Digital literacies as school practices
Education policies today aim at fostering digital literacies, which are essential for participating in contemporary society and culture.1 Recently a variety of experiments have been implemented in order to improve the way that new technologies are used in schools. However, it appears that digital media are not integrated into everyday teaching and learning practices. Children seem to learn digital literacies mostly through their everyday activities.
The aim of this chapter is to describe what actually happens in schools, in terms of digital literacies, from the perspective of students. Digital literacies are approached as social practices embedded in school context, such as teaching and learning routines and organization of space and time. Empirically, this chapter illustrates digital literacies as school practices by describing one classroom episode from an ethnography conducted in a Finnish elementary school. It draws on media education research on new technologies, literacies and schooling. Accordingly, the Internet is seen not only as an information source, but also as a cultural form (Buckingham 2008). This provokes questions related to critical evaluation and creative production of a variety of media texts. Digital literacies are in this chapter seen as participating in social practices that involve meaning-making with digital technologies and media, including information searching on the web.
The perspective of media education research
The belief that a new technology (for example, film, radio, television, computers, and the Internet) will revolutionize schooling by changing teaching methods and making learning more effective and meaningful has been a part of the educational technology paradigm since the 1920s (Cuban 1986; Schofield & Davidson 2002). Currently, there seems to be a shift from this technological perspective to a cultural perspective and there is an emphasis on the need for teaching and learning cultures (for example, organizational structure of schoolwork, pedagogical practices related to new technologies) to be transformed in order to include digital media in school practices (Haaparanta et al. 2008; cf. Warschauer 1999).
The cultural perspective underlines the need for a media education approach to using new technologies in formal education. While the educational technology paradigm emphasizes the instructional implementation of educational technologies and views digital literacies as tools for better learning, the media education perspective sees digital media as a cultural form that has to be taken as an object of learning in schools in terms of teaching critical analysis, creative production and understanding of digital media and digital culture. As Ola Erstad, Oystein Gilje and Thomas de Lange (2007, p. 185) put it, ‘technology in media education should not be equated to general technology implementation in schooling’. David Buckingham (2008, p. 73) characterizes the media education perspective as follows:
if we want to use the internet or computer games or other digital media to teach, we need to equip the students to understand and to critique these media: we cannot regard them simply as neutral means of delivering information, and we should not use them in a merely functional or instrumental way.
In line with the belief in the revolutionary power of new media technologies, providing citizens with the literacies to function in present-day society has always been considered a key task for formal education. Accordingly, the history of Finnish media education could be seen as an enlightenment project related to the development of Finnish language and national identity and, lately, to educating the citizens of the so-called information society (Kupiainen, Sintonen & Suoranta 2008, p. 3). For example, in the 1980s, Finnish education policies sought to foster computer literacies that were then seen as necessities for the new generation to participate in the computerizing society. According to Petri Saarikoski (2006, pp. 104-8), computer literacy projects in schools were, however, realized only as separate short-term experiments and the actual learning of computer literacies took place during students’ free time at home and in informal networks of young computer-enthusiasts.
This ‘gap discourse’ which emphasizes the failure of schools to be meaningful spaces for learning new literacies is reproduced in terms of digital literacies as well. Buckingham (2003), for instance, writes about a tension between ‘the official culture of the school’ and ‘the unofficial culture of the children’s everyday lives’. Other researchers have identified culture clashes in computerized classrooms (Goodson et al. 2002), gaps between children’s Internet use at home and in schools (MediAppro 2006), and a disconnect between technology-rich kids and their technology-poor schools (Selwyn 2006).
Contrary to emphasizing such gaps, some other researchers have studied digital literacies in school contexts as negotiation processes in which the literacy practices that youngsters engage flow across school, home and other spaces (Bulfin & North 2007). The study reported in this chapter goes beyond the ‘gap discourse’ around digital media culture and schooling by asking how digital literacies are produced in everyday school practices.
Digital literacies
Digital literacies have been defined in a variety of ways (Lankshear & Knobel 2008; Bawden 2001, 2008). Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel (2008, pp. 2-4) have identified three perspectives on digital literacies: the conceptual definitions; the standardized operational definitions; and the sociocultural view of digital literacy.
The conceptual definitions of digital literacy include a general idea or ideal of digital literacy. David Buckingham’s (2008, pp. 78-80) general idea, for example, which is based in the British media education tradition, identifies the key aspects to digital literacy. These are: representation; language; production; and audience. According to this view, digital literacies include an understanding that digital media offer particular interpretations of reality, rather than reflect it (representation), have particular codes and conventions to construct meanings (language), are produced by a variety of interest groups, such as commercial corporations (production), and are responded to in different ways by different users (audience). From this perspective, being digitally literate means mastering these basic concepts and acquiring a conceptual understanding of the Internet and digital media culture through these concepts.
