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Teacher educators, literacy scholars, and classroom teachers are beginning to develop curricula that leverage digital literacy practices and make visible what elementary students are learning across modalities. Although this body of work provides valuable examples (e.g., digital storytelling, innovative uses of digital apps and platforms, creating podcasts, and integration of tablets) of twentyfirst- century literacies in action, little is known about how these curricular choices support Black girls as they navigate digital spaces. In this article, I employ a Black girls' literacies framework to better understand how classroom teachers can design curriculum with layered opportunities for Black girls to develop critical literacy practices in digital spaces. This framework makes visible how digital tools can (1) highlight technological capabilities, (2) promote exploration of social issues, (3) promote agency and confidence with digital literacies, and (4) showcase learning across modalities as Black girls navigate their multiple, political/critical, historical, intellectual, collaborative, and identity-laden literacies.
What have you learned about equality and freedom in America? I really want you to consider all of the learning experiences we had with literature, digital tools, social media, and classroom conversations to help you name some of your understandings and list questions you still have. What informs your perspective about freedom and equality in America?
This question was posed by Ms. Jones (all names and places are pseudonyms), the fifth-grade teacher I worked with in this digital literacies study, to her students before they began working with a partner on a project related to a poem by Langston Hughes. Questions like these are foundational for the work that happens in her classroom and the partnership we created a few years ago. When I began my inquiry into digital pedagogies with Ms. Jones in a large urban school district, I was trying to understand how she developed curriculum, learning experiences, and pedagogies for print-based and digital texts that encouraged students to question power structures that lead to restricted opportunities for marginalized groups. I wanted to know if students were able to create digital texts that probed the intersection of power, language, and identity and whether they would better understand how to engage with, respond to, critique, and create multimodal manifestations of their thinking.
As I began to document and analyze data from this...
