Can You Design for Agency?: The Ideological Mediation of an Out-of-School Digital Storytelling Workshop

Abstract

This article explores an out-of-school digital storytelling workshop at a Singapore community center and how it was shaped by ideological clashes between differing definitions of literacies and learning. We unpack circulating ideologies of language learning in light of our attempts as workshop designers and facilitators to foster openings for youths' creative authoring practices. We develop a framework for examining stakeholders' negotiations of design efforts across what we call intended, authorized, and lived layers of a design dialectic. Our analysis details some of the ideological tensions between our own and institutional ideologies of literacies and language learning, as well as how these competing constructions positioned us as transgressors amidst circulating orientations to school in the workshop. This study has implications for curricular design, exploring and critiquing agendas of agency, and deconstructing discourses of literacies and learning.