<i>Activist Technical Communication at Girls’ Technology Camps: Building Girls’ Confidence in Digital Literacies</i> presents a mixed-method empirical study investigating the capacity of a girls’ summer technology camp, Girls Go Digital, to foster girls’ confidence and interest in STEM subjects. I build on the work of a growing number of university technical communication and composition programs hosting local digital camps for middle school-aged girls, responding to the gap in STEM confidence that grows between boys and girls after middle school. My dissertation works in partnership with a large, national, for-profit version of these camps, and I utilize a community engagement approach. Though some may see the aims of a for-profit tech camp as incompatible with engagement ethics, I argue that we ought not to ignore the potential for community impact offered by their resources and reach. With a camp design targeted to reach girls who may feel discouraged by a mixed gender setting, a week of camp at Girls Go Digital leads to statistically significant positive impacts on girls’ confidence in their technology skills, as well as attitudes relating to technology. These findings contribute not only to strategies for technofeminist interventions, but also to the growing body of technical communication scholarship with social justice aims. In order to build girls’ confidence at camp, technical instruction is intertwined with instructors’ roles as emotionally supportive mentors for their campers. Complicating technical communication’s prioritization of clarity and efficiency, my study suggests that for girls learning STEM subjects, and for many other disenfranchised audiences, truly effective technical communication must also be trust-building advocacy work.

Game construction learning approaches have seen increased interest for computational learning and digital literacy in K-12 education, but the paucity of research on game text-based scripting skill development identifies a gap in the literature. This case study investigated text-based scripting skill development and intrinsic motivation with a class of eighth grade students who were engaged in game construction. The study participants were 20 students and their teacher. The case involved the open-ended, project-based game construction class. Data sources included classroom observations, teacher and student interviews, survey responses, and student game scripts. The findings showed that engaging in game construction with peer collaboration and teacher support helped the students develop scripting skills. Game scripting skill development involved the use of language arts and mathematic skills. Challenges in game scripting included student debugging difficulties, as well as technology issues that distracted the students from their work with battery charging problems, Wi-Fi connectivity drops, and broken computers. The students showed moderate intrinsic motivation toward text-based scripting in game construction and appeared to prefer design artwork to scripting. Implications suggest that developing game scripting skills promoted the practice of language arts literacy and mathematics concepts. Game scripting was an engaging self-directed autonomous learning experience. Text-based scripting development is suggested to be a distinct digital literacy.

Digital storytelling as a pedagogical practice has been extensively explored as a means of increasing engagement, developing 21st century skills such as creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and communication, and refining digital literacies in students. However, there is a lack of data on how the use of multimodal digital tools can be used to explore pervasive social issues such as bullying in adolescents. In this study, a group of grade seven students provided their views and self-assessed their levels of empathy and understanding for victims of bullying, bullies and bystanders prior to and after the completion of a digital storytelling project. Using Likert scale data, along with an in-depth content analysis of the stories and presentations the students produced, the study explored whether participation in this digital storytelling project led to a noticeable and measurable impact on their understanding of and empathy for victims of bullying, bullies and bystanders.

This study examined the critical digital practices and pedagogies of two professors from two different Canadian provinces – Ontario and British Columbia. Employing a qualitative multi-site case study methodology and a tri-theoretical framework that I refer to as a Critical Intersectional Technological Integration framework (CITI), I investigated the meaning of digital and critical literacy within mandatory educational texts such as provincial curriculum documents and syllabus statements. I engage with how educators mobilized these texts to become critical digital literacy learners, producers, and communicators of knowledge. This study provides a detailed analysis of how two professors understand their pedagogical conceptualizations and enactments of critical digital pedagogies and lessons learned in regard to future pedagogy and practice. Several significant findings emerged from this research study. First, the two professors’ teaching and schooling experiences revealed how intertwined equity and diversity issues were, which influenced their pedagogies and practices as critical digital literacy teacher educators. Second, the critical digital literacy teacher educators modelled expansive definitions of literacy to include the consumption, critique, and creation of digital content. Third, deliberately exploring issues of diversity and equity was a strategy employed by the professors to support teacher candidates to appreciate the complexity of education and arrive at the understanding that schooling, pedagogy, and curriculum are not neutral practices. I argue that this work should not be left solely to teacher educators; rather, teacher preparation programs must play a larger role in preparing and supporting teacher educators with both the technical and pedagogical know-how of meaningfully designing and integrating critical digital practices into their courses.

