Enabling student co-curation of digital media through teachers’ pedagogical research

Abstract

Early millennial arguments tended to regard young people’s out of school literacies with enthusiasm, with school print literacies by comparison seen as lacking currency. More recent critiques of such binary positioning of home-school digital practices instead recommend seeking connections and continuities. However, with teachers rarely gaining direct access to knowledge of students’ out of school digital lives, they are often left to speculate about the actuality of their students’ everyday digital practices. In line with recent directions in Australian educational policy, this paper draws on evidence from a project in which literacy teachers were positioned as researchers of their students’ everyday digital practices. It explores how teachers designed and conducted research into their students’ everyday digital funds of knowledge and associated pedagogical renewal. Teacher research was embedded in and iteratively informed pedagogy. Teachers sought to position students as active research participants with opportunities to influence classroom pedagogies. The effects of teacher research on pedagogy are analysed, specifically pedagogies which positioned students agentically. The new literacies concept of curation, an expanded notion of authorship, is used as an analytical tool to consider to what extent agentic positioning allowed students to curate the incorporation of digital media and digital literacy practices into classroom programs.