Re-thinking critical digital literacies in the context of compulsory education

Gouseti, Anastasia; Ilomäki, Liisa; Lakkala, Minna

Abstract

Digital technology use has become deeply embedded in everyday schooling and various technology-mediated practices have been adopted to facilitate teaching, learning, communication and collaboration. At the same time there has also been a rapid take-up of digital technology in the lives of children and young people. The importance of developing digital competences is well recognised by policy-makers and a range of frameworks are available. Even so, these often tend to focus predominantly on basic technical skills and a few key issues like e-safety or information literacy, and do not capture the complexity and multidimensionality of teachers and students’ current digital practices. In this chapter we argue that critical digital literacies (CDL) need to be framed within the range of social, economic and political factors that underpin digital engagement in the twenty-first century and we present a new CDL framework created for an innovative EU-funded, international research collaboration. Whilst our account of CDL builds on previous work that explores the intersections between ‘digital’ and ‘literacy’, what makes it novel is that it introduces a more open-ended approach towards capturing the different dimensions, such as societal, that can be associated with CDL practices within and outside classrooms. In particular, we view this new CDL framework as more responsive to current digital contexts and practices while at the same time it accommodates some emerging phenomena, which we suggest are key to reconceptualising CDL. We also consider the uncongenial rhetoric of transformation and its impact on how CDL is operationalized in classrooms. We end this chapter by considering the implications that re-thinking CLD in light of this new framework has for research, teaching and policy making globally.

Citation

Gouseti, A., Ilomäki, L., & Lakkala, M. (2024). Re-thinking critical digital literacies in the context of compulsory education. In H. S. Dunn, M. Ragnedda, M. L. Ruiu, & L. Robinson (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Everyday Life (261-281). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30438-5_15

• Acceptance Date: Aug 10, 2022
• Online Publication Date: Feb 12, 2024
• Publication Date: Feb 13, 2024
• Deposit Date: Sep 2, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 13, 2025
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Pages: 261-281
• Book Title: The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Everyday Life
• ISBN: 9783031304378 ; 9783031304408
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30438-5_15
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4064316