Thesis advisor: Leigh Patel / Digital literacies have become central in today's society, used in various personal and public incarnations (Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear, & Leu, 2008), occupying prominent space in social and professional worlds (boyd, 2014; Leu et al., 2011). Despite digital literacies' centrality in society, schools have a notoriously difficult time integrating these into curriculum and instruction (O'Brien & Scharber, 2008). Accordingly, I asked: How do teachers in a large, public comprehensive secondary school navigate the challenges and benefits of digital literacies within the structure of Washington High, the curriculum, and their pedagogy? Using a case study design both ethnographic and collaborative in nature, I examined teachers' beliefs and practices to investigate how digital literacies were being used in the classroom, as well as why. Data included a school-wide survey, participant interviews and observations with six teachers, and informal meetings with school staff, most notably the vice-principal. Data was analyzed through the lens of theories of literacy curricular design (New London Group, 1996) and an eye toward New Literacies (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006). Notable results include the finding that technology at Washington often plays out in fairly traditional, teacher-directed, "wine in new bottles" (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006, p. 55) sorts of ways. However, this study also concludes that why this is so moves far beyond these teachers' individual beliefs and practices. Their contexts (unreliable technology, control of uses imposed by the administration), their cultures (narratives of adolescents needing protection from themselves and others), and compulsory schooling itself (traditional conceptions of time and space, narrow definitions of success, high-stakes testing and teacher evaluations) all play dynamic and complicated parts in how digital literacies get taken up, along with teachers' own beliefs and practices. As such, I draw upon theories of complex personhood (Gordon, 1997) and complexity thinking (Davis & Sumara, 2008) in positing ways digital literacies may be utilized in relationship to schools. Implications address these practices' collaborative, creative potentials to transform schools. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

abstract: For the past few decades, feminist researchers have worked tirelessly to recover the history of American women’s sewing – both the artifacts made and the processes, practices, and identities linked to the objects produced. With the transition to the digital age, women are still sewing, but they are inventing, making, and distributing sewn objects using platforms and pathways online to share knowledge, showcase their handicrafts, and sell their wares. This dissertation examines contemporary sewing and asks how digital practices are extending and transforming the history of women’s sewing in America. I place my findings against the backdrop of women’s history by recounting how and why women sewed in previous eras. This dissertation demonstrates how past sewing practices are being repeated, remixed, and reimagined as women meet to sew, socialize, and collaborate on the web. The overall approach to this project is ethnographic in nature, in that I collected data by participating alongside my female subjects in the online settings they frequent to read about, write about, and discuss sewing, including blogs, email, and various social media sites. From these interactions, I provide case studies that illuminate my findings on how women share sewing knowledge and products in digital spaces. Specifically, I look at how women are using digital tools to learn and teach sewing, to sew for activist purposes, and to pursue entrepreneurship. My findings show that sewing continues to be a highly social activity for women, although collaboration and socializing often happen from geographically distanced locations and are enabled by online communication. Seamstresses wanting to provide sewing instruction are able to archive their knowledge electronically and disperse it widely, and those learning to sew can access this knowledge by navigating paths through a plethora of digital resources. Activists are able to recruit more widely when seeking participants for their causes and can send handmade goods to people in need around the globe. Although gender biases continue to plague working women, the internet provides new opportunities for female entrepreneurship and allows women to profit from their sewing skills. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2016

abstract: This dissertation discusses how Twitter may function not only as a tool for planning public protest, but also as a discursive site, albeit a virtual one, for staging protest itself. Much debate exists on the value and extent that Twitter (and other social media or social networking sites) can contribute to successful activism for social justice. Previously, scholars' assessments of online activism have tended to turn on a simple binary: either the activity enjoyed complete success for a social movement (for instance, during the Arab Spring an overthrow of a regime) or else the campaign was designated as a failure. In my dissertation, I examine a Twitter public-relations campaign organized by the New York Police Department using the hashtag #MyNYPD. The campaign asked citizens to tweet pictures of themselves with police officers, and the public did, just not in the way the police department envisioned. Instead of positive photos with the police, the public organized online to share pictures of police brutality and harassment. I collected six months of tweets using #MyNYPD, and then analyzed protestors' rhetorical work through three lenses: rhetorical analysis, analysis of literacy practices, and social network analysis. These analyses show, first, the complex rhetorical work required to appropriate the police department's public-service campaign for purposes that subverted its original intent; second, the wide range of literacy practices required to mobilize and to sustain public attention on data exposing police abuse; and third, the networked activity constituting the protest online. Together, these analyses show the important work achieved within this social justice campaign beyond the binary definition of successful activism. This project shows that by increasing our analytical repertoires for studying digital rhetoric and writing, scholars can more accurately acknowledge what it takes for participants to share experiential knowledge, to construct new knowledge, and to mobilize connections when engaging online in public protest. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2016