The standardized operational definitions of digital literacies consist of lists of functions and operations a person should be able to accomplish with computers and the Internet (Lankshear & Knobel 2008, pp. 2-4). A recent example of a standardized operational definition is by Genevieve Marie Johnson (2008) who has defined the cognitive skills for required Internet use, which she identifies as functional Internet literacy. Her definition includes a categorization of typical internet activities and a list of cognitive skills related to each activity. Johnson’s categorization includes five activities: communication; information; recreation; commercial; and technical. The activity of communication, for example, includes skills, such as entering an email address, reading and understanding a message, complying with email instructions, identifying essential information, combining multiple messages and judging the intention of communication (Johnson 2008, p. 39). In this case, being digitally literate appears to require the acquisition of standardized skills in each predefined category.
The third perspective on digital literacies, formulated by Lankshear and Knobel (2008), approaches literacies as social practices. The term practice, in this case, refers to patterns in using literacies in particular situations and activities, including embodied meaning-making (Barton 2007, pp. 36-7). This view is based on the sociocultural theories of literacies and the New Literacy Studies tradition that has developed since the 1980s. This tradition approaches literacies (reading and writing) as social practices, not as individual skills or conceptual understanding. A key to this view is to situate reading and writing in their social context by emphasizing that ‘literacy can only be understood in the context of the social practices in which it is acquired and used’ (Barton 2007, pp. 24-5).
Originally, the New Literacy Studies were not primarily about new technologies at all. However, many new literacy researchers, such as Pahl and Rowsell (2005), have emphasized that, in a digitally mediated culture, it is necessary to go beyond reading and writing in the traditional sense (that is, with a focus on printed texts) to consider the whole multimodal communicational landscape in which people live. Following this idea, Lankshear and Knobel (2008, p. 258) defined digital literacies as social practices that ‘involve the use of digital technologies for encoding and accessing texts by which we generate, communicate and negotiate meanings in socially recognizable ways’. From this perspective, being digitally literate is to be able to participate in social practices that involve meaning-making with digital technologies and media.
Lankshear and Knobel (2008) have conducted studies on a variety of social practices in.the Internet (for example, blogging, using Ebay, and Facebook) to prove that they are indeed literacies—that is, valuable vernacular activities in their own right. Indeed, the social practice view of literacies arose from an interest in people’s actual everyday uses of literacy, not from school uses of literacies (Barton 2007, p. 175). Viewed from this perspective, school is only one special context for the manifestation of literacies in people’s lives. Schools have certain physical settings, routines, regularities in interaction, social hierarchies, and rules and patterns of socialization, all of which frame the activation of literacies. People who act in schools in certain roles (pupils and teachers) also always bring their cultural knowledge from other settings of their lives to school literacy practices (Barton 2007, pp. 174-85).
In this chapter I apply the sociocultural view of literacies to study digital literacies in the context of schooling. I study digital literacies as school practices involving the use of digital technologies and media for generating, communicating and negotiating meanings. I call these practices ‘schooled digital literacies’.
Methodology
The research reported in this chapter employs an ethnographic approach to the study of digital literacies as social practices (Heath & Street 2008). According to the sociocultural view, literacies are located in people’s activities. To understand literacies, therefore, researchers have to ‘observe them as they happen in people’s lives in particular times and places’ (Barton 2007, p. 52). I carried out a school ethnography in a Finnish sixth-grade classroom (with children twelve- to thirteen- year-old children) throughout the 2007-08 school year. My interest was in studying practices related to the use of digital media in the classroom, and on the meaning-making of the class community in relation to digital literacies. As is common in ethnography, 1 applied multiple methods in collecting data. I carried out observations (four hours once a week), recorded them as field notes, conducted taped and informal discussions with the pupils and the teacher, and gathered a variety of documents, such as written school tasks and curriculum texts.
This chapter illustrates the findings of the study by focusing on one episode from the data. This episode-driven analysis strategy has been applied by some Finnish school ethnographers (Lappalainen et al. 2007). An episode is defined here as a set of theoretically meaningful activities taking place in a specific limited period and a specific place. The episode chosen is meaningful because it enables a detailed description of the use of digital literacies in a classroom setting with respect to information searching. In this chapter, I describe a lesson from the perspective of one pupil, thirteen-year-old Laura. The episode describes how Laura searches for information on the Internet in order to accomplish a Religious Studies task—to write a brief introduction on the Christian teacher, Mother Teresa.
