Conclusion

New technologies and literacies have historically spawned great concern over threats to previous institutions. But just like those institutions past, the coming ones are formed out of the confluence of social practice situated in particular kairotic exigencies. Particular contexts develop out of need or demand, and we negotiate through the ecology of disparate power, resources, and interests to come into a new situation. The positive here is that we have agency in shaping those situations together through the sum of our social practices. In a time of prolific textual production, writing teachers are perfectly positioned to help students develop the critical consciousness necessary for shaping the most just system possible. And this is the aim upon which I base my understanding of critical digital literacy education as an ethical charge.



As I have shown, however, the specific texts and processes that serve as the raw materials out of which we shape the current moment have the capacity to muddy our fulfillment of this task. In my analysis of "Consider the Source," I have raised ethical questions in the categories of identity, humor, and fair use–just a few of the possible ethical challenges I could have named. These problems and more will continue to emerge in classrooms that encourage students to produce multimodal work for public distribution. That said, I would like to offer some reflections that shape a pedagogy I feel will best serve teachers and students who take on this work.



Digital literacy education has been positioned as a social good by scholars in the fields of rhetoric and composition, literacy, and education since the early 1990's, and that early hyper-optimism has since been tempered and critiqued toward more realistic assessments based in actual practice. In some ways, we need to tailor our digital pedagogy to account for and help shape ways that students already use digital media for their own ends. As Bertrand Bruce (2002) describes:

If we conceive literacy practices as a set of activities around texts, including understanding and composing, but also the whole complex of social relations and actions related to making and communicating meaning, then literacy becomes inextricable from community, and from the ways in which communities and society change. It is likewise inseparable from the material means by which knowledge is negotiated, synthesized, and used. (Bruce, 2002, p. 3)

As educators, we have a specific role in both preparing students to continue developing their digital literacies and in helping them understand the direct ways in which those literacies actively impact the social world. These duel obligations are facilitated when we adopt a pedagogy of both play and dialogue.



In my analysis of humor in "Consider the Source," I pose the question: how do we decide when to use our full teacherly authority as evaluators and as administrators of virtual class spaces, and when to respect our students' rights to learn-through-play and to take informed risks? It is important to note that in many cases, learning and risk-taking might never emerge if we do not allow space for creative play. A decade ago, Albert Rouzie (2001) revealed the power of play in online writing spaces. Contradicting teacher evaluations of playful synchronous discussion as distracting, out of control, or a waste of time, Rouzie reflects that "play... is a major dialectical force in an evolving, somewhat chaotic system of interaction" (2001, p. 265). Play in digital literacy work, similarly, can bring about the unwieldy ethical challenges that open a space for the "meta-communion unattainable through the merely serious" (Rouzie, 2001, p. 255). If students are never given the opportunity to freely make what they will, we may never reach the place to openly discuss the problems that can arise therein, in the relatively safe and educational environment of the writing classroom. Students may otherwise be left to face these risks on their own when exigencies are compelling and consequences can be dire.



Like Rouzie, James Paul Gee (2004) advocates the value of play in formal educational environments. He reinforces the challenge of teaching digital literacies in an academic space, describing the situation as one in which:

Many children are exposed to language and other symbols connected to modern technologies and media (e.g. the Internet, video games, text messaging) that seem more compelling and motivating than school language. These forms of language are, in come cases, complex and fairly technical, so the issue is not just that academic language is technical or complex. These new technologies and media may well recruit forms of thinking, interacting, and valuing that are quite different from–and again, more compelling and motivating than–those children find in today's schools. (Gee, 2004, p. 37)

Advocating the literacy-learning affordances of video games, Gee continues that games can be "...constructed to allow for moral dialogue and reflection. But here such dialogue and reflection take place inside the situations that have triggered them, not detached from them" (2004, p. 56). In other words, play in the classroom can serve students as they come to feel more drawn to the educational experience, and as problems that arise out of that enriched environment can be addressed pedagogically in a "sandbox" environment whose real-world consequences are relatively lessened (Gee, 2004, p.66). Additionally, making room for play in digital environments can stimulate reception of and attachment to the more traditional academic literacies and outcomes that are so often decontextualized from immediate needs in students' daily lives. Opening up space for play lets us enjoy learning and take chances that can result in even deeper discovery.



And yet, I do not want to minimize the very real ethical problems related to identity, humor, and fair use that I describe above. In the case of "Consider the Source," student play risks copyright infringement charges, illicit substance use investigations, libel charges, denial of future job opportunities, and more. A pedagogy of play in digital literacy education is only ethically responsible if it is accompanied by a pedagogy of dialogue that brings these issues to the forefront, provides resources for learning more about potential risks, gives students a voice in developing classroom discourse about dangerous practices, and essentially, positions the writing teacher as facilitator and co-learner.



Digital compositions are an iconic platform from which students can trace through their own composing processes the profound global linkages informing our economic, political, and ideological landscape. And those digital literacies in action, publicly circulated, in turn help reshape that same landscape. We are teaching and learning in a moment of deep complexity. As writing teachers, we must be rhetorical and strategic in building our pedagogies out of the resources and exigencies of that complexity in an ethically-motivated effort to help construct the moments to come. We must be what Byron Hawk (2007) calls "co-responsible," recognizing that:

In the context of composition pedagogy, teachers need to build smarter environments in which their students work. [...]These environments are constellations of architectures, technologies, texts, bodies, histories, heuristics, enactments, and desires that produce the conditions of possibility for emergence, for inventions. Heuristics, then, cannot be reduced to generic, mental strategies that function unproblematically in any given classroom situation. They are enacted in particular contexts and through particular methods that reveal or conceal elements of a situation and enable or limit the way students interact with and live in that distributed environment. Attending to this level of specificity in our classrooms is ultimately a fundamentally ethical act that should no longer haunt our pedagogical practice. (p. 249)

Hawk further argues that we must "design the occasions of our classrooms to foster the potential for emergent, inventive moments rather than uncritically apply generic heuristics or processes" (2007, p. 252). In "Righteous Remix," I attempted to occasion for students the project of learning and developing traditional print-based academic modes in combination with digital literacies in the act of public intervention in a global problem through localization.



We are teaching in a difficult global, political moment. It can be compelling in moments of doubt and fear to cling to the familiar, historically-valued, traditional goals of classroom practices. But, as Gee (2004) offers, "The other [option] is to fight the neoliberal agenda and make schools sites for creativity, deep thinking, and the formation of whole people: sites in which all children can gain portfolios suitable for success,... and gain the ability to critique and transform social formations in the service of creating better worlds for all" (p. 110). Jenkins, Clinton, Purushotma, Robison and Weigel (2006) connect this social, political possibility with play when they articulate that:

Empowerment comes from making meaningful decisions within a real civic context: we learn the skills of citizenship by becoming political actors and gradually coming to understand the choices we make in political terms. Today's children learn through play the skills they will apply to more serious tasks later. The challenge is how to connect decisions in the context of our everyday lives with the decisions made at local, state, or national levels. The step from watching television news and acting politically seems greater than the transition from being a political actor in a game world to acting politically in the "real world." (p. 10)

I raise my voice with this brave chorus, and encourage writing teachers (all teachers, really) to recognize the benefit of co-learning and co-teaching with our students the literacy practices that are an economic advantage in the information economy, but an ethical necessity in the shaping of a more socially just future for all.




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