlled approaches to digital media, including blanket blocks on websites such as YouTube and in-school bans on mobile devices. This work adds to current scholarship by focusing on the teaching and learning in two humanities classrooms that are situated in a whole-school context wherein digital tools and digital mind-sets are woven into all aspects of the school's curriculum. A critical element of this context is that digital media are so thoroughly integrated into the ecology of learning that they are almost unremarkable. Ito (2008) argued that we need to take seriously the kind of learning that young people are doing online and specifically the kind of learning they do when they have the freedom to use various technologies how, when, and in the way they want to use them. In keeping with Ito et al. (2010) and others (Horst, Herr-Stephenson, & Robinson, 2010; Parker, 2010) who suggested that our project should not be to understand how digital media can fit into our current educational agenda but rather how it could open up new educational outcomes, this work aims to understand what happens when teachers are able to embrace digital media for students' learning in schools. Despite the criticism of scholarship on digital media as either improving or interfering with literacy learning as we know it, we know little about literacy learning in classrooms where digital media are always available, integrated within and across content areas to support pedagogy, and as characterized by the principal of this research context, part of the air students breathe. Although scholars, educators, and policymakers generally agree that there is a need to improve the use of digital media in schools, we will likely continue to focus on and evaluate media according to how it contributes to or disrupts existing agendas in schools until we have a more nuanced understanding of the possibilities of this space as a formal learning context. This inquiry was guided by three questions: What literacy learning experiences are available for adolescents in digitally rich classrooms? What roles are created for or initiated by students via these learning opportunities? What happens when students learn in classrooms where a teacher engages a range of digital media and students have the freedom to use various technologies in the ways they are instructed to use them and the ways they want to use them? Conceptual Framework This work is guided by a belief that digital media are creating new forms of engagement and unique learning opportunities for adolescents. This inquiry was grounded in a conceptual framework developed around three bodies of literature: sociocultural constructions of literacy, youth culture, and new media ecologies. From the perspective of literacy as a critical, social, and cultural practice, students' literacies and the range of texts they read and produced in these classrooms were uniquely constructed and shaped by the school context. In keeping with the New Literacies Studies (Street, 1995) framework, I see literacy as socially, culturally, and politically situated practices that are actively negotiated by individuals. Youth cultural studies supported my effort to position the adolescents as active, purposeful, and thoughtful agents in their own lives and in their relationships with others and their surrounding communities. The media ecologies framework and scholarship (Barron, 2006; Benkler, 2006; Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Ito et al., 2010; Shirky, 2008) provided a useful lens to view the patterns of participation and multiple modes and forms of communication between and among the adolescents and the wider school community. Context and Methodology The School Big Dipper Academy (all names are pseudonyms) is a public, inquiry-based high school in a large Northeastern U.S. city that not only is rich with digital media tools and technology but also embraces the digital mind-sets of students, teachers, and administrators. The school afforded me the opportunity to analyze what it is like for adolescents who are learning day to day in digitally sophisticated environments. This school was selected because it aims, by design, to pioneer the notion of the 21st-century school. All students are issued a laptop at the beginning of ninth grade that is expected to travel with them throughout the school day and home every night. In grade 9, students receive some specialized instruction on topics such as Web-based research, wiki building, and the learning management system, but most of the time, technology-related instruction is incorporated and learned as needed for various classes and/or projects. The participants represented in this article are students in two 10th-grade humanities classrooms, both taught by Mr. Beck. The context includes the in-person and virtual contexts associated with the students' school lives. Students were diverse in regards to race, gender, religion, socioeconomic background, country of origin, and sexuality. I used critical case study methodologies with an ethnographic perspective (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1995). Data were collected over the course of one academic year through the following means: observations and field notes completed during Mr. Beck's instructional time, observations and field notes of students' participation in Web-based spaces tied to instruction (e.g., Moodle: https://moodle.org), semistructured interviews with 12 focal students and Mr. Beck, and students' online interactions and assignments. The interviews were used to gain more detailed information about students' experiences with learning with digital media in this classroom environment and to better understand what they gained (or did not gain) from learning in a digitally rich environment. Using constant comparative analysis (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), I systematically sorted and coded the data, creating categories across data units. I analyzed the experiences of the youths in these classes, with special attention to the literacy learning opportunities associated with new media and the roles created for or initiated by students via these learning opportunities. In my analysis, I relate how students described their experiences with digital media to