In the analysis of the episode, I apply the framework developed by literacy researchers David Barton and Mary Hamilton (2005, pp. 17-24). They identified a set of propositions about the nature of literacy: the historical; the literacy practice; the social structure; the dynamic; the multimodal; and the recontextualization point. I use these aspects as a theoretical framework to analyze Laura’s engagement of digital literacies in the episode. In practice, I describe, how Laura’s engagement of digital literacies is built upon her history and the history of the class community, how it is framed and structured by general practices and the broader social patterning of schooling, what kind of dynamic purposes it has, how it is multimodal in nature, and how her engagement of digital literacies relates to contexts other than school.
Digital literacies as school practices: Laura’s lesson
The Internet-sawy classroom
In the study setting, the pupils already have a history of digital literacies originating particularly from informal learning contexts. As is the case for most thirteen-year-old Finnish girls (Noppari et al. 2008), Laura’s everyday life is saturated by digital media. Laura has her own laptop computer at home which she uses almost every day. In a taped discussion, she estimates spending approximately an hour a day with the computer. Her main activities in the Internet are instant messaging with friends and spending time in photo galleries; sometimes she plays online games. Laura says that she has learnt to use the computer and the Internet mainly at home and with a friend, Niina, who was in the same third-and fourth-grade class as she was. In a school task in which the pupils were instructed to list their usage of the Internet, Laura wrote:
I can discuss properly in the net with different people about different topics
I can retrieve information (text and images) fast from the net
I can register in different websites
I can attach a video or an image to e-mail
I can join competitions on websites
In addition to Laura’s personal history, the former experiences of the class community on using digital technologies, the personal history of the teacher, and the school support infrastructure affect the engagement of digital literacies. Working with computers and the Internet has been a regular activity for the class community for three years; the class spends at least one lesson a week in the computer classroom. Digital literacies are recognized in their curriculum as well; on Laura’s timetable, when her lessons start at 8 a.m. on Fridays, is written ‘Media education’. The teacher in Laura’s class has an interest, a willingness and the competencies to use computers and the web in his teaching. Such interest and enthusiasm is not evident in all Finnish classrooms (Kotilainen 2000; Kupiainen et al. 2008). Laura’s class is a special visual arts class. Consequently, it has additional resources, such as lessons during which the class is divided into two groups, with only ten pupils in the computer classroom during the lesson. The school has established a practice of using new technologies in teaching and the computer classroom is well-equipped with fifteen computers and fast Internet connection.
Digital literacies for accomplishing a school task
In the study setting, digital literacies are framed by general school practices. Both physical and social contexts are parts of ‘doing schooling’ (Gee 2005) in the computer classroom (Gordon, Holland & Lahelma 2000). Laura, for instance, always sits at the computer next to Niina. The pupils of the classroom community also tend to prepare collectively for the forthcoming task when they start their computers at the beginning of the lesson. This time Laura has her Religious Studies textbook open in her lap. A boy, Marko, asks whether he can borrow the book. Laura tells that she has already promised to lend the book to Niina.
‘Doing schooling’, in the sense of accomplishing a Religious Studies task, seems to be the dominant practice that frames Laura’s digital literacies. This practice relates to a broader social patterning of schooling as a literacy domain (Barton & Hamilton 2005, pp. 19-20). Accordingly, Religious Studies is a school subject that follows the classic division of school knowledge based on the division of academic disciplines (Gordon et al. 2000, p. 76). In the study setting, the pupils continue the task they started to plan earlier in the same week in a Religious Studies lesson. The teacher starts this lesson by showing the written instructions for the task on the screen, using a computer and a projector:
Continue the task from the Religious Studies lesson and search for information (including images, audio, maps etc.) about your person.
Package the information and be ready to present it in front of the class later.
Remember! You have only this lesson for the task, unless you get on with it at home…
The practice of accomplishing a school task also includes the discourse around the task that is negotiated and produced in the classroom community. According to Barton and Hamilton (2005, p. 19), a domain of literacies, such as a school, has its own specific discourses and ways of talking and writing, including a specialized vocabulary. The teacher, of course, as the leader of the formal classroom community, has an important role in creating the discourses related to school tasks. In this case the teacher creates the discourse with a variety of linguistic tools, including the written text projected to the screen, more detailed spoken instructions, and discussion with the whole class.
