Final Thoughts

a “good [digital] citizen…[now by] participat[ing] in civil and political life, critiqu[ing] problems in the world, and ameliorat[ing] them through hopeful inquiry and action”

Ultimately, our work in literacy must be aimed at addressing questions that will continue into a future that is impossible to foresee. It is important that when “choosing between alternatives, we should ask ourselves not only how to overcome the immediate threat, but also what kind of world[s] we will inhabit once the storm passes”

Proposing One Larger Ethical Question at the Root of Digital Citizenship

Digital Citizenship in the Classroom

Being a digital citizen calls for more than just technical skill. It also requires individuals to confront complex ideas about the enactment of identities and dialogue online as citizens who collectively work for equity and change

Being a digitally literate citizen encompasses the ability to read, write, and interact on/across screens to engage with diverse online communities, with an orientation for social justice.

Critical digital civic literacy (Garcia, Mirra, Morrell, Martinez, & Scorza, 2015), as is the case of democratic citizenship more generally, requires moving from learning about citizenship to participating and engaging in democratic communities face‐to‐face, online, and in all the spaces in between. Classrooms and schools, as well as other educational contexts, must be(come) democratic communities.

Digital Citizenship: Critical Digital Literacy as Participation/Engagement

This leaves space to re‐create and reimagine a more expansive and experiential view of the critical literacy practices necessitated for digital citizenship in the post‐COVID‐19 world.

Citizenship in a Time of Crisis

We begin with a discussion of education, citizenship, and the digital world in the context of the COVID‐19 pandemic.

In this commentary, the authors move beyond digital literacy and take up the question of what digital citizenship means and looks like in the context of the COVID‐19 pandemic. To engage with questions of ethical practice, the authors begin with the International Society for Technology in Education framework for digital citizenship. They expand on these standards to argue for an awareness of the ethical questions facing citizens online that are difficult to encompass as a set of skills or competencies. The authors then take these considerations into a set of practical steps for teachers to nurture participatory and social justice–oriented digital citizenship as part of the curriculum. The authors conclude by noting the digital divide and social inequities that have been highlighted by the current cris

latforms, then, may offer a veneer of data-driven objectivity, but little of that data may be usable for enriching instruction

Considering the Meanings of Data

For instance, if Seesaw becomes the prin-cipal means through which growth is documented and parent communication occurs, the logic of the app might remake growth and communication in its own image: as something recognizable to Seesaw’s algorithms and interface

When focused on individual apps, it is easy for edu-cators to foreground how the social function of an app aligns with their desires for the classroom. For example, Seesaw allows teachers to document stu-dent learning over time and communicate with parents—practices well aligned to common educa-tional goals

Weighing Alignments of Platforms and Pedagogy

For the last few years, we have studied how plat-form dynamics complicate the meaning, teaching, and practice of digital literacy.

In a platform society, developers’ primary aim is not to make programs more compatible with teach-ers’ instructional practices but to coax teachers’ instructional practices to be more compatible with the logic, scale, and economy of platforms.

ome even made determinations about what other instructional software to use based on its compatibility with Google programs (e.g., choos-ing one app over another because it integrated better with Google Classroom).

The Platform Society

Social media researchers called this consolida-tion of internet resources platformization (Helmond, 2015) and suggested that its simultaneous rise along-side the spread of mobile media into more facets of life is now creating a platform society (van Dijck, Poell, & de Waal, 2018), where platforms are not only a feature of everyday life but also a core part of our informal interactions, professional routines, and civic institutions.

Table 2 Platform Dimensions and Considerations for Practice

Technical Aspect

This perspective con-siders the question, What do platforms allow their users to do?

or instance, when teachers we interviewed described using Seesaw to document student learning or ClassDojo to manage classroom behavior, they were referring to the social function of these apps.

n digital media, the term platform has two mean-ings. First, it refers to the infrastructure on which apps are built. For instance, a video game platform (e.g., Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4) is the hard-ware through which its compatible software is run. Second, platform refers to digital spaces that facilitate social and economic exchange. Facebook and Twitter, for example, are platforms for users to post content, interact with others, or make purchases. Srnicek (2017) described platforms as “digital infrastructures that…bring together different users: customers, advertisers, service providers, producers, suppliers, even physical objects” (p. 44).