Magister Educationis - MEd / Rwanda has taken a strong move towards language-in-education policy shift whereby English became the sole medium of instruction in 2008, despite her rich linguistic diversity. The language shift occurred at the time when the country had resolutely embraced Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) as one of the country’s key development plans for socioeconomic development. In spite of these changes, research on multilingualism and digital identity in Rwanda is very limited. Given the pressing need for Rwanda to play an increasing role in the global economy, it is important to explore the ways in which the new generation negotiates multilingual digital identities in second language learning. The aim of this study, therefore, was to investigate the ways in which secondary school learners used digital technologies to negotiate new identities in two or more languages in order to understand the implications for English second language learning in the multilingual context of postcolonial Rwanda. Specifically, my interest was to examine Grade 11 learners’ current digital practices and the ways in which existing multilingual repertoires were drawn on as resources in navigating digital literacies. I also aimed at understanding how such practices could be harnessed as resources for English second language learning in the classroom. This study is informed by post-structural theories of identities as well as of Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, field and capital. The post-structural frame of analysis underlying issues of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) has also been important to establish a bridge between the learners’ digital practices and their English learning processes. It draws on debates around digital literacies, multilingualism, and identity, theories of access to ICTs and digital technologies and English as Additional Language Acquisition. The research sites were two urban based high schools mainly selected for their proximity to digital technologies, namely cyber cafes and/or computer laboratories and by their representativity in terms of gender and subject choices. Drawing on the qualitative research tradition and informed by ethnographic methodology, the study investigated Grade 11 learners’ insider views of the affordances of digital technologies for language learning. To reach this end, non-participant observations, focus group discussions and a questionnaire were used. Issues of research ethics namely, informed consent, anonymity and confidentiality were adhered to throughout the research process. With regard to access to technologies, the research findings reflect Bourdieu’ post-structural theory notion of ‘habitus’ as they show that the social dimensions the learners were involved in influenced their engagement with several digital technologies. In relation to Warschauer’s model of access, this study was able to identify the following: (1) material access’ linked to the learner’s access to the internet connection; (2) skills access’ concerning the learner’s ability to interact with computers and communicate with peers or fellow friends by typewriting and (3) usage access’ associated with the learner’s opportunity to use ICT facilities. The findings also generated insights into the learners’ construction of multiple digital identities and the fluidity and hybridity of ‘youth digital literacies’. The learners created a form of global digital identity by simply interacting or engaging with various multimodal literacies. Findings also indicated that learners negotiated digital identities by immersing themselves in Social Networking Sites (SNS) that fall under ‘Web 2.0’, an online platform which online users make use of to interact, share and perform different activities, focusing chiefly on social media. It was observed further that learners constructed a national language identity in the digital world by visiting mostly popular sites whose medium of communication was the national vernacular “Kinyarwanda”, thus stimulating the sense of national language identity of ‘ Rwandaness’. Additionally, it was apparent that Grade 11 learners had a great sense of attachment to their language as a significant characteristic of their digital practices through ‘translanguaging’ which became one of the resources in the digital space. The findings also indicate that technology served as a bridge between learners’ digital practices and their learning of English as an additional language, although language power relations were apparent as English was conferred a status of symbolic capital. The study concludes that various forms of access to ICTs do not only inform and strengthen Grade 11 learners’ process of learning English as additional language, but also support the construction of their multiple identities. There is a need to capitalize on face-to-face interaction and integrate ICT in teaching and learning so that learners can create their own learning space whereby they construct their digital identities as adolescents in the different languages they get exposure to.

Magister Artium - MA / This ethnographically-orientated intervention explored how members of a Cape Flats reading club “took hold” (Street, 2009) of digital literacy in their engagement with online fictional stories accessed by a mobile phone. The Masifunde reading club takes place inside the premises of a church located in one of the most impoverished and resource-constrained communities on the outskirts of Cape Town. The club is connected to a bigger sets of clubs under the Nal’ibali reading-for-enjoyment campaign seeking to create nurturing spaces for learning by introducing children to literacy through story-telling. I wanted to diversify and increase the literacy material available by introducing mobile phones to the club. This research paper is theoretically grounded in the New Literacy Studies (NLS) framework which argues that the social turn and digital turn to literacy have transformed literacy. I adopted an ethnographic approach to literacy in order to understand how mobile reading is ‘taken hold’ of within an already established activities of the club which are conceptualized using Goffman’s (1983) “interaction order”. Goffman’s (1983) “interaction order” was used to map the established print-based interaction order and then to examine the practices of reading online fiction and the materiality of the mobile phone as taken hold of within this interaction order. The notion of ‘taking hold’ of was further extended to reveal the ways in which mobile stories were resemiotized in the shared practices of the club members. The introduction of mobile phones is viewed within Prinsloo’s (2005) “placed resources” concept that pays attention to the specificity of the context in how the phone was taken hold of. What is more, through Goffman’s (1956) back stage and front stage concept, I was able to trace using Ker’s (2005) “text-chain” concept, how interactions in the back region WhatsApp group chat moved across space-time to the front stage interactions in the Saturday club event. This revealed the ways in which the uses and valuing of the phone changed across these spaces, with the phone being naturalised in the back stage, but being treated as a difficult object in the front stage sessions by the volunteers, while the children took up the phones in easy ways consistent with the existing interaction order and therefore as placed resources. The study reveals that triumphalist claims about uptake of digital technologies in resource-poor contexts and dismal internet connectivity need to be treated with caution.