After the teacher has read aloud the written instruction, the class community discusses the task. The deliberation of school tasks is a common practice in the learning culture of this class community. In these discussions, the pupils tend to ask questions related to different options for carrying out the task and for applying the instruction according to their own preferences. This time Laura’s friend Niina asks: ‘Can I do a play?’ The teacher answers: ‘Yes, you can, you don’t have to be so conservative with these tasks’. The teacher also issues some more specific instructions: ‘In this task you have to make choices. Pick up only interesting things, golden grains. Do not copy and paste large amounts of information from the web’. He also reminds the pupils: ‘Since our purpose is to make brief introductions, only package some facts, so that we can together work with them further’.
By giving space for the pupils to suggest different ways of accomplishing the task, the teacher creates a discourse that clearly attempts to move toward knowledge-creation pedagogy (Rantala & Korhonen 2008). By emphasizing how ‘we’, as a class, continue to work with the information later in the classroom, the teacher is speaking about learning as participation in a community that collaboratively explores information and creates knowledge. Digital literacies do not have a role in this discourse as objects of learning in terms of, for example, critical evaluation or creative production. On the contrary, computers and the Internet are represented mainly as tools for ‘packaging’ information related to the school subject.
Structured multitasking
After the class has deliberated the task, Laura begins to carry it out by multitasking (Lankshear & Knobel 2007, p. 15) and juggling a variety of windows (Jenkins 2006, p. 16). She is engaging digital literacies in a way that so-called ‘digital youth’ tend to in out-of-school contexts. Laura’s actions are firmly focused on the school task. She has three or four windows open on her computer screen, including Google, a Word document, Wikipedia and YouTube. She starts by reading the written notes she has taken earlier in the Religious Studies lesson. Mother Teresa is the Christian teacher she has chosen to study. She goes to the Word document and writes her title, ‘The Ambassador of Charity’. After that she opens Google in the web browser, writes a search term ‘Mother Teresa’ (in Finnish) and ends up in Wikipedia to read a Finnish article about Mother Teresa. After scanning the article, she selects the first and second paragraphs and copies and pastes them to the Word document.
Laura’s information-searching activities intermingle with preparing the text document, the written production of the school task. She deletes the marks indicating misspellings in the two Wikipedia paragraphs she has copied and pasted into her document and reformats bolded and linked sections from the text. Then she goes to Wikipedia again and chooses the first link (‘Early Life’) in the Mother Teresa article. She takes a look at the photo of Mother Teresa, copies the image file and pastes it into the text document. Then she again cleans and organizes the production by deleting some text and other irrelevant marks. During the whole forty-five-minute lesson, Laura repeats these organizing activities simultaneously with her information seeking. In the revising point, in the end of the lesson, she reads the text she has copied and pasted more carefully, and formats some words and structures in the sentences and paragraphs. For instance, she changes part of a sentence from Wikipedia ‘26 August 1910 Skopje, Ottoman Empire’ into a full sentence ‘was born Skopje, Ottoman Empire’.
Laura’s multitasking is clearly structured by the broader social patterning of schooling (Barton & Hamilton 2005, pp. 19-20), particularly by the condition of being a pupil. The social structure of the school produces the authoritative role in the classroom for the teacher, while the youngsters are so-called ‘professional pupils’ who know how to be and act in classrooms (Gordon et al. 2000, p. 71). Laura obviously wants to do her school work well. She plays her role quite strictly according to the lesson’s manuscript. In addition to following the teacher’s direct instructions, she pays close attention to the advice that the teacher gives to other pupils in the computer classroom. Laura’s activities are guided by the teacher’s indirect supervision, although she does not speak a word to the teacher during the whole forty-five minutes. At the beginning of the lesson, when Laura has just started the task, the teacher says to a pupil in the classroom that ‘you can use information from YouTube as well’. Right away Laura opens a new window in her browser, goes to YouTube and writes the search term ‘Mother Teresa’ (in English). She scans the results and briefly watches some videos. ‘Now 1 found something’, she says aloud, watches a video for a short while and then copies and pastes its link into her Word document. She repeats this scanning and copying and pasting act three times with new YouTube videos.
Another indirect supervision event takes place towards the end of the lesson when Laura begins to revise and close her work. By that time the teacher has read a production made by Pinja, who is sitting near Laura. The teacher asks Pinja: ‘What are the main achievements of this Christian Teacher?’ He adds: ‘You should also explain more closely some words in this text, such as schism and consistory’. Almost immediately Laura reads her product again. There is a sentence in her text referring to leprosy hospitals and AIDS. Laura goes to Wikipedia, writes the search term ‘leprosy’ and skims an article titled ‘Leprosy’. She repeats this act with the search term ‘AIDS’.
