Commentary: Critical digital literacies, practices and contexts

The four studies presented here all broadly point to the idea of digital literacies and do both similar and contrasting things with them in relation to English language learning and use in institutional settings. I thought it was interesting to see how particular discourse phenomena from the recent past, to do with print literacy, persist and get modified for application to technologically mediated environments—ideas about literacies as contextualized social practices and arguments for critical literacies get transposed to digital, electronic, screen-based contexts. Foregrounding context allows for a probing of shifts, continuities, and incongruities across time and space, and across contrasting technological environments, and language and semiotic choices online. The study from Singapore provides the most thorough example of a “social literacies” approach to digital activity. Weninger contrasts the “baseline skills” oriented approach required by the Education Ministry for a tertiary course that she teaches on digital literacies with her commitment to a situated social practices approach to digital literacies. She draws on New Literacy Studies literature and its later impact on approaches to digital literacies research to make clear the wide gap between skills-based and social practices approaches to digital, screen-based communicative activity. The former's focus is on baseline skills as sets of skills without social context, and thus centred around effective tool use. The latter focuses on the social, cultural, and political-economic dimensions of digital participation as communicative practice. Effective tool use, from the social practices perspective, rests on a communicative competence that is situated within specific activities and interactions and contextualized within such domains of use and social activity. Weninger describes her own course on digital skilling and communicative competence as aiming to incorporate the skills-based concerns of the official curriculum with her own understanding that such skills have to be encountered and developed within situated communicative activities, so as to foster a complex set of communicative competences. Her students get exercises in analyzing online texts, where they are asked to examine how values and points of view are presented using digital resources; they create short videos about a “digital skill” which is shared within a larger group of students; and they design and create memes, as a way of developing their abilities to work with visual–linguistic conventions, while enhancing their creativity and criticality. This is impressive, though I had some unanswered questions at the end of this interesting and well-crafted example from Singapore, about context. What are the students' primary identifications and where are they heading? What is the wider social context that gives a particular shape to screen-based, digital learning here? Are the students doing this digital literacy course heading in to professional work related to global financial or commercial trade, that one associates with Singapore, or are they headed elsewhere? What relations of class, ethnicity, gender relations, globalization, and commodification practices give a particular shape to the digital literacy practices of TESOL and learning in this tertiary context? If digital literacy and language learning are not just technical skills, then, in this tertiary context, they are also prescriptions about what counts as worthwhile knowledge here, and we could make better sense of what teacher and students are up to with a wider sense of sociocultural and economic-political context. In a very different context, Ehret and Becerra Posada, in Columbia, focus on how language educators and researchers use digital technologies to foster connections between students and teachers, along with attention to their situatedness in rural and semi-rural settings that are under-resourced but also contain sites of natural beauty. They provide examples from teachers who developed pedagogies for critical language learning, using mobile, digital media, including “smartphones,” cameras, and collaborative online workspaces. They focus on themes that they see as essential for developing more critical pedagogies that are sensitive to the role of affect, or feeling, in language teaching and learning “at a distance,” or how feelings of being together in place and time can be invoked with digital media. Somewhat similarly to Weninger's contrast between skills-based and practice-based approaches, they contrast their concerns with feeling and place with the national curriculum's “neoliberal” emphasis on EFL for economic development. But while Weninger draws explicitly on a New Literacy Studies orientation to digital media practices, there is a stronger Freirean emphasis here (reflecting the influence of Paulo Freire's writings on pedagogy and oppression), as might be expected from work in a South American setting and in rural and semi-rural schools with limited access to media and digital technologies. In examining how teachers nurtured interaction and “closeness” at a distance through their remote pedagogies they present three distinct examples. In the first case, the teacher gets students to engage in what they call “community movements” around a focus on gender inequalities. Such engagement included class reading activities around feminist literature, discussions of related concerns with female relatives and the sharing of English-language material they had gathered on related themes. Online class work included reading feminist literature (about Women's Day), answering questions with discussion, supplemented by conversations on related concerns with female relatives and by students showing short messages in English they had collected around gender awareness and against violence against women. The authors describe this as critical mobile literacies, where the movement has in part come from students moving through their communities, as well as collecting and showing resources online, while learning English. In the second case that they present, the teacher is concerned to move students away from deficit perspectives on their local communities, by getting them to see places differently while working on language learning. With limited Internet and digital technology access, students are required to create a collage of images and written description in English of a favorite local place, usually a site of natural beauty. The authors suggest that the students working together to express their connections to local sites produce new affective relations between them and their locale, and fewer negative feelings about their rural marginality. In their third case, two teachers express a more ambivalent and critical approach to their local context, including the impact of political surveillance by colleagues and administrators, along with the armed actors—guerrillas and paramilitaries—as constraints on teachers' abilities to openly engage in critical literacy practices. One strategy they use to circumvent such surveillance is to use contrasting pictures of urban and rural schools to get students to describe the differences and to provide a basis for describing the unequal allocation of resources