teaching

In the second edition of their influential book New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Classroom Learning, Lankshear and Knobel argued that engagement with these practices was “largely confined to learners’ lives in spaces outside of schools.” That was nearly 10 years ago, and in some respects, very little has changed. In many classrooms, there is a lot more technology than there was back then; for instance, the provision of interactive whiteboards, desktops, laptops, and portable devices is better, and there is a greater variety of software and hardware on offer. Yet, even when equipment is available, up to date, and in good working order, problems of curricular integration still arise. Despite all the rhetoric about the importance of new or digital literacies in education, recent curricular reforms and their associated assessment regimes have tended to privilege traditional literacy skills and printed text. An expansive view of new literacies in practice seems hard to realize. Why should this be the case?

The school curriculum is not neutral knowledge. Rather, what counts as legitimate knowledge is the result of complex power relations, struggles, and compromises among identifiable class, race, gender, and religious groups. A good deal of conceptual and empirical progress has been made in the last 2 decades in answering the question of whose knowledge becomes socially legitimate in schools. Yet, little attention has actually been paid to that one arti-fact that plays such a major role in defining whose culture is taught–the textbook. In this article, I discuss ways of approaching texts as embodiments of a larger process of cultural politics. Analyses of them must focus on the complex power relationships involved in their production, contexts, use, and reading. I caution us against employing overly reductive kinds of perspectives and point to the importance of newer forms of textual analysis that stress the politics of how students actually create meanings around texts. Finally, I point to some of the implications of all this for our discussions of curriculum policy.

This talk shares collaboration strategies and “funnest practices” for using netprov — networked improvisation, online roleplay literature — in the classroom. In sequences of “jump right in” creative games, students explore such topics as character development and character voice in a real-time laboratory of quick creative exchanges (accompanied by mutual encouragement and laughter). By building a bridge between students’ own social media writing practices and learning about historic literature, their creative strategies are expanded and critical connections between canonical texts and contemporary, everyday writing are made. What students may not realize is that netprov also can help break through their own creative blockages and freezes.

Reviewing the history of computing, the educational potential of new ways of knowledge representation and new literary affordances have sparked many influential ideas and reform efforts, spanning from “frantic systems” (Nelson, 1970) to constructionist discovery learning (Papert, 1993) to the reconfiguration of literary education (Landow, 2006, ch. 7). Yet, the current usages of electronic literature in education arguably fall behind those early anticipations. Therefore, this paper explores the wider educational and social entanglements that withhold electronic literature from entering classrooms in the context of current technology transformations. Considering the recent pandemicrelated global upsurge of the digitalization of educational systems, the mere lack of supply of digital devices and equipment will cease to be the main obstacle for the adoption of electronic literature in K12 classrooms. Nonetheless, the question shifts to what imaginaries and discourses shape (and limit) the use of new digital literary affordances. Reviewing current trends, three issues are identified. These concern (1) fixations of technological disruption, (2) literacy learning objectives and (3) the marginalization of teaching. The focus on technological disruption (and solutionism) refers to a tendency for innovators to overly emphasize particular technological aspects and to become fixated on their “disruptive” benefits while disregarding the need for cultural and artistic conventions and communities of education practices to grow within the digital medium. Secondly, the problematization of learning objectives relates to a prioritization of basic skills and 21st century workforce preparation while neglecting the need to address new critical literacy practices. Rather than responding with a restricted, preservationist stance limited to paper-based literacy, educators and authors may find ways of combining material affordances and electronic literature to introduce wider literacy conceptions in educational practice. In a similar vein, the marginalization of teaching is concerned with how technology is being used to quantify, classify and control teaching practices within new regimes of digital governance. In other words, teachers are being increasingly framed as technicians and behavioral managers in place of enhancing their role as “cyberbards” (Murray, 2016). Given that some of the issues raised correspond to known problems in the field of electronic literature, they also provide opportunities for further transdisciplinary research into the production and adaptation of electronic literature for educational purposes.

(Source: the abstract of the work)