In the study setting, the authoritative role of the teacher is also clear in the sense that he organizes the lesson. This takes place in the context of spatial and temporal structures of schooling (Leander 2007). The teacher starts the activities in the computer classroom by opening the locked door and, at the end of the lesson, he brings the classroom activities smoothly to an end, first by announcing that there is ‘still five minutes to go’ and then by closing the lesson. As a professional pupil Laura uses the time effectively. After the teacher’s five minutes announcement she rapidly makes an image search ‘Mother Teresa’ in Google, selects a couple of image files from the result list and saves them to her own directory in the school’s computer network. When the teacher ends the lesson by saying ‘now to the break’, she has already managed to shut down all the windows from the browser and close her computer.
An aspect of the social patterning of schooling is the traditional focus on individual learning (Lankshear & Knobel 2007). In the study setting, it definitely seems that a ‘solo task’, searching and gathering information about a character, does not promote collaborative engagement in digital literacies. Laura’s digital literacy activities end up being conducted individually and there appears to be no need for collaboration in accomplishing the task. These activities also relate to the traditional spatial and temporal dimensions of schooling, in that every pupil in the classroom follows the same sequential path in the accomplishment of the task (Leander 2007, p. 47).
However, alongside Laura’s mainly individual activities in completing the task, there are a few examples of social activities that can be characterized as a kind of silent social interaction in the study setting. As I mentioned before, Laura and her friend Niina always sit next to each other in the computer classroom. Laura even says that she and Niina have learnt to use the computer and the Internet together. Niina, in tum, says that her mother is a web designer and has taught her. In other lessons in the computer classroom, for example when the pupils have taken digital photos and their purpose is to download them to a computer, Laura and Niina actually tend to collaborate. During this lesson, there are also a few moments when Laura shows that she is all the time aware that Niina is sitting next to her. One moment is when she is modifying search terms in YouTube in order to find more videos about Mother Teresa. She adds both’s life’ and ‘movie’ after her earlier search term ‘Mother Teresa’. A video that she finds, which is something related to Saddam Hussein, makes her laugh and turn to Niina.
Mixing media and literacy domains
Because of the social structures of schooling, the teacher has a great deal of authority, both directly and indirectly, in deciding what kinds of digital literacies will be engaged in the classroom. In the study setting, the teacher—of a class specializing in visual arts—encourages the pupils to use YouTube and a variety of information modalities, such as images and maps in his written instructions. These activities of the teacher are aimed at supporting working with multimodal information in the school context. Even so, the teacher tells that using YouTube is not common in other classes in his school. On the contrary, it might be even forbidden, or at least restricted, as it is in many schools (Selwyn 2006).
Consequently, digital literacies that are multimodal and particularly visual are recognized in this classroom (Barton & Hamilton 2005, pp. 22-3). In her production Laura, as youngsters in general (Fieldhouse & Nicholas 2008, p. 60), seems to prefer visual information and especially YouTube videos. In practice, she mixes textual, visual and audiovisual information. Moreover, in this case, using the web for searching information for a Religious Studies task, did not exclude using the textbook. The analog medium of the book and the digital medium of the screen (Kress 2003) were mixed. In the study setting, pupils’ activities involved using a variety of media forms. In addition to the Internet, both Laura’s friend Niina and the boy, Marko, who wanted to borrow Laura’s textbook, also use the book. In the middle of the lesson Niina, as an illustration, even reads aloud a short piece of text about her Christian teacher from the textbook.
The learning culture of Laura’s classroom community is very much based on pupils’ self-organized and collaborative studying. The teacher’s role is to give general instructions for carrying out learning tasks. This type of teacher role is often associated with classrooms that use digital technologies; the teacher is only one participant in the interaction, but not the centre, and is sometimes even at the periphery (Leander 2007, p. 36). As it appears to be in Marko’s case, in this context, the textbook can be a medium that gives the information that pupils need more explicitly than the Internet, for instance, it makes it easier to pick out ‘what is important’. In the study setting, the teacher takes part in the activities of the computer classroom towards the end of the lesson. He gives final instructions by addressing the whole class: ‘Do not print the document. And remember that you are preparing a brief introduction. We are not interested in small details’. The teacher supervises individual pupils as well, and he gives Marko some advice: ‘You have a lot of information about the childhood of your character. But why is he a Christian teacher?’ After this discussion with the teacher, Marko comes to Niina to borrow Laura’s textbook again.