that produce these differences. I found these descriptions both informative and touching, encapsulating both the appeal and limits of a critical digital literacies approach under conditions of social constraint. Jiang & Gu, working at a state-funded university in Southeast China, express the need for “a developmental model” to teach teachers how to teach critical digital literacies in classrooms and describe the goal of their paper as being the development of such a model. They see TESOL educators as playing “an essential role in helping nurture digital citizens who can ethically use English in combination with other digital resources for participatory action and social change.” For their model, they identify three features, namely that such activities should be participatory, should involve digital multimodal composing, and should include teacher enquiry, where teachers work in groups to explore questions of teaching and learning that they identify as significant. I'm not clear, though, why these three features should be defining features of a critical digital literacies approach. Working with seven EFL teachers they trial their model and find it to be successful. As successful examples of teachers and students elsewhere engaging in multimedia composing, the authors quote two studies, one from the USA and one from Canada, where teachers work with underprivileged immigrant youths, or ethnic minority students. The authors see themselves as engaged in the same broad activity, similarly concerned to challenge stereotypes of linguistically and ethnically minoritized students. They similarly express commitments to “empathy and social equity,” to the “engaging of youths in critical civic literacy practices,” and to “representing marginalized communities for collective action and critical reflection.” For me, though, these commitments and activities surely cannot be the same thing in China as in those other contexts because very different practices and values around social hierarchies, political freedom, and freedom of expression pertain in the USA, on the one hand, and Canada, on the other, in contrast with China. I have to think that “critical civic engagement” around the oppression of ethnic minorities must be a very fraught activity in China, to a far greater extent than in those other contexts. To treat critical digital literacies as the same thing across contexts is to miss the specificity of context, I suggest. One risks giving a limiting authority and orthodoxy to the notion of “critical digital literacies” rather than encouraging a more fluid and creative approach to the use of digital resources. I see an example of this concern in the feedback from the teachers during their critical digital literacies training. The seven teachers are all said to report “gains in the more critical, productive and goal-oriented use of digital tools among students,” with one teacher describing a transition from students using their “smart phones or laptops for fun” or for doing the “traditional linguistic exercises” that the teachers used to give them, whereas now they were contributing content to online platforms “about problems of income gap or gender bias.” A common complaint from teachers was about students' “uncritical use of digital tools for predominantly entertainment purposes” rather than for “more critical and authentic purposes.” Why, though, would students having fun on digital media not be seen as authentic? The teachers view here, and perhaps also the researchers' view, seems to me to reflect elements of a “top down” concept of digital literacy in schooling, informed by older school-based print literacy pedagogical practices, where teachers controlled access to the literacy practices to a greater extent and had more room to decide what was worthwhile. Digital literacies are different though, to the extent that young people encounter them and learn their ways with them outside of schooling to a much greater degree than the old literacies. “Bottom-up” engagements of informal and popular cultural processes and engagement with digital media such as through video games and social networking sites provide youths opportunities for social participation and learning as well as skill development with regard to the technologies. To relegate all this as simply fun and entertainment is to present a limited view of critical digital literacies, and to attempt to impose an overly restrictive school-based authorization over what is worthwhile and what is not. It has, in fact, been young people using the Internet informally that has produced new forms of writing, languaging, and adaptations of new technologies, in Asia just as much as elsewhere. My guess is that while they are listening to their teacher talking about civic responsibility, the students could at the same time be using instant-messaging software to chat with classmates and even strangers, having fun and enhancing their situated linguistic and semiotic repertoires. And that brings me to the last of the four papers, where Yi, Cho, and Jang present a discussion of technological resources and their uses for doing research on digital literacies, TESOL, and applied linguistics. There is not really much sign here at all of attention to literacies as social practices, contextualized, situated, fluid, and heteroglossic, but more a focus on “tools of the trade,” though it is an interesting summary. The authors’ attention is on screencasting/screen recording, participant generated photography, photo-elicited interviews, first-person diaries, and wearable technology. They provide detailed and thoughtful descriptions of the particular affordances of such technology for research and teaching purposes, particularly for capturing interactive screen-based communicative activities, for example, for capturing screen content along with participants' facial expressions as well as verbal commentary. They describe such innovative techniques as participant-generated photography and first-person video diaries, as a resource for researchers to identify what is meaningful to research participants from their everyday lives or schooling contexts. They also explore wearable technology devices such as Google Glasses and GoPro wearable digital video cameras, and go on to suggest that these can all be used in empowering and transformative ways, while also recognizing that there are some ethical concerns around breaches of privacy where non-participants are recorded. What they do not address is whether these digital resources work as “they are supposed to” in diverging contexts. A “social practices” perspective on these tools and their actual use in specific contexts would focus less on their design features, what their designers intend digital resources to do, and instead focus more on how these resources are “taken hold of” by situated users—not what their affordances might be across contexts, but how they are assembled in distinctive ways or not available at all in certain contexts. There are links between the algorithms built into these tools and the ideologically laden assumptions of their designers as to how they are to be used, who the intended users are or should be, and what sites they should be used in. But we should take none of that as given, across sites, settings, function, and purposes, if we are to be critical.