Amy Stornaiuolo, Jennifer Higgs, Opal Jawale and Rhianne Mae Martin
With the rapid advancement of generative artificial intelligence (AI), it is important to consider how young people are making sense of these tools in their everyday lives…
Abstract
Purpose
With the rapid advancement of generative artificial intelligence (AI), it is important to consider how young people are making sense of these tools in their everyday lives. Drawing on critical postdigital approaches to learning and literacy, this study aims to center the experiences and perspectives of young people who encounter and experiment with generative AI in their daily writing practices.
Design/methodology/approach
This critical case study of one digital platform – Character.ai – brings together an adolescent and adult authorship team to inquire about the intertwining of young people’s playful and critical perspectives when writing on/with digital platforms. Drawing on critical walkthrough methodology (Light et al., 2018), the authors engage digital methods to study how the creative and “fun” uses of AI in youths’ writing lives are situated in broader platform ecologies.
Findings
The findings suggest experimentation and pleasure are key aspects of young people’s engagement with generative AI. The authors demonstrate how one platform works to capitalize on these dimensions, even as youth users engage critically and artfully with the platform and develop their digital writing practices.
Practical implications
This study highlights how playful experimentation with generative AI can engage young people both in pleasurable digital writing and in exploration and contemplation of platforms dynamics and structures that shape their and others’ literate activities. Educators can consider young people’s creative uses of these evolving technologies as potential opportunities to develop a critical awareness of how commercial platforms seek to benefit from their users.
Originality/value
This study contributes to the development of a critical and humanist research agenda around generative AI by centering the experiences, perspectives and practices of young people who are underrepresented in the burgeoning research devoted to AI and literacies.
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Amy Stornaiuolo, T. Philip Nichols and Veena Vasudevan
Building on the growing interest in school-based “making” and “makerspaces,” this paper aims to map the emergence of a literacy-oriented makerspace in a non-selective urban public…
Abstract
Purpose
Building on the growing interest in school-based “making” and “makerspaces,” this paper aims to map the emergence of a literacy-oriented makerspace in a non-selective urban public high school. It examines how competing conceptions of literacy came to be negotiated as students and teachers shaped this new space for literacy practice, and it traces how the layered uses of the space, in turn, reworked understandings of literacy in the larger school community.
Design/methodology/approach
Part of a longitudinal design-research partnership with an urban public high school, the paper draws on two years of ethnographic data collection to follow the creation, development and uses of a school-based literacy-oriented makerspace.
Findings
Using notions of “re-territorialization,” the paper examines how the processes of designing, mapping and building a literacy lab offered space for layered and contested purposes that instantiated more expansive views of literacy in the school – even as it created new frictions. In presenting two analytic mappings, the paper illustrates how mapping can offers resources for people to make and remake the spaces they inhabit, a form of worldmaking that can open possibilities for reshaping the built world in more just and equitable ways.
Originality/value
The study offers insights into how mapping can serve as a research and pedagogical resource for making legible the emergent dimensions of literacy practice across time and spaces and the multiple perspectives that inform the design and use of educational spaces. Further, it contributes to a growing literature on “making” and literacy by examining how informal making practices are folded into formal school structures and considering how this reconfigures literacy learning.
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Bethany Monea, Katie Burrows-Stone, Jennifer Griffith Dunbar, Jennifer Freed, Amy Stornaiuolo and Autumn A. Griffin
Adaptivity has long been recognized as a key aspect of teaching and shown to be particularly important for English Language Arts (ELA) teachers leading discussions about texts…
Abstract
Purpose
Adaptivity has long been recognized as a key aspect of teaching and shown to be particularly important for English Language Arts (ELA) teachers leading discussions about texts. Teachers' abilities to make such adjustments are especially important when facilitating discussions in digital contexts, as was made clear with the shift to virtual teaching caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of this paper is to explore how the structure and process of teacher inquiry supported ELA teachers in enacting and cultivating adaptive repertoires for facilitating discussion in online contexts during the disruptions of the 2020–2021 school year.
Design/methodology/approach
As an inquiry team comprising teacher-researchers from secondary and university-based contexts, the authors used practitioner inquiry methods in the context of a multi-year, multi-sited study involving, design-based and teacher-research methodologies.
Findings
This paper shows how teachers’ engagement in digital teacher inquiry groups supported their willingness to be playful and adapt their practices in response to one another, creating conditions for powerful teacher learning through relational inquiry online. This paper identified three specific relational practices that were critical for cultivating adaptive repertories in teachers’ learning with and from each other: cultivating empathy; attuning to silences and actively listening; and decentering authority across multiple platforms and modalities. The authors discuss how teachers carried these practices to and from their digital discussions with their students and with each other, demonstrating how this recursive cycle of inquiry and practice deepened their learning, relationships and adaptive repertoires.
Originality/value
The authors discuss the implications of these practices for equity-oriented and dialogic teacher learning that can transform classroom practice, illustrating the power of online teacher inquiry groups for developing ELA teachers’ adaptive expertise – something urgently important for teaching in digitally mediated contexts and through unsettled times.