In addition to mixing modalities and media, Laura’s digital literacy practices mix the domain of school and the domain of home. The most concrete example of this is an event when Laura’s written school production moves from school to home via email (cf. Barton & Hamilton 2005, p. 23). Besides multitasking (information searching, reading Wikipedia articles, watching YouTube videos, copying and pasting texts, image files and video links, organizing and formatting the text file), at one point of the lesson Laura opens one more window in the web browser and writes down a new address ‘www.hotmail.com’. She logs in to her email account and watches a Mother Teresa video from YouTube. Later, as the almost final activity in the lesson, and after the teacher’s ‘five minutes to go’ announcement, Laura goes to her email account again, attaches her production file to a message and sends it to herself. After the lesson Laura tells me that she is going to finish the task at home.
Following Barton’s and Hamilton’s (2005, p. 23) recontextualization point, it would have been interesting to study how Laura’s school product was recontextualized at home and how it had been changed when it came back to the school context. The teacher told me later that Laura tends to discuss Religious Studies tasks with her parents at home and that, in his opinion, her tasks are always carefully and thoughtfully done. I actually made observations in the next Religious Studies lesson in the classroom, but Laura’s Christian teacher was not discussed. In any case, in addition to recontextualizing texts, it is clear that digital literacies themselves move across contexts (cf. Barton & Hamilton 2005, p. 23). In practice, Laura’s ‘doing schooling’ includes engaging digital literacies that relate to her out-of-school domains. In addition to multitasking and juggling Internet sites, the emailing event is an example of that.
Laura’s emailing activity also relates to Barton’s and Hamilton’s (2005, pp. 21-2) dynamic point. According to this point, literacy practices are dynamic activities that have both individual and social purposes for people. Therefore people’s literacy practices might vary in different social settings (Barton & Hamilton 2005, pp. 21-2). Since Laura follows the manuscript of the lesson quite strictly, she does not face significant conflicts with digital literacies in the study setting. Perhaps she even avoids conflicts by acting according to the teacher’s instructions.
Nevertheless, as an observer was I surprised when Laura opened her email account, because I did not understand, at first, that her purpose was not to read her email but to save the text file in her email account in order to continue the task at home (following the suggestion in the teacher’s written instructions). This event seemed to be against the instructions for the lesson and therefore confusing to me. But following the dynamic point, the reason for my confusion was the fact that I did not understand Laura’s purpose for engaging digital literacies in this context. Using email during the lesson did not directly relate to Laura’s general engagement with digital literacies in the setting, which was focused strictly on the school task. In other words, the emailing event broke the classroom code by challenging what is relevant for the ongoing assignment. So, it seems that relevance for a certain digital literacy event in a classroom context could be different from the perspective of the pupil than it is from the teacher’s perspective (see Erstad, Gilje & de Lange 2007, p. 197), which could cause conflict as well.
Discussion
The aim of this chapter has been to illustrate digital literacies as school practices, in other words, schooled digital literacies. So, what are digital literacies as school practices? First, in the school context, engagement with digital literacies is based on the history of the class community and on the personal histories of the teacher and the pupils. All of these, in this case, evidently support engaging with digital literacies in the classroom. Most importantly, the teacher’s willingness to encourage digital literacies and to give space for them in his curriculum clearly enhances the acknowledgment of digital literacies in the classroom. The teacher seemed to have agency as ‘a teacher in the digital media culture’: he stepped out of the so-called comfort zone, got familiar with new technologies and maybe took risks as well (Kimber & Wyatt-Smith 2006, p. 21). This is a necessary step for promoting and learning digital literacies in schools.
An important example of the teacher’s agency with respect to searching for information is acknowledging the so-called ‘copy-and-paste literacies’ in the classroom (Erstad, Gilje & de Lange. 2007). In general, it has been claimed that copy-and-paste literacies are not ethical literacy practices in school contexts, because they relate to plagiarism. Likewise, copy-and-paste literacies are often associated with the digital re-mixing culture in which people re-use and combine a variety of semiotic resources by downloading fdes from different sources, such as the Internet. Erstad, Gilje and de Lange (2007) have suggested that digital production, for example, editing videos, in the school context is a re-mixing process as well. They argue that re-mixing is not only about copying and pasting ‘something’, but a conscious choice involving engagement with the subject matter (Erstad, Gilje & de Lange 2007, p. 194). I suggest that Laura’s activities can also be seen as re-mixing practices, because she is using a variety of sources (Wikipedia texts, images, YouTube videos) in order to produce a school task. Therefore, I argue that copying and pasting should be acknowledged as a dimension of digital literacies as school practices in general, not only with respect to media production. This recognition of re-mixing which is a common cultural form in the Internet could promote media education in schools as well.
