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The purpose of this study was to examine teacher decisions surrounding opportunities for student voice, experiences and beliefs in digital classroom communities. The teachers’ decisions reflect monologic rather than dialogic teacher pedagogies which prompted the authors to ask the following question: What led to these teacher-centered practices in digital environments?

Authoritative discourses in school policies and a missing connection between critical pedagogies and teachers’ technology practices are examined in light of teachers’ decisions to engage in monologic and/or dialogic teaching practices. The authors propose professional development and research that emphasize pedagogy that supports student voice as foundational to practices involving digital literacies.

Examination of the teachers’ decisions showed monologic practices void of student opportunities to critically engage in digital environments. Dominant discourses imposed through protectionist and digital citizenship policies of schools as well as lack of opportunity through professional development to connect critical pedagogy to technology impacted the teachers’ decisions.

Current research surrounding teachers’ digital literacies uses the TPACK framework to examine technology integration practices. Missing is a critical component that addresses and works to dismantle the dominant discourses and power structures in digital communities (Author, 2018). The authors build on research in critical digital literacies to argue for adding the critical missing “C” into the TPACK framework (C-TPACK) to move researchers and educators to consider pedagogies that examine ideologies at work in digital communities to provide opportunities for student voice.

Social studies teachers engage a vast subject area within which they can enlist a wide scope of possible curriculum and pedagogy choices. Despite the opportunity to engage students with an abundance of potentially fruitful themes, topics, and ideas, social studies teaching can be captured by the need to cover specific content in particular ways. Philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1983), in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, would connect such an agenda to the capitalistic machine that shrinks potential sources into what Foucault (1980) sees as tendencies to seek control rather than the openness of becoming. We contend that Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome opens new lines of flight in social studies curricula and works to revolutionize social studies as a subject area that often has been over-standardized and taught as one-size-fits-all. We also contend that rhizomic thinking can renew how students see the world and transform how they interpret events, epochs, eras, and cultures by drawing from rhizomic research’s bamboo-like qualities.