Digital texts and media are central to the ways today’s learners make sense of the world, both in and out of schools. Effective literacy instruction involves helping students develop media and digital literacies that reflect the multimodal texts they consume and create. In a globally connected communications landscape, these texts often reflect socially and politically charged topics that shape social media and civic discourse. How to navigate complex social issues using digital texts and tools matters to English language arts (ELA) teacher education as it prepares educators for a rapidly shifting educational, communications, and political landscape.
The current moment demands a commitment to humanization. Media messages that dehumanize Black and Brown bodies persist (Stamps, 2024), while emerging technologies, including generative AI, can reproduce dehumanizing representations, biases, and forms of exclusion (Buolamwini, 2024). At the same time, the federal government’s policies continue to defund schools and ban diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts — misrepresenting their positive impact on student belonging, achievement, and democracy (Miller, 2024).
These dehumanizing narratives and actions have profound material and psychological consequences, particularly for marginalized students (Love, 2019). Projects in humanization (San Pedro & Kinloch, 2017) elevate young people’s dignity (Filipiak, 2024) by affirming their communities, cultures, and identities — boldly combatting legacies of social injustice.
Drawing from the experiences of two high school teachers in different contexts: one teaching social studies (civics) and one teaching English language development (ELD), we explored how these educators came to engage digital texts in ways that resonate with young people’s everyday literacy practices and social contexts. By examining the humanizing motivations and practices of teachers who leverage new media to engage current sociopolitical topics in history and English courses, we illustrate how critical digital literacy (CDL) can purposefully counter the dehumanizing ways digital texts are often used to represent and discuss marginalized communities.
We also specify implications for ELA teaching and teacher education. This study learns from teachers how the “why” of teaching digital texts influences the “how” of their own practice. Both cases address immigration, a topic replete with dehumanizing messaging and media, further necessitating a CDL practice that teaches for social justice. Curriculum can also serve as a portal to humanization when students see themselves reflected in the course content (Sealey-Ruiz, 2018).
Teaching During Anti-Immigrant Attacks
The current moment has seen an escalation of anti-immigrant rhetoric, policies, and state-sanctioned violence. Within the first 20 days of Donald J. Trump’s second presidential term, he signed 10 executive orders (EOs), accompanied by nearly a dozen interrelated policy changes attacking immigrants’ rights. These EOs included declaring a national emergency at the border, forcing asylum seekers to be stationed in Mexico before US hearings, and expanding expedited removal (National Immigrant Justice Center, 2025).
The Southern Poverty Law Center (2019) reported on “The Trump Effect,” a phenomenon where students reproduce the xenophobic, racist, homophobic, transphobic, and misogynistic rhetoric they observe from political leaders. Federally propagated media and messaging have framed immigrants and dark-skinned peoples as threats, criminals, and “garbage” (Luscombe & Popat, 2026), reinforcing racialized hierarchies through public discourse.
These dynamics reverberate across schools. Social media has intensified these harms, with misinformation and disinformation circulating within immigrant communities. Social media TikTok influencers promoted false messaging suggesting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) “checkpoints” in Sacramento, California, and grocery store raids in Washington, DC (Joffe-Block, 2025), exacerbating panic and prompting immigrants’ rights lawyers to respond. However, even when misinformation has been dispelled, the damage is already done (O’Byrne et al., 2022).
The effects on schools nationwide are severe. In Chicago, Illinois, a second-grade teacher reported student attendance dropping by 50-80% citywide (Garsd, 2025, para. 1). Elementary teachers in Boston, Massachusetts, schools noted similar absenteeism trends (Hurwitz & Dias, 2025, paras. 1-3). A middle school teacher described frequent student questions about I.C.E. presence, with some youth asking whether they should prepare as they would for an active shooter drill (paras. 5-6). At the same time, students continue to lead solidarity walkouts nationwide (Asmar, 2025).
These stories are not isolated. Teachers are crucial responders to state-sanctioned dehumanizing tactics. In Oklahoma, teachers are partnering with elected officials to oppose legislation requiring proof of US citizenship for school enrollment (Singh, 2025, para. 4). School districts are resisting I.C.E. by training administrators and teachers on EOs, identifying judge-mandated warrants, and distributing “Know Your Rights” red cards (American Civil Liberties Union, n.d., “Immigrants’ Rights”) outlining constitutional protections. Districts are also providing urgent multilingual support for immigrant families and students (American Civil Liberties Union Maine, n.d., “Know Your Rights Video Series”).