This study confirmed that schooled digital literacies are clearly framed by general school practices and everyday social patterns of schooling, the most important aspects of which are playing the role of the pupil and doing a school task. Thus, the school context definitely appears to produce imposed, rather than self-generated, uses of digital literacies (Barton 2007, p. 38). In the study setting, digital literacies were primarily tools for learning the subject matter, and the main function of Laura’s engagement with digital literacies seemed to be the accomplishment of the school task. Consequently, most of Laura’s digital literacy activities ended up as fairly mechanical and operational and appeared to lack personal creativeness, as in constrained contexts in general (Barton 2007, p. 38).
However, I would say that the school context does not totally domesticate engagement with digital literacies. Laura’s multitasking and emailing practices, which connected the schooled digital literacies with her home digital literacy domain, are examples of that. In earlier studies it has been noted that youngsters do not necessarily consider it problematic to engage with digital literacies across different domains and that they are clever in identifying and even challenging school constraints in their engagement with digital literacies (Bulfin & North 2007; Selwyn 2006). This appeared to be the case for Laura as well, although she obviously focused not on breaking the classroom code but on doing her school work well.
The significance of the teacher-given task as a constraint for engaging with digital literacies has to be discussed in this context, since the task very much affected Laura’s engagement with digital literacies. So, why did the teacher formulate such a task? The purpose of the teacher seemed to be to cover the curriculum-based subject matter of Religious Studies by dividing the broad field into smaller units so that each pupil could individually develop expertise in one piece of the subject matter and share the knowledge acquired with other pupils. This is a quite traditional way of collaborative teaching and could be compared with, for example, the jigsaw technique, in which each student in a small group first receives a unit of material to be introduced and then teaches the unit to others. In addition, by formulating a task which involves using the Internet as an information source, the teacher aimed at finding more varied and perhaps also more interesting information about the Christian teachers than might be found in the Religious Studies textbook. In the observed task, the pupils, at least Marko and Niina, used both sources.
Thus, the aims of the predesigned curriculum and the task formulated by the teacher did not include digital literacies, in themselves, as objects of learning. In other words, the task was not a media education task and, therefore, the whole lesson was more in line with the educational technology paradigm of using technologies in schools than with the media education perspective. Still, there are possibilities for promoting the learning of digital literacies from the media education perspective within imposed contexts as well. An example of that relates to pupils’ practices of mixing media, the Internet and the textbook. A media education approach in this case would have been to teach the different natures of the Internet and the book as information sources—for example, to discuss what kinds of information could be found from Wikipedia or YouTube compared with that found in the textbook. This would also provoke discussion related to critical evaluation of both information written in the textbook and information found from various Internet sources, as well as discussion of the Internet as a cultural form. At least the two pupils, Niina and Marko, appeared to notice that the information in these different media was not similar; it was easier to find a particular type of information in the textbook than from the Internet.
Additionally, engaging with digital literacies in the classroom context was negotiated in teacher-led discourses. In this case, I would say, these discourses emphasized the kind of knowledge-creating pedagogy that approaches learning as a participatory process in a teacher-guided community. However, the task was related to Religious Studies and the discourse did not explicitly address the interdisciplinary relations of the subject matter in schools, which characterizes the knowledge-creating pedagogy as well (Rantala & Korhonen 2008). Moreover, it is worth noting that in the teacher-guided knowledge-creation pedagogy discourse, digital literacies did not have a role in terms of peer collaboration in Internet platforms. In this case, collaboration took place after the information-searching session, in face-to-face classroom discussion. Face-to-face interaction is an important aspect of ‘doing schooling’ and it should not be ignored, even in the context of the Internet-savvy classroom community.
One discourse and a material practice that could have been produced in the classroom, in line with the knowledge-creation pedagogy, would have been the notion of knowledge-producing schools (Lankshear & Knobel 2006, pp. 200-4). According to Lankshear and Knobel, knowledge producing in schools has traditionally referred to practices in which pupils complete a given school task and are evaluated by the teacher without getting involved with producing knowledge that could be meaningful for purposes or contexts other than the school task. This definitely is the case in Laura’s engagement with digital literacies in the study setting.
The new knowledge-producing schools described by Lankshear and Knobel (2006, p. 201), in trun, ‘develop new and interesting relations with groups of their local communities, by engaging in processes that generate products that are valued by the constituencies for which they have been produced’. In the study setting, this might have entailed, for instance, working with the local church to produce digital presentations of Christian teachers, or it might have entailed Laura’s revising the Wikipedia article on Mother Teresa. These kinds of practices would have promoted more media education purposes in the classroom setting, particularly in terms of creative production.
