Making Sense of Authors and Texts in a Remixed, Participatory Culture

Mikhail Bakhtin's and Jacques Rancière's theories can help educators understand students' texts in today's remixed, participatory culture. Specifically, this chapter will focus on two key terms: Bakhtin's heteroglossia and Rancière's emancipated spectator. First, the aforementioned terms will be defined in relation to the authors' ideas and applied to literacy education. Then, these ideas will be connected to how authors and texts are shaped by remixing within a participatory culture. Next, Bakhtin's and Rancière's works will be discussed to understand how they speak to each other concerning remixing in a participatory culture, pulling from examples from the research literature. Finally, it will be important to consider the implications of their work for literacy educators and researchers.

Incorporating Students' Digital Identities in Analog Spaces

Multiliteracies has gained significant favor in the past two decades due to the increased popularity of technology. Educators are not only finding new and exciting ways to make content relatable to students by including their digital lives in the classroom, but now the digital experience of teens is the topic of classroom conversations. The inclusion of students' online identities has certain advantages, as many students may find the bridge between academic work and their out-of-school lives advantageous to their learning. However, educators need to give careful consideration of how to safely include students' digital identities into the classroom, as these online lives are often carefully crafted for their networking platforms and are not necessarily intended for analog, classroom spaces. Throughout this article, the author explores the ways in which teachers incorporate teens' online identities and troubles the notion that teachers can safely include these identities without co-opting their out-of-school online practices.

Interactive Art Applications (I-Apps) in the Development of Younger Learners' Creative Thinking

Interactive art-based application is an informal approach to new creative learning methods, in which younger students are visually stimulated, and actively engaged to discover nature and grasp the original concept of core content areas in academic disciplines, such as science, mathematics and geometry from a broad perspective. This chapter tries to explore the means to further young children's creative thinking in today's techno-scientific world. But much of the analysis holds more generally for the intersection between visual art and interactive aesthetics, and how the exploration of visual art forms shapes new ways for primary school students to reform their creative practice to effectively interact in an increasingly smart setting. The chapter then concludes with a focus on the attribution of aesthetic value in integrating digital technologies with human ideas as an interactive tool to infuse immersive visual thinking into children's fun learning apps.

Creating Connected Educators with Online Portfolios

The authors explore ethical considerations, as well as logistical concerns of online portfolio creation by teacher candidates by examining how the Reading Faculty in one university instituted a cross-course online portfolio that followed students as they progressed through their Master's degree in Teaching (MAT) program. This grassroots online portfolio initiative, while collegial, became a microcosm of technology use in education today where faculty attempted to provide students with a job-seeking tool while also encouraging reflection on their growth in the teaching profession. This tenuous line in an environment of hyper-standardization and accountability left unanswered questions. Faculty worked to transparently examine costs and benefits to stake-holders. This chapter describes how the online portfolio project developed, and offers vignettes that illustrate some of these issues faced by the teacher educators who implemented the project across their courses.

Lessons Learned Building an Online Degree Program

Many universities and colleges are moving courses and master's programs to online formats. The Masters of Reading program at the University of Virginia has a history of providing professional development to teachers in the Commonwealth through course work and the online Reading Degree program. This chapter will outline the growth of a state outreach master's degree program as it developed courses online beginning in 1999 and moved to a fully online degree program. The authors will discuss the importance of using a sound instructional design model and taking a close look at course evaluations to examine the design of the course and the quality of instruction. This chapter will discuss the success of our design, lessons learned and some of the challenges faced.

The Use of ePortfolios in Teacher Education Programs to Support Reflective Practitioners in a Digital World

The use of ePortfolios to document and assess preservice teacher learning continues to be a prevalent method for encouraging student reflection. This chapter outlines the definition and prevailing uses of ePortfolios and describes the variety of ways that ePortfolios are implemented in teacher education programs. The authors describe the issues that faculty and preservice teachers face when implementing ePortfolios, particularly when writing for different audiences, such as accreditation agencies and to meet program requirements. The importance of technology knowledge and skills for successful creation of ePortfolios is outlined. Through the presentation of two cases, this chapter focuses on the development of ePortfolio implementation projects. The chapter concludes with suggestions for faculty to support preservice teachers as they implement ePortfolios in their teacher education programs.

Gender, Process, and Praxis

The authors establish an analytical framework comprising the socio-historical and ideological formation(s) and re-formation(s) of hegemonic masculinities as part of a system of governmentality. They use hegemonic masculinity and heteropatriarchal settler colonialism as lenses through which to understand and critique the historically gendered, classed, racialized, and sexualized assumptions that underlie education discourses based on conservative modernization through analysis of the historic relationship between education and the military, particularly gaming technology as curricular and pedagogical tools for recruiting and transmitting military values and skills. They finally urge that the “hidden curriculum” underpinning the power and practices of the education-industrial complex be made more visible, stronger curricular counter-narratives asserted, and they seek to uncover spaces of disruption and possibility, cognizant of the constraints that arise from the totalizing nature of conservative modernization in education and schooling.

Living the YOLO Lifestyle

In this chapter, the authors discuss what it means for students to create, remix, and disseminate memes today—especially considering the connectivity and participatory nature of youth culture. The authors then discuss the importance of a critical media literacy pedagogy. Next, the authors investigate and rhetorically analyze some current memes. The authors also analyze the digital affordances of tools, the ways that messages are privileged and silenced, visual rhetoric, and remix. Finally, the authors explore further implications for educators to consider when using memes in the classroom.

Digital Storytelling and Digital Literacy

This chapter reveals the overview of digital technologies; the overview of digital storytelling in education; and the overview of digital literacy in education. Digital storytelling and digital literacy are very important in modern education. Digital storytelling is used to improve student's learning through multimedia in the modern classrooms. Digital storytelling is the expressive medium that can explain even the most intricate topics in depth, integrating it with the rest of the curriculum. Digital literacy is the ability to use Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to find, evaluate, create, and communicate information, requiring both cognitive and technical skills. Digital literacy leads to the great increases in information that can be conveniently accessed. The chapter argues that developing digital storytelling and digital literacy skills has the potential to improve both teaching and learning performance in modern education.

The Dying of the Light

These are dangerous times (Giroux, 2010, 2015). In this chapter, the author illuminates and explores the founders' complex and often contradictory perspectives on public education and democracy itself and their relevance to technologically-mediated educational discourses. This chapter demonstrates the importance of re-politicizing and historicizing public education with particular emphasis on defending public schools, public school teachers and the very concept of public education as a site of democratic solidarity. The author approaches this topic with attention to the corporatized war on education waged by wayward conservatives and centrist democrats. The author explores these battle lines while juxtaposing their stance and value for public education with that of the nation's founders. The author expands upon this contrast by drawing critical awareness to the social, political, and cultural implications of information technology and the use of digital spaces to project our voices and faces loudly and vividly into the bedrooms of people never met.