In this study, the teachers demonstrated how humanizing CDL pedagogies create pathways for students’ sensemaking. Their justice-oriented standpoints and humanizing practices shaped how they engaged students with digital texts, facilitated dialogue about sociopolitical issues, and cocreated spaces of community and belonging. By embedding historical and contemporary digital texts, they supported students in critically analyzing dominant discourses and using literacies as a tool for humanization. These pedagogies help students challenge misinformation, counter dehumanization, and work toward a more just world that honors human dignity.
Conceptual Framework
This study was grounded in a conceptual framework that brings together critical digital literacies (CDL) and self-reflexivity (SR) to examine how teachers select and teach digital texts through humanizing orientations. These concepts helped us analyze how teachers’ identities, histories, and pedagogical practices inform their sensemaking about digital texts, sociopolitical topics, and students’ lived experiences.
Critical Digital Literacies
Literacies are plural, multimodal, social practices that offer ways to analyze and create texts, which includes acknowledging that technologies and literacies are not neutral and that educators must attend to longstanding inequities and identity-based discrimination as they teach with and about digital tools (National Council of Teachers of English, 2018). As this study explored teachers’ humanizing pedagogies with digital texts, we situated ourselves within conversations around CDL, those that explicitly address the role of power, media representation, and platform discourse (Ávila & Pandya, 2013). Doing so provides common language and frameworks for understanding the texts, technologies, skills, and contexts of working with digital media in classrooms.
As literacy learning is a multiple, situated, and cultural meaning-making practice (Street, 1984), the meaning of texts is socially produced and historically situated. As digital texts are historical and ideological artifacts, engaging them involves layered skills beyond neutral consumption and production. We anchor our definition of CDL in the work of Freire (1970), who, in articulating liberation as a two-part process of naming and transforming oppressive conditions, framed literacy practices both as reading the word and the world. These approaches helped us to consider texts and tools through lenses of power, representation, and agency in the world (Bacalja et al., 2022).
CDL in ELA Classroom Practice
In this study, digital texts encompassed the multimodal texts students encounter, interpret, and produce through digital media, including video and film, social and news media, digitized print texts, and audiobooks. CDL involves not only learning and literacy with digital texts but also about the social contexts they operate within and the mediums they travel through as part of larger social ecologies (Nash, 2024; Nichols & Garcia, 2022). These social ecologies include the context of civic media and youth participation as consumers and producers (Jenkins et al., 2016).
For example, Kwon and de los Rios (2019) highlighted young people reading and speaking back to their racialized worlds through the use of a civic repair mobile app. Using digital tools within their Ethnic Studies course, students “problematized and interrogated the inequitable conditions of their communities” (p. 160), ultimately resisting deficit narratives and demonstrating the need for CDL in different content areas including social sciences.
Opportunities for young people to leverage digital tools to participate agentively in the media landscape both as producers and consumers can help promote social and civic engagement (Lyiscott et al., 2021), challenge discourses of domination (Janks, 2000), and offer alternative media that challenge racialized harm and advance affirming, truth-bearing narratives (Share & Gambino, 2022). Media can serve as a powerful pedagogical tool, positioning digital texts as entry points for analyzing and resisting systemic oppression, including racism and nativism (Yosso, 2020). Alternative media production and challenges to mainstream narratives through counterstorytelling offer a means of disrupting these racist discourses and exposing their systemic design (Baker-Bell et al., 2017; Kinloch et al., 2020).
Producing and sharing digital media and multimodal storytelling can have empowering effects for youth, including facilitating a sense of belonging. Wade (2022) explored how Black adolescent girls shared media on Facebook and Snapchat and established kin relationships in the process. Another study demonstrates how centering digital stories created by professional youth journalists can help students to engage humanizing literacy practices while also supporting teacher learning and curricular development (McBride et al., 2023). An ELD teacher found digital texts and critical media literacy valuable for supporting emergent bilingual students’ language acquisition, challenging deficit-based mainstream media about their communities, and composing local digital stories that celebrated their cultural histories from asset-based perspectives (Choudhury & Share, 2021).
Barnes and Marlatt (2024) offered a volume of examples of leveraging digital media in the ELA classroom as a humanizing process for identifying and challenging systemic power relations based on identity as situated in current political tensions. These include using popular media and videos to research colorism (Ramos & Turner, 2024) and supporting students’ critical analysis using screen recordings of digital media, leading to conversations on misinformation and surveillance (Green et al., 2024). Teachers and students can also learn to name and transform deficit-based media representations by engaging in inquiry that negotiates meaning, identifies internalized ideologies, and fosters transformative media analysis and production.
Self-Reflexivity: The Praxis Link in Teaching Digital Texts
Although some researchers have explored self-reflexive practices for helping students make informed judgements using digital media (Currie & Kelly, 2022), this study foregrounded teachers’ SR and examined how it shaped their standpoints, pedagogical commitments, and sensemaking as teachers of digital media.