Submitted by Aline Batista (alinehb.ufpel@gmail.com) on 2017-06-29T19:28:15Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Dissertacao_Aline_de_Lima_Bazerque.pdf: 1133407 bytes, checksum: 9976484a04ef08d5a18e496ec643f22c (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Aline Batista (alinehb.ufpel@gmail.com) on 2017-07-03T20:24:50Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertacao_Aline_de_Lima_Bazerque.pdf: 1133407 bytes, checksum: 9976484a04ef08d5a18e496ec643f22c (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-07-03T20:24:57Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertacao_Aline_de_Lima_Bazerque.pdf: 1133407 bytes, checksum: 9976484a04ef08d5a18e496ec643f22c (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-03-22 / Sem bolsa / Em tempos de globalização nos quais pesquisas positivistas e estudos modernistas são questionados, a concepção de sujeito social como homogêneo e preexistente aos discursos que lhe atravessam parece não dar conta das discussões e reflexões que surgem sobre identidades de gênero (MOITA LOPES, 2006). Por conseguinte, faz-se necessário olhar para essas diversas identidades de gênero como fragmentadas, heterogêneas, fluidas e em processo de construção contínuo (HALL, 2000) através de performances discursivo-identitárias (PENNYCOOK, 2006; BUTLER, [1990]2003). Sendo o homem branco cisgênero e heterossexual classificado como padrão dominante, esse trabalho tem por objetivo principal analisar performances discursivas de pessoas LGBTs para compreender de que forma os novos letramentos digitais impulsionam a compreensão e o empoderamento de identidades de gênero e sexualidade desviantes do padrão. Para isso, busco suporte teórico em uma Linguística Aplicada Indisciplinar e no socioconstrucionismo propostos por Moita Lopes (2002, 2006, 2013a, 2013b), nas performances e performatividades elucidadas por Pennycook (2006), nas teorias queer (BUTLER, 1993, 2003) e no entendimento de novos letramentos digitais discutido por Knobel e Lankshear (2007), Lemke (1998) e Moita Lopes (2010). Ao gerar e analisar os dados, apoio-me em uma etnografia virtual (HINE, 2000), realizando observações etnográficas e entrevistas narrativas via redes sociais virtuais com LGBTs, analisadas segundo as pistas indexicais de Wortham (2001). A pesquisa aponta para o empoderamento de LGBTs a partir da mobilidade e da coletividade na construção de discursos que a Web 2.0 e a 3.0 possibilitam ao disponibilizarem informação e propiciarem a comunicação. / In a globalization time in which positivist research and modernism studies are questioned, a view of the social subject as homogeneous and pre-existent to discourses that cross it does not seem to run the errand for the discussions and reflections that arise on gender identities (MOITA LOPES, 2006). Therefore, it is necessary to look at the various gender identities as fragmented, heterogeneous, fluid and in a continuous construction process (HALL, 2000) through discursiveidentity performances (PENNYCOOK, 2006, BUTLER, [1990] 2003). Being the White cisgender and heterosexual man classified as the main standard to be followed, this paper has the main objective to analyze the discursive performances of LGBT people so that we can comprehend the way new digital formats boost an understanding and empowerment of deviant gender and sexuality identities. For this, I seek theoretical support in an Indisciplinary Applied Linguistics and in the socioconstructionism proposed by Moita Lopes (2002, 2006, 2013a, 2013b), in performances and performativities elucidated by Pennycook (2006), queer theories (Butler, 1993, 2003) and in the new digital literacies discussed by Knobel and Lankshear (2007), Lemke (1998) and Moita Lopes (2010). In generating and analyzing data, I rely on a virtual ethnography (HINE, 2000), making ethnographic observations and narrative interviews via virtual social networks with LGBTs analysing them according to the indexical clues proposed by Wortham (2001). The research signals to the empowerment of LGBTs happening due to the mobility and collectivity in the construction of discourses that Web 2.0 and 3.0 enable when they make information available and facilitate communication.