the intellectual work that was accomplished. I also pay attention to Mr. Beck's pedagogical moves in relation to how they facilitated student success in this environment. This article presents some of the affordances and constraints of this context for literacy learning. Unfortunately for those in search of easy solutions to determining the role of digital media in schools, the answer to the question of what purpose digital media should or could have is complex and context-dependent. However, the literacy practices I observed offered considerable insight into how adolescents engaged in various learning opportunities. My findings challenge the idea that digital media are either constructive or disruptive, and put forth the idea that the multiple, collaborative, and simultaneous texts that undergird this learning context are a kind of constructive disruption (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) of what it means to learn in these classrooms. The Classroom and the Curriculum This article is grounded in an analysis of students' study of the Age of Exploration. The goals of this world history unit were to understand that this historical time period expanded people's understanding of the world, that people changed the way they viewed themselves and society, and that historical interpretation is as influential as history itself. One of the final tasks was a simulated trial. For this trial, students were arranged into five groups, with each group representing one of the following constituencies: the Aztecs, Hernán Cortés, Cortés's men, King Charles V, and the system of the empire. Prior to the trial, students worked in their groups to research this time period and understand the role that their individual or group played in the historical events. Each group was charged with the destruction of the Aztec civilization and the mistreatment of thousands of Aztec Indians (field notes, November 10, 2011). In addition to open-ended research, students engaged in several other learning activities to deepen their understanding of key concepts, including civilization and indigenous. During this unit, several learning activities were conducted via online discussion forums on Moodle. Although they are written, most students referred to these exchanges as "talk" or "conversations." Thus, I use the term talk to maintain students' construction of the forums and to convey the conversational nature of them. Two of the forums focused on the Tarahumara culture in Mexico and represented what I came to refer to as quick-thought forums. Figure 1 captures the first forum. In the second forum, students were asked, "What different contradictions and struggles exist for indigenous people in today's world? Respond to this question with both statements, questions of your own. Include quotes from the articles when appropriate" (Moodle artifact, November 22, 2010). Figure 1Open in figure viewerPowerPoint Moodle Forum 1 Findings: Layering At any moment in these classes, there existed the possibility for students to access multiple sources, communicate with a range of people, and engage with various modes and texts. Because of the freedom and permission students had to access and generate information, I came to understand these classes as highly saturated learning environments. This saturation was due to the near-constant generation of student-authored texts, which were published, read, and responded to across multiple digital platforms and drew on a range of media and a range of inputs from the teacher, social media, and friends and family through the laptop and other devices, including tablets and smartphones. Whereas this environment is often understood as an interference in "quality" learning environments because of the constant stimulation, it surfaced as a fundamental part of the learning environment in these classes. The near-constant collection of digital media, social interactions, and intellectual work is critical to understanding the possibilities for learning in this classroom. In my analysis of students' engagements with the multiple texts, talk, and writing, the concept of layering surfaced as a central component of this learning space. Layering supports the New Media Literacy group's argument that classrooms in the digital age are far from isolated environments (Gardner & Jenkins, 2011) and are connected to a multitude of other authors and ideas. In Mr. Beck's classes, students had nearly constant access to people and texts. Layering as I have conceptualized it is the collection of individual and shared documents, individual and class-sponsored communication channels, and private and public workspaces. Layering intends to capture the coexistence and fluidity of media inputs, student-created texts, and social interactions (school-sanctioned and not) that were part of the media ecology that young people inhabited in Mr. Beck's classroom. Although I conceptualize layering by looking at students' texts, talk, and writing, it is critical to recognize that in this space, texts, talk, and writing overlapped and were never isolated acts. In the context of Mr. Beck's classroom, digital media enabled and required students' constant shifts in attention and communication not only between face-to-face contexts and online contexts but also among multiple online contexts. Multiple Texts Mr. Beck's pedagogical design routinely invited students to engage multiple texts, ideas, and people from behind the screen of their school-distributed laptops. At one point during the Age Of Exploration unit, students read and responded to two online texts that were preselected by Mr. Beck. Students accessed both texts via hyperlinks posted on Moodle and published their responses during class to a peer-to-peer discussion forum on Moodle. The first text, "A People Apart" by Cynthia Gorney (2008), was published on the National Geographic website. The second was a New York Times photo-essay, "An Ancient Culture in Mountainous Mexico," by James Estrin (2010). Figure 2 shows the initial webpage that students encountered. The articles shared different perspectives on the indigenous Tarahumara culture in Mexico and some of the challenges that the Tarahumara have faced in 21st-century Mexico. Figure 2Open in figure viewerPowerPoint Still Image of "A People Apart"aaGorney, C. (2008). A people apart. National Geographic. Retrieved from ngm-beta.nationalgeographic.com/archive/tarahumara-a-people-apart Like many classrooms with or without digital media, students were expected to make sense of ideas in a series of related texts. What was distinct here was that students' use of networked media enabled them, in an explicit way, to trace their own reading path and come to their own unique interpretations of the texts. Students worked at their own pace, gathering ideas that stood out to them and adding the ideas to their evolving understanding of the unit's key concepts. In a brief amount of time, students contributed a written response to the forum that would be read by an audience other than their teacher. All students were assigned the same broad task but engaged the invitation differently. Regardless of the path, students were required to return to the Moodle forum to post an individually authored response to their prompts. Students were expected to have their laptops every day for this type of assignment and many others. Challenges arose when students' laptops were being repaired or lacked a power source. Here is an excerpt of one exchange in response to the prompt "What different contradictions and struggles exist for indigenous people in today's world? Respond to this question with statements and questions of your own. Include quotes from the articles when appropriate" (Moodle artifact, November 22, 2010): ☺ Frances: Traditional Tarahumara men wear wide headbands and loin coverings that leave their legs bare even when it's freezing, but many more now wear blue jeans and cowboy hats and pointy-toed boots in leather dyes to match their belts. (Moodle artifact, student writing, Frances, November 22, 2010, 8:56 a.m.) ☺ Jachin: So there were two pictures where a young teen was wearing a bandana and a chain and an eminem shirt and jeans, but I don't see anyone else like that. I think the majority of their civilization is not modern or connecting to anyone or anything on the outside. (Moodle artifact, student writing, Jachin, November 22, 2010, 9:09 a.m.) The relative autonomy that students had to direct their path supports research that argues that online reading requires additional practices, skills, and strategies (Coiro, 2011; Leu et al., 2011). What is new, however, is the interplay between self-directed online reading and the collaborative reading and writing forum. Here, students were required not only to read the same series of texts at the same approximate time but also engage in a public, written communication channel in conjunction with their reading. Students' immediate, public, in-the-moment responses contributed additional texts to the unit and ideas that neither the teacher nor students could predict. This generation of new texts contributes to the concept of layering. Students were not simply reading and writing but engaged in a new literacy practice that supported self-directed reading within a collaborative sense-making community. Students' patterns of participation embodied the participatory and distributed (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006) nature of new literacies. Encounters with texts required a deliberate and consistent process of making sense of texts within a community of known peers. According to Aldona, "the good thing [about the forums] is we're able to read what each person in the classroom thinks about that one topic and take that into consideration" (personal interview, May 24, 2011). These students harnessed media to read with one another. Students frequently posted individual readings that pushed back against what they believed were their peers' misreadings or oversimplified readings. The written forum facilitated room for and a culture of contributing additional ideas and challenging ideas already reported. The result was a dramatic amplification of ideas about culture and indigenous instead of closing in on or coming to consensus on one idea. I found that students were learning how to become critical readers of the abundance of information and their peers' interpretations. A benefit and challenge of this practice of layering was the need to be discriminative about the authorial stance of all texts. The following is another student's response to these texts: I thought they would be totally different people. They have the same religious beliefs as I do (Catholic). I also realized that even tho modern things have to them most still stay true to their ancestors. Then again i saw that two teen boys are dressed more modernly and also while reading what came with the photo essay it said that some were moving to the city and looking for jobs. (Moodle artifact, student writing, Mara, November 22, 2010, 2:52 p.m.) Mara's encounter with these texts prompted her to put her assumptions up against a broader lens for thinking about the Tarahumara people. Unlike oral discussions, Mara and others had space to dwell on specific interests and questions. The intersection of her prior understandings with the texts contributed to her ability to see similarities through obvious differences. This collaborative sense making supports Bruns's (2008) notion of produsage in relation to how students, together, build on and extend current content in the pursuit of further production and learning. Students' contributions fostered a new literacy practice in which students were simultaneously positioned as consumers and producers of information. Collaborative Texts Lankshear and Knobel (2006) argued that the cyberspatial-postindustrial mind-set is unique to new literacies. Central to this mind-set is the tendency to view expertise and authority as that which is generated by collectives, as opposed to that which is singularly located in individuals. Students' contributions on these forums reflected this mind-set in the ways they explored the expertise of externally published authors and their peer authors and in the ways that students contributed their ideas. Collaborative reading and writing contributed to layering as I have conceptualized it in this article because it generated additional texts, contexts, and channels for interaction and learning. In this interview excerpt, one student reflects on her experiences as a