Digital literacy and digital participation #FLRI

Digital Participation: exploring the development of digital literacy in subject teaching Futurelab Research Insights Day Sarah Payton & Cassie Hague Learning Researchers Futurelab

The ‘Digital Participation’ Project
14 primary & secondary teachers as research partners
Co-developed approaches to digital literacy within curriculum subject teaching
Teacher interviews and workshops
Student interviews and workshops
Researched classroom activities aimed at fostering digital literacy

Outputs: http://www.futurelab.org.uk/projects/digital-participation

Project rationale: Why is Digital Literacy Important?
Preparing young people to thrive socially, intellectually and economically in increasingly digitised world.
Supports ability to participate
Digital natives? Not always
Being a subject expert in 21 st century = being digitally literate

Digital Literacy
“ The constantly changing practices through which people make traceable meanings with digital technologies.” (Gillen & Barton, 2010)
The skills, knowledge and understanding that enable young people to become critical, creative, effective and safe users of digital technology.

Some Components of Digital Literacy Creating Cultural & social understanding Critical thinking Communicating Collaborating E-safety Functional skills Finding and selecting information
Digital Literacy: The practices through which people understand, make and share meaning with digital technologies.

Some Components of Digital Literacy

Digital Literacy - What Does it Mean in the Classroom?
ICT not an add-on but used to develop subject knowledge
Designing activities that allow children to critically engage with technology and assess its suitability for particular tasks
Using technology to support critical thinking, creativity, collaboration etc.

A Digital School Prospectus – written, directed, produced by year 5 & 6 students
Cross curricular project
Communication, collaboration, creation, functional skills
Re-contextualising information, thinking about audience
“ We’re not just saying random things like blah blah blah, we’re thinking hard about which places to film, what people should see, we’re planning it” Yr 6 girl “ Working as a team can be hard, we try to listen to each others’ ideas and, then like, combine them.” Yr 5 boy

Year 11 Science: Why is DNA the molecule of life?
Communication, creation, functional skills, critical thinking
Researching & recontextualising information
Evaluating
Whole school focus on Communication
“ This is more creative than our usual science lessons” yr 11 student “ With a podcast you could listen to it over & over again to help you revise” yr 11 student “ It’s hard to put a picture into words in a podcast. Looking at a picture is easier for some parts of this learning” Yr 11 student

Other Classroom Activities
Rites of Passage - Year 9 students used digital media to create a teaching and learning resource about the stages of life
Animated stories – Year 4 students brought their creative writing to life for a younger audience using stop-motion animation.
Digital Captain’s Log – Year 3 students used internet research and developed their use of creative language to create a video diary to describe the experience of exploring another planet.

Emerging areas of interest : Teacher Role
“ As a practitioner you become more of a facilitator I think and you have to take a massive step back, which is actually quite tricky. As a teacher, you’re taught to ‘teach’ and sometimes in this sort of pedagogical environment, you have to take a step back and just observe the learning and facilitate, provide the resources....
It’s actually quite hard to not be ‘sticking your hands in the learning’ if you know what I mean. So, yeah, you do have to change. I think there’s a lot of trust as well in this sort of teaching I think you need to trust your students, you need to tell them you’re investing a lot of trust in them.”

“ For me, it was an emphasis that I try and put on my teaching anyway but an even greater emphasis in terms of allowing that choice. And that’s really difficult in terms of managing the logistics. You know you couldn’t possibly have every lesson where everyone has a different choice of the way that they’re going to learn... But it’s certainly something that benefited here.” - Secondary school teacher

“ I said I was interviewing a DNA molecule to make it more interesting. It was so free - what you could write and what you could do... it made you think more creatively because you didn’t have all of these points that you had to do so you had to think of what you thought you needed to put into it.” – Yr 11 student
“ It was really rewarding for myself and the students. It really freed up the creativity of a number of my students and that was worth it in itself... And actually their learning - I know for that particular area, which is a difficult one for them to understand, was much deeper. I tested it subsequently and they achieved much higher in that than in other areas. “ – Secondary school teacher

Emerging areas of interest: School and Teacher Cultures
Teachers related the concept of digital literacy to their own professional values
“ As a teaching professional, I have a responsibility to ensure my students are not just digitally confident but digitally competent & literate.” Secondary Geography “ It [digital literacy] is about giving learners tools to access their digital surroundings and the abilities to do that so they’re not disadvantaged...empowering them and enabling them to make informed decisions” Primary teacher

Emerging areas of interest: School and Teacher Cultures
Teachers adopted the concept of digital literacy into existing, dominant frameworks in their school
“ As a teacher I’ve found that digital literacy can be fostered alongside teaching subject content and within other critical skills frameworks like the PLTS” Secondary Geography teacher and Advanced Skills Teacher (AST)

Emerging areas of interest:
School and Teacher Cultures
Emerging issues:
Teachers very quickly adopted their own interpretations of digital literacy – implications for classroom approach
Possibility of digital literacy simply becoming part of the skills agenda in schools
Digital literacy = a cultural shift in the way technology use is thought about in schools?

Emerging areas of interest: Role of the researcher
Action research and digital literacy
The relationship between research and intervention
Challenges and opportunities
Important issue for all Futurelab work

Next Steps:
Researching digital literacy interventions in UK schools
Developing professional development materials
Young person’s research group
Exploring the links between young people’s literacy practices at home and school

Discussing the Implications: Provocation Questions
Is digital literacy a useful concept?
Do you agree that developing student’s digital literacy depends on a change in teacher role? If so, what are the implications for classroom practice and teacher CPD?
What do you think the relationship is and should be between digital literacy and subject knowledge?
What issues do you think are raised when researchers and teachers work together as partners? What are the tensions, what are the opportunities?
To what extent might a focus on digital literacy affect curriculum design?
To what extent does digital literacy depend on a radical shift in the way that ICT is regarded in schools? How does this relate to established school cultures?

www.futurelab.org.uk twitter.com/futurelabedu cassie.hague@futurelab.org.uk twitter.com/casscass7 [email_address] twitter.com/notyap

Digital literacy and digital participation #FLRI

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