OPENING THE DIGITAL BLACKBOX: UNPACKING AND NUANCING DIGITAL-MATERIAL EDUCATION

Black boxes sit inside of machines generating information and knowledge for people, but as engineers, computer scientists, software designers, coders, hackers know, blackbox processes that share and circulate information are opaque if not invisible. That is, a black box sends us knowledge, but we do not necessarily understand how, when, where, in what ways, from whom they arrive. Broadly speaking, as educators and researchers, we do not know enough about blackboxed knowledge practices, texts, and technologies that we engage in all of the time. Scholars like Umoja Noble (2018) and Ruha Benjamin (2019) have opened up blackboxes to expose oppression and racism and much more needs to be done in education to give our students the criticality they need about these hidden knowledge systems and practices that they move across during their engagements with print, media, digital, immersive, and AI platforms. In this talk, I apply blackboxing to the digital literacy practices that were always present, but that have been dramatically accelerated by the pandemic years. Based on an interview study, I will open the black box of digital literacy patterns and practices that offer ways to reimagine pedagogies and educational frameworks. Moving into the lives of 17 people, I will draw out our movements across digital, physical, AI, print-based, and object-led literacy practices that have the potential to rethink how literacy is taught and framed today. There is an essential social justice thread that runs throughout the keynote which attends to inequalities and to critical literacy that we must inform our reimagined literacy futures.

Short CV

Jennifer Rowsell is a Professor of Digital Literacy at the University of Sheffield. Her research seeks expansive ways to frame literacy pedagogies through multimodal-ethnographic methods. Her research spans ages from young children to adults in formal and informal learning environments to analyse ways that people learn and live through digital and material literacy practices. She is the Lead Editor of Reading Research Quarterly and Co-Series Editor of Digital Culture and Education and the Routledge Expanding Literacies book series. Her most recent book is entitled The Comfort of Screens which gives an inside view of the properties, practices, and passions of people’s screen lives.

ECO-LITERACY IN AN AGE OF SUSTAINABILITY CRISES

Today, climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution constitute an interlinked triple planetary sustainability crisis that needs to be tackled together to secure a greener and viable future. Changing behaviours and ways of thinking, living and communicating in societies requires multi-disciplinary collaborations, including the research methods, tools and knowledge from humanities in general and literacy studies in particular. Based on three ongoing research-initiatives – the mixed-methods research project Green transition in lower-secondary education funded by the Independent Danish Research Foundation; the Danish Centre for Primary and Lower-secondary Education Research as well as the recently established Elite Centre Understanding Human Relationships with the Environment (CUHRE) – this keynote will address how literacy researchers engaged in education can address the crises through practice-oriented research. In particular, I will focus on the notions of eco-literacy and Eco-Bildung and how they might be useful for rethinking literacy research in, with and for education. Questions I ask are: How can teaching within particular school subjects, such as L1/Language arts, social science and science as well as across the curriculum, address the crises we face? How can ecoliteracy and/or Bildung be fostered among citizens in carbon-intensive countries around the world? And even more broadly, and politically: What is the mission for future literacy research – and why?

Short CV

Nikolaj Elf is professor in educational sciences at University of Southern Denmark (SDU), where he is also head of the cross-faculty/cross-institutional Centre for Primary and Lower-secondary Education Research. Furthermore, he is head of the Research Program for Didactics (with Ane Qvortrup), a co-PI of the Quality in Nordic Teaching (QUINT) Nordforsk Centre of Excellence, co-PI of SDU Climate Cluster’s Centre for Understanding Human Relationships with the Environment (CUHRE) and chair of the world’s largest research organization for L1 teaching (ARLE). He has many years of experience with research in primary and lower-secondary as well as upper education, including the Writing to Learn, Learning to Write project exploring the transition from lower- to upper-secondary education. His research interests include literacy, multimodality, quality in education, and education for sustainable development covering a multitude of methodological approaches. His latest publications are on disciplinary literacy and developing green transition teaching from monodisciplinary and cross-disciplinary perspectives reflecting that he is currently leading the Independent Research Fund Denmark project Green transition in basic school. In addition, he is a research participant in a Nordic ‘Future Challenges’ project exploring the Nordic basic school in the past, the present and the future.

LITERACIES OF SURVIVAL: FAVELA ACTIVISTS’ COLLECTIVE ACTION AND CREATIVE USE OF TECHNOLOGIES IN PURSING REDRESS OF INEQUITIES

This lecture draws from my ongoing ethnography with activists (teachers, students, artists, journalists, and human rights defenders) in the Complexo do Alemão favelas in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Favelas are neighborhoods built by residents, and they were first formed by former enslaved people and their descendants who were not afforded with housing or labor policies following the end of the longest and largest slavery regime of European colonialism. Today, despite having the lowest Human Development Index in the city (0.711) and disproportionately fewer public services such as schools and health care facilities, Complexo do Alemão is a site of intense artistic activity, political organization, and production of solutions for everyday life. I discuss here activists’ strategic engagement with literacies of survival, that is, the contextual use of resources and technologies of writing for creatively grappling with the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade – including anti-Black racism and aggressive policing – and pursing redress of longstanding inequities. Analytically, I build a case study unpacking communicative strategies and reflexive semiotic models enacted by participants of Faveladoc, a grassroots documentary making workshop that I attended in 2021. I examine how a group of majorly Black participants engaged with digital literacies to grapple with a shootout that broke out during a meeting. I discuss the role of local (digital) literacy practices and a situated literacy event in rendering uncertainty into a backdrop from which modes of reorienting knowledge, building socialites, and pursuing resources could emerge. Through further enacting a distributed embodiment – collective commitments beyond a bounded body – participants facilitated hope as a creative and action-oriented affect that has had political impacts for peripheries. 

Short CV 

Daniel N. Silva teaches applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and linguistic anthropology at Universidade Estadual de Campinas, UNICAMP, Brazil. His research focuses on the contextual use of literacies, technologies, and networks of cooperation by activists (teachers, students, journalists, social workers, and human rights defenders) in Rio de Janeiro favelas to produce hope as a principled semiotic action for resisting anti-Black racism, violent policing, and other systemic inequities in Brazil. His fieldwork in Brazilian peripheries has led to publications and collaborative work on language and resistance, including Language as Hope (with Jerry Lee, to be published by Cambridge University Press, 2024) and The Pragmatics of Adaptability (edited with Jacob Mey, 2021). He is also co-editor of Trabalhos em Linguística Aplicada, a leading applied linguistics journal in Brazil.