From a humanizing standpoint, teachers’ pedagogical decisions must recognize individuals’ dignity, unpack oppression, and foster dialogue and societal transformation (Freire, 1970; Salazar, 2013). This is especially urgent in a US context, where the racialized and systemic dehumanization of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous peoples is perpetuated in schools (Camangian & Cariaga, 2021; Dumas & Ross, 2016). Too often, schools reproduce carceral systems and “spirit murdering” (Love, 2019, pp. 28-29) against Youth of Color through the ways white supremacy is embedded in K-12 institutions and society.
Humanizing approaches to teaching and learning, by contrast, nurture students’ full humanity, bridge their lived experiences inside and outside of school, and cocreate conditions for belonging (hooks, 1994). Culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogies (Muhammad, 2020), also a form of humanizing pedagogies, reveal that this work necessitates both inner critical reflection and outward knowledge-building, enabling teachers to understand the historical, cultural, racial, and sociopolitical realities shaping their students’ lives as well as their own (Sealey-Ruiz, 2018). Along these lines, Martinez et al. (2021) reminded teachers that for educators to build justice-engaged standpoints and transformative practices, they must engage in critical self-knowledge and an embodied praxis of solidarity with students.
We posit SR as a precursor for humanizing pedagogy, one that offers a vehicle for educators to critically assess their standpoints before facilitating discussion on topics of immigration, race, and systemic inequities in media or other texts. SR is a process of reflecting on self-home-place in relation to the world through the lens of power, oppression, and resistance. Qualitative researchers have called for a similar approach to research methodologies, with Esposito and Evans-Winters (2022) naming critical reflexivity as a way to examine identity, power, and socialization in relation to intersectional identity politics.
It is important to distinguish that SR moves beyond notions of reflection. Educators’ praxis, a dialectical process of thought and action, involves interrogation, reflection, values, and critical awareness geared toward transformation (Freire, 1970). Mora (2018) demonstrated how SR is central to teachers’ inquiry, not just as a personal endeavor, but as a dialogic and socially transformative one. Sealey-Ruiz (2018) advanced a need for teachers’ deep, sustained reflection as an archaeological endeavor, wherein educators “excavate” within themselves issues of identity and historical literacy.
Building from this framework, González et al. (2024) positioned the Archaeology of Self as foundational to educators’ racial literacy and culturally responsive and sustaining practices, emphasizing that teachers’ self-work shapes how they understand students, confront bias, and respond to structures of power. For this study, that connection helped clarify why teachers’ SR mattered for the selection and teaching of digital texts about identity, history, and sociopolitical life. This level of reflexivity moves beyond surface-level reflective practices traditionally found in teacher education and invites practitioners to interrogate their socialization and proximity to power (Mamikonyan et al., 2026).
We leveraged SR as a tool for understanding teachers’ standpoints (Mihailidis et al., 2021) or their identities as situated in multiple intersecting dimensions including race, class, gender, and as we emphasized in this study, history. By bringing together CDL and SR, we come to understand what teachers’ humanizing pedagogical approaches reflect about their sensemaking about texts and contexts.
In this study, sensemaking refers to the ways teachers narrate, interpret, and connect their identities, histories, pedagogical values, and sociopolitical contexts to the digital texts they teach. We considered how teachers’ identities, histories, and practices were reflected in their digital texts, topics, and approaches to teaching digital texts. Examining teachers’ SR allowed us an analytical frame to unpack the relationship between their standpoints, the digital texts they used, and the politically contested topics they taught. Guided by this framework, this study asked, “How do teachers’ SR standpoints shape their humanizing CDL pedagogies, including their selection and teaching of digital texts?”
Methods
This was a comparative qualitative case study that engaged purposive sampling to focus on two teachers working in distinct contexts (Miles et al., 2014) and who shared characteristics relevant to the inquiry. We placed two context-rich cases side-by-side to examine how teachers’ SR standpoints shaped their humanizing CDL pedagogies in distinct disciplinary and regional contexts. We used qualitative methods of interviews, teacher reflections, lesson artifacts, and theory-informed and emergent qualitative coding to engage a cross-case analysis of the phenomena at hand: teachers’ teaching methods, text selection, and what drove theirpedagogical choices.
Approaching the cases side-by-side allowed us to identify similar and distinct features of these teachers’ lived experiences, histories, and instructional practices and to identify what took hold across the two teaching contexts. Additionally, bounding the comparative qualitative case study design to two cases opened an opportunity for in-depth exploration.