The issue was not the weaknesses of indi-vidual apps but the relation between education and the wider ecosystem of app development

Overwhelmingly, teachers interviewed by this team described the critical role apps played in how they enhanced lessons and supported stu-dents, including software packaged with curriculum (e.g., from Pearson or McGraw-Hill) as well as apps for classroom management (e.g., ClassDojo, Google Classroom), assessment (e.g., Kahoot, Socrative), and parent communication (e.g., Seesaw)

Across these interviews, teachers talked about the exciting opportunities such apps offer for diver-sifying instruction. However, many also voiced frustrations. In an Ohio district, licensing fees for a popular program became too high, leaving teachers scrambling to restructure units that were aligned to the software. In a Texas elementary school, language arts teachers lamented a recent software update that removed favorite features from an app they used to support vocabulary practice.

Why Platforms?

reflective teaching and for engaging students in authentic inquiry about what it means to live and learn in a society increasingly dependent on digital platforms.

In this column, we explore how attention to plat-forms can help educators grapple with dimensions of digital literacy that are often hidden from view in day-to-day practice. Apps such as FlipGrid, Kahoot, and Photomath are big businesses in education and are increasingly woven into formal classroom learning.

A group of students who share an identity are going to relate to each other in ways they can’t with peers who can’t or don’t understand their experience

internalized oppression

Culturally, it’s not uncom-mon for men and boys to critique what women and girls say.

Continuing the conversation, the girls started to emphasize being different at home and at school; Stacey mentioned that she never “shuts up” outside of school. I probed the idea about why the girls felt compelled to change between the two environments. The young women shared that at home they can be themselves, but in school there are pressures

we developed affinity groups as a pedagogical strategy to engage our students: one group for self- identified girls and another for self- identified boys. What are affinity groups? According to Teaching Tolerance managing editor Monita K. Bell, “affinity groups offer a platform for voices often relegated to the margins.” In particular affinity spaces “allow stu-dents who share an identity— usually a marginalized identity— to gather, talk in a safe space about issues related to that identity, and transfer that discussion into action that makes for a more equitable experi-ence at school.”

Classrooms themselves act as microcosms of society, meaning that the socialization of children that too often leads to distorted perceptions of gender roles and positionings are reflected in classrooms. And more than just merely reflected, the classroom often becomes a context in which these roles and position-ings are reproduced and sustained

Because the dynamic was troubling, we met to discuss and brainstorm ways to respond to and dis-rupt this emerging phenomenon— not uncommon in schools everywhere

including our incorporation of film, social media, guest speakers, art, and collaborative inquiry. Mod-eling the work of well- known ELA educator Linda Christensen, we began the school year with a two- week unit designed to cultivate community, which was successful until we started noticing a particular dynamic persisting day after day.

culturally responsive and multimodal cur-riculum full of opportunities for the students to engage content reflective of their communities’ histo-ries, cultures, identities, and language practices

mportantly, how will we create opportunities for equitable student engage-ment? This question emerged when I co- taught an eleventh- grade English language arts class as part of a university- school partnership aimed at using cultur-ally sustaining pedagogies to engage mostly Puerto Rican students in a struggling urban school district

In a New York Times op-ed, “I’m 10. And I Want Girls to Raise Their Hands,” children’s book author Alice Paul Tapper recalls a school field trip where she “noticed that all the boys stood in the front and raised their hands while most of the girls politely stayed in the back and were quiet.”

Affinity Groups as Equitable Student EngagementHIGH SCHOOL MATTERSEJ_July_2020_A.indd 137/22/20 5:59 PM