Attending AERA? Hear from Marginal Syllabus researchers on Sunday, April 15th, 2:45 to 4:15pm, at Sheraton New York Times Square, Second Floor, Metropolitan West Room (Roundtable Session 17).
This post supports the roundtable presentation “Civic Writing on Digital Walls,” presented by Remi Kalir and Antero Garcia at the 2018 American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting during the Division G (Social Context of Education) session “Rejecting Neutrality and Challenging Inequity: Fostering Critical Youth Civic Engagement Across Informal Learning Contexts.”
Working Paper
This case study examines how civic writing is publicly authored, read, and discussed as openly accessible and multimodal texts on the walls of everyday digital environments. Specifically, we focus on how a repertoire of social, technical, and literacy practices associated with Hypothesis open web annotation (OWA) develop and amplify educators’ critical civic literacies. The case study is bound by educators’ OWA activity associated with the November, 2017 Marginal Syllabus conversation. The first and quantitative phase of our analysis identified: a) descriptive statistics of educator participation in the focal conversation; and b) topics of civic relevance that emerged through educators’ OWA conversation. The second and qualitative phase of our analysis was informed by inductive methods of discourse analysis; we examined situated meaning in educators’ OWA to identify and categorize types of annotation as a civic literacy repertoire.
Our case study identifies as its primary finding ten annotation practices that comprise educators’ collective repertoire of civic literacy practices. We embrace the heuristic of an acronym to both organize and express an ethos relevant to the layered meanings and shifting authorship present in the focal annotation conversation: SUBLIMATES (Summarizing, Unpacking, Building, Linking, Illustrating, Musing, Affiliating, Translating, Evaluating, and Sharing).
Educators’ open web annotation practices as a civic literacy repertoire
- Educator OWA served as a means of summarizing, or reviewing and highlighting, specific civic topics associated with the conversation’s focal text. Read an example of summarizing in context.
- Educators also authored OWA to unpack complex civic ideas by expanding upon pedagogical and political implications. Read an example of unpacking in context.
- Educators used OWA for building: in some annotations, educators established connections from the focal text to related civic conversations or concerns; in related threads, educators’ OWA co-constructed commentary that built upon civic topics and insights. Read an example of building in context.
- Given the technical affordances of OWA, educators frequently exhibited linking whereby their annotation content included a hyperlink that tethered the focal text to related civic content. Linking established connections across texts and contexts to a variety of civic resources including books, reports, scholarly articles, and even other Marginal Syllabus conversations. Read an example of linking in context.
- The practice of illustrating occurred when educator OWA explained in detail the pedagogical or political relevance of a specific civic topic. Read an example of illustrating in context.
- Questioning–or musing–was a common OWA practice among educators as they advanced both open-ended and pointed inquiry about civic topics. Read an example of musing in context.
- Educator OWA was also a means of affiliating among Marginal Syllabus text-participants, or strengthening connectedness and community, via meta-language, in-jokes, and playful, multimodal expression. Read an example of affiliating in context.
- Educators’ OWA could also be a practice of translating civic education and engagement ideas from the focal text to other academic disciplines, educational and civic settings, political circumstances, and even popular culture. Read an example of translating in context.
- At times, educator OWA adopted a more critical stance with annotation evaluating civic topics as well as critiquing particular claims and analyses. Read an example of evaluating in context.
- The final practice comprising educators’ OWA repertoire was sharing, or instances in which text-participants openly communicated information about their personal lives, values, or opinions while discussing civic topics. Read an example of sharing in context.
Thoughts and feedback? Please contact us:
Remi: Connect with Remi
Antero: antero.garcia@standford.edu
