William T Wright

An emerging body of scholarship on digital platforms in education has offered critical insights into the influence of platform technologies within traditional school contexts. This study, however, examines platforms' broader cultural impact on teacher identity and the thinking teachers do around school(ing) writ large (i.e., the ways platforms enable or constrain teachers' imaginations with regards to teaching, student possibilities, standardization, etc.). Mobilizing digital remix as a platform intervention, the article considers how preservice teachers' conceptions of the teaching profession were shaped by a course project asking them to navigate and splice together an array of disparate representations of school(ing) on YouTube. The study thus explores how preservice teachers dissected these representations by animating digital remix as a means to initiate dialogue across differences and limn the interstitial spaces between representations through which new lines of thinking might emerge.

This study reveals the affordances and limitations of introducing a new instructional framework— archival-based pedagogy—into a digital literacies course for English language arts educators in the fall of 2020 in the midst of COVID-19. Its purpose was to document how seven students in the course went about choosing archival content for the podcasts they created as part of their final project. The conceptual framework of artifactual critical literacy guided the study’s methodology, analysis, and interpretation of the participants’ descriptions of how the archival artifacts they selected became centerpieces in their podcasts and reflected their personal and/or professional identities. Findings from the study are presented through the seven participants’ narrative reflections, created during the spring of 2021. Implications are discussed for furthering archival-based pedagogy as a curricular alternative to traditional online teaching and learning.

Since its inception, social media has been an important method of constructing and performing identity, including gender identity. Identity work on social media is perhaps especially relevant to Gen Z (those born after 1996; Parker & Igielnik, 2020), who are the first generation with access to it in early childhood. In this article, we explore how Gen Z constructs and performs gender identity and other facets of intersectional identity on popular video platform TikTok by analyzing selected content from three TikTokers through the lenses of performativity, intersectionality, and automediality.

Naming is a curious practice. It entails rudiments, now mostly taken for granted, that serve to categorize everyday literacy practices across fields as diverse as cultural anthropology and the management of multiple Git profiles. As a term unto itself, adolescent literacies is not immune to the vagaries of naming. In fact, it serves as an excellent example of how commonly named concepts in education embed the field's histories, debates, pedagogies, and policies writ large. Conceptualizing literacy in its plural form raised eyebrows among academics, researchers, practitioners, publishers, and indexers concerned with the noun-verb agreement in phrases such as "adolescent literacies is a subfield" of adolescence. For some, the very notion of literacy extending beyond reading and writing is still debatable. With each passing day, however, it becomes noticeably more evident that multimodal forms of communication-images, sounds, bodily performances, to name but a few ways of expressing oneself-are competing quite well in the marketplace of ideas that flow globally with or without a linguistic component attached to them. Aside from the naming process and its attendant political overtones, the practice of treating youth between roughly the ages of 12 and 17 as a monolithic group has been common in the United States. Largely traceable to a time in which developmental psychology dominated the field of literacy instruction (in the early to late 20th century), designating youth as adolescents equated to viewing them as some a normative group devoid of racial, class, gender, and any number of other identity markers. Even with the sociocultural turn in early 21st century and its abundance of studies reifying the socially constructed nature of adolescents, the term persists. Its adhesive-like attraction to literacies, however, may be weakening in light of research that points to youth who are agentic and dynamic game changers when it comes to participating in a world grown more attuned to the need for collaboration based not on hierarchical standing but instead on working through commonplace tensions too complex for any one solution.

The term backchanneling has shifted from its linguistic roots in recent years to accommodate technological tools like texting and social media. Throughout his experiences working with youth as both a literacy instructor and videogame design camp counselor, the author has explored the potential of digital backchanneling to help students seek clarification from one another, make unexpected connections, invite shy voices, and/or add humor and spice to a lesson without ever having to take center stage or commandeer a teacher’s immediate attention. These are lively, collaborative spaces, and they deserve a closer look.

ELA teacher candidates used video editing software to create mash-ups of school(ing)-related YouTube videos in order to express critical commentaries about a range of educational issues and perspectives. S everal years ago, when I was an English teacher at a majority White high school in a low-income community, a student of mine wrote a poem entitled "Mitochondria Are the Powerhouse of the Cell." In the poem, the title phrase-"Mitochondria Are the Powerhouse of the Cell"-was repeated robotically at the end of each stanza. The student and I had a candid relationship and often spoke together after class, and it was then he told me the phrase was based on a popular meme most students knew all too well, although he suspected most teachers did not. A simple internet search revealed the phrase "Mitochondria Are the Powerhouse of the Cell" was frequently mocked online as the ultimate example of the kind of impractical information taught in schools, the irrelevant "third things" (Gambell & Sumara, 1996) students were expected to hardwire into their brains for test day. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Since then, dozens of students have described to me the daily, draining frustrations they feel about school(ing), feelings which more than a few were quick to stress were perfectly represented in this YouTube video, or that one. I have looked into these videos over the years, and indeed, it is to come up against a stark and sometimes humbling reality to learn that YouTube videos decrying the uselessness of school or the pettiness of teachers often receive many millions more "views" than any academic article or professional development resource I will ever produce. By the same token, if the numbers are to be believed, educational practitioners themselves are considerably more inclined to consume popular teaching vlogs-premised on anything from teaching-related humor to classroom décor-than they are to seek formal professional support or read texts on pedagogical theory. As a result, much of the work we do as researchers , theorists, and commentators to shift the policies and discourses of education is outpaced by less formal representations of school(ing) that proliferate online. These feelings (of animosity, frustration, hope, etc.) are then shared, taken up, and reinforced in various digital communities that often remain unaccounted for in institutional spaces but nevertheless give shape, in fraught and contested ways, to the daily realities of 21 st-century schooling. These days, as a literacy scholar and teacher educator myself, I frequently wonder how we might better reckon with these online mediascapes in university teacher education programs. An amorphous challenge, to be sure, but one which I recently took on through a project I designed for my course, "Digital Tools and Social Media in English Education." For this project, 4th-year undergraduate and mas-ter's teacher candidates were first positioned as on-line "border crossers" tasked with researching the various, dissenting, often isolated ways teaching and school(ing) were represented on YouTube, be it through spoken word poems, news reels, TED Talks, or movie

This article centers on how TikTok’s adolescent users “speak back” to discourses of school(ing) in the US.  Through a discussion of four viral, school-related trends that have proliferated on TikTok over the past two years, the author calls attention to the ways school(ing), as a largescale, democratic project and socially constructed phenomenon, is being shaped by young people, for young people on a digital platform that backchannels a largely resistant attitude toward the institutional framing of school(ing) upheld by many adult educators today. The hope is that educators might engage these moments of rupture and feelings of dissonance in considerate ways that do not combat or cheapen the experiences of the young people in classrooms but instead open up opportunities for understanding and dialogue.

With strict no-cell phone policies in classrooms becoming commonplace, national and international electioneering campaigns eroding trust in social media platforms, and content posted years prior affecting students' acceptance into the colleges of their choice, it is little wonder that educators often think twice about bringing participatory technologies into their instruction. This literature review seeks to address how literacy educators reckon with the risks and potentials of these participatory technologies in the midst of our current sociopolitical climate, through an examination of an array of factors and influences that shape and give rise to educators' understandings of participatory technologies' place in 21 st-century education. The hope is that doing so will help delineate a clearer problem space for future investigation into the relationships between teacher perceptions, participatory technologies, and educational transformation.