What did Laura then actually learn by engaging with digital literacies in the classroom setting? In line with the educational technology paradigm, the purpose of engaging with digital literacies in this case was to enhance learning of subject matter, Mother Teresa as a Christian teacher. Laura’s learning is reminiscent of the transmission of learning paradigm that regards learning as the acquisition of knowledge (Rantala & Korhonen 2008). In practice, Laura might have learned facts about Mother Teresa’s life, such as place of birth and date of death—the facts in the two paragraphs she copied and pasted from Wikipedia into her document. However, from the media education perspective the more interesting question is: What could Laura have learned about digital literacies? The classroom context seemed to produce quite mechanical and operational digital literacies. In a way, this might be precisely what Laura implicitly learned; digital literacies as school practices mean quickly finding some information and preparing a nice short presentation.
Consequently, Laura’s learning was not about media education, that is, about critical evaluation and creative production. Earlier studies (Harris 2008; Noppari et al. 2008) have shown that when information searching is directly related to their prior knowledge and interests, youngsters do engage with the information they find in an in-depth manner and are able to evaluate it critically. Could it also be that critical evaluation does not, at least explicitly, take place in classroom settings in which using the Internet as an information source is an established practice? Perhaps the teacher feels no need to highlight the matter anymore. Nevertheless, it can be argued that in the re-mixing practices carried out by Laura it is impossible to avoid doing some kind of evaluation. What Laura did was not simply copying and pasting ‘something’ from the Internet, but a more conscious action, as suggested by Erstad, Gilje and de Lange (2007).
Conclusion
Should students then be encouraged to more comprehensively evaluate their digital literacy practices? Or is being street-wise and just engaging with digital literacies effectively in the classroom context enough? I suggest that ‘doing’ digital literacies as school practices would need a curriculum framework that supports teachers to focus on the most important aspects of digital literacies. A possible framework is provided by Henry Jenkins and others (2006) who call for teaching participatory media literacies in schools. These literacies include appropriation (sampling and remixing media content), multitasking (scanning one’s environment and focusing on details as needed), collective intelligence (pooling knowledge and comparing notes with others toward a common goal) and judgment (evaluating the reliability and credibility of different information sources). Such a framework would promote learning and engaging in creative and critical digital literacies in schools.
Based on this study, the question of promoting digital literacies in schools is clearly intertwined with the everyday culture of schooling, including the roles of the teacher and the pupil and the practice of doing school tasks. Consequently, I argue that, to promote digital literacies in formal education, we have to look at them in their own terms, as school practices, instead of only contrasting them with youngsters’ out-of-school digital literacies (Leander 2007), or with schools’ traditional teaching and learning culture and the material/industrial mindset (Lankshear & Knobel 2007). In other words, to teach digital literacies in schools we should attempt to understand them as school practices and, in that way, learn how to produce better schooled digital literacies. It is important to acknowledge that digital literacies as school practices relate both to the digital media culture in which the youngsters live and act and to the traditional teaching and learning culture of schools, which might be transformed step by step. This study indicated examples of school traditions (such as classic subject matter, the pupil’s role, the teacher’s authority) and their ongoing transformations (multitasking practices, mixing media and modalities, traces from knowledge-creation pedagogy).
The method applied in this study, school ethnography, is a valuable way to study digital literacies as school practices, as it makes visible the constraints and possibilities for engaging with digital literacies in the classroom from the perspective of the pupils. This case study observed the practices of one thirteen-year-old Finnish girl in one lesson and in one particular class community. The digital literacies as school practices would, of course, have been different with other pupils and in other classroom contexts. The case study nevertheless captured existing schooled digital literacies. To develop pedagogical practices that promote the learning of digital literacies in schools, more research of everyday practice in engaging with literacies in schools is needed. Rather than sticking to contrasts between schooled and out-of-school practices, it would be important to study youngsters as capable of ‘doing’ and learning different digital literacies in different contexts. It is important to look at youngsters as capable of learning different digital literacies in different contexts. It is also important for policy-makers, school administrators and teachers to work together to create a better context for engaging with digital literacies in schools.
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1In this chapter, digital literacy is seen, following Gilster (1997) and Bawden (2008, p. 18 and 30). as an ‘essential requirement for life in a digital age’ and as ‘the current form of the traditional literacy per se’. This definition for digital literacy encompasses information literacy and media literacy. I am aware that the definition is problematic, because, obviously, in a digital age, literacy includes using information that is not in digital mode.