participant in the forums: I read my friends' posts, but like Dante—I love his stuff. He always writes really thoughtful stuff. And people who I think I'd like their opinions or might have interesting opinions. I read Dante because he and I usually argue about stuff a lot. (Marlena, personal interview, May 27, 2011) Students exercised their authorial agency across these spaces and engaged in relatively open talk and exchange with peers. One of the concerns that these forums raised was about the in-class networks that formed. Although there was evidence to support how these networks expanded relationships, interview comments and online response patterns raise pressing questions about the extent to which networks might limit students' exposure to a diversity of responses. Moreover, this raises questions about the relationships and balance between production and consumption. Over time, students developed patterns that led them to read contributions from the same subset of students, thereby overlooking the contributions of other peers, which could lead to a polarization rather than an expansion of ideas. Students recognized the presence of a so-called real audience and the roles they played in their sense-making community. This practice positioned students as active generators of texts and knowledge. Mara attempted to understand how the Tarahumara responded to changes in Mexico's development as a country, but also wrote her way into thinking about the possibility of an indigenous group being modern and true to their ancestors. Mara's contribution joined with others, offering additional evidence that this new literacy practice counters the idea of students as passive consumers of knowledge. The Web-based research that students conducted and analyzed to build their individual case for the trial further contributes to the concept of layering. Open access offered students contact with a seemingly limitless collection of sources. Although online searching can seem roundabout, participants developed fortuitous searching (Ito et al., 2010) strategies to find, review, and evaluate texts for their trustworthiness and usefulness to the project. Students selected resources for pointed purposes and searched for information to address specific questions. In interviews, most students spoke about the difficulty of researching primary sources and reliable sources for the trial. Students told me that they relied on .edu, .org, and .gov websites, pointed Google searches, and library search engines. This open access had benefits and constraints. Mr. Beck shared the following: I don't want them to stumble around for 60 minutes and still not have something quality. Like the Cortés trial primary sources—they are there, but they are hard to find. So, I want them to find them, but I don't want them to take wrong turns constantly. So, I see how people are doing. (personal interview, June 6, 2011) A literacy practice essential to this classroom was learning how to critically read the sources encountered. Students constantly tried to improve their searching abilities and their ability to interrogate the resources they discovered, but it was clear that Mr. Beck's guidance was needed, ongoing. Students learned that the criteria of .gov, .edu, and .org alone did not grant them access to immediately credible sources. This was a long and often frustrating process of trial and error but a skill that students needed to develop. Students told me that with practice, they learned to read authors' biographies to understand where the documents came from and whether they deemed the documents valuable. Dante shared, "Always know that there's always two sides to a story and sometimes even three sides to a story" (personal interview, May 20, 2011), reflecting his understanding that there are always multiple interpretations of a story or historical event. In Mr. Beck's classes, the layering associated with the proliferation of texts was not simply about students' easy access to numerous resources but rather in the face of multiple resources, about learning to be critical readers of texts and to come to recognize that all texts are authored for some purpose and from some unique perspective. Simultaneous Texts In one section of 28 students, the Tarahumara Forum generated 78 unique posts, totaling 17 print pages, in 34 minutes. The second section of 21 students generated 51 unique posts, totaling 14 pages, in 35 minutes. This talk was student driven, fast paced, and nonlinear. What is significant was that all of the students in class were talking at the same time, dramatically expanding the number of perspectives in the room. Although students could not read and write in precise simultaneity, analysis revealed that students were thinking, writing, and posting at the same time as their peers. Students did not have to raise their hand, wait for the right moment to contribute, or worry about being shut out by more vocal peers. The amplification of student-generated ideas illustrated how reading was a social process. The requirement for students to interact with one another as they read is central to the new literacies in these classes. Here is an excerpt from one series of interactions: ☺ Dante: I think that to be indigenous is to be one. One culture, one religion, and one home. Now that all of these modern cultures are being forced into their lives I feel like even after staying in touch with their roots that they are no longer indigenous because they are not one anymore. (Moodle artifact, student writing, Dante, November 22, 2010, 8:50 a.m.) ☺ Deb: People were leaving the canyon to seek work in the cities. Yet, at the same time, Mr. Reyes found "many traditional religious practices still being maintained, alongside Catholic observances" (Moodle artifact, student writing, Deb, November 22, 2010, 8:53 a.m.) ☺ Kate: Own religion? I didn't even think about religion; I would just suppose that someone who is indigenous means one is only of that culture. (Moodle artifact, student writing, Kate, November 22, 2010, 8:55 a.m.) Here, new media intensified the possibilities for what it might mean to read texts together in school. The networked platforms expanded students' encounters with texts by creating spaces in which students could interact around their rea