Both cases featured Teachers of Color working in public schools in their home communities to guide students during a period of increasing political scrutiny and censorship surrounding discussions of race, immigration, and civic participation in US schools. Examining these cases together provided insight into the ways experienced educators working in distinct regional contexts (the Midwestern United States and Western United States) engaged humanizing CDL pedagogies in response to shifting sociopolitical pressures in their respective contexts.
Because our research question centered on how teachers narrated and made sense of the relationship between identity, history, digital texts, and pedagogy, we prioritized data sources that illustrated both teachers’ accounts of their pedagogical decision-making and examples of the texts, lessons, and classroom practices they described.
Settings, Context, and Case Selection
The two teachers in this comparative qualitative case study work in public high schools serving predominantly Students of Color in distinct regions of the United States. Teachers were purposefully selected from a pool of practitioners with whom we had collaborated in prior research. They were selected because each had extensive teaching experience, taught in a community to which they had personal roots, regularly engaged politically contested topics through digital texts, and provided multiple opportunities to examine how SR standpoints shaped humanizing pedagogy.
Regina (a pseudonym) was part of a study led by author Cherise McBride that explored teachers’ digital literacy in high school social studies classrooms between 2023-2025. She is a Black cisgender female veteran educator with 16 years of experience and at the time of the study taught civics in a large Midwestern U.S. urban district where she was born, raised, and educated. For the previous 5 years, Regina had worked at a magnet high school with a student population of approximately 85% Black/African American and 14% Latinx.
Fernando (a pseudonym), was part of a study led by Andrea Gambino that examined teachers’ standpoints and critical media literacy pedagogies in secondary ELA/ELD and Ethnic Studies classrooms between 2021-2023. He is a Filipino American cisgender male educator with 16 years of experience and has taught ELD and served in a Western US public high school with approximately 2,500 students enrolled. The school’s student population is approximately 69% Latinx, 12% Black/African American, 8% Filipino, 5% Asian, 2% American Indian, 2% BIPOC, <1% Pacific Islander, and 2% White, with 85% of students qualifying for free and reduced lunch. Like Regina, Fernando returned to teach in the school district where he attended school during his K-12 education. Both educators also describe their positionalities as teachers with commonalities to their students’ identities and demonstrate a strong commitment to their local contexts.
Both educators regularly address politically contested topics using digital texts related to immigration, race, and civic participation. Both Regina and Fernando actively seek out professional development opportunities, which was also how they first connected with us (Cherise as leading a civics and online reasoning project, and Andrea coaching ELA teachers, developing and scaling critical media literacy instruction). Finally, both teachers serve in several leadership capacities at their schools or districts, drawing from their teaching careers to support newer teachers and steer school and district-wide initiatives. We purposefully center these teachers’ experiential knowledge as critical to understanding, analyzing, and teaching about racialized injustice using digital texts.
Data Sources
We brought together data from two separate studies to construct the cross-case analysis. As part of the study with Regina, Cherise collected video, transcripts, and notes from (a) two one-on-one interviews with Regina about digital literacy, misinformation, and civics education, and (b) Regina’s participation in two online focus groups with other social studies teachers during the prior year. These data sources offered insight into Regina’s civic literacy instruction, her use of digital and media texts, and her reflections on teaching race, immigration, misinformation, and civic participation in her local context.
As part of the study with Fernando, Andrea collected video recordings, interview transcripts, field notes, lesson plans, and student work, including (a) one semistructured interview focused on teacher identity, standpoints, and critical media literacy; and (b) one lesson demonstration accompanied by Fernando’s reflections on his instructional praxis. This lesson-centered dataset focused on Fernando’s use of digital and multimodal texts within ELD and Ethnic Studies contexts, highlighting how his pedagogical choices, text selections, and curricular shifts directly addressed media representation, student identities, and sociopolitical concerns.
For this study, we both conducted virtual 60-minute follow-up interviews with the two teachers to further the inquiry. We codeveloped a shared interview protocol with 12 questions organized into three sections: (a) teaching background and curricular motivations, (b) teacher and student identities, and (c) digital texts and technology. The interviews were video recorded and transcribed using the Rev artificial intelligence transcription tool. These transcripts served as a common data source for the two cases. The shared protocol allowed us to revisit both cases through a common analytic focus while still maintaining the distinct disciplinary, regional, and relational contexts of each teacher’s prior study.
Data Analysis Procedure
Because SR centers the relationship between educators’ identities and their praxis, we began our analysis with two theoretically derived categories: teacher identity and lived experiences, and pedagogical values. As we identified patterns and themes within those two categories, we developed additional subcodes. These a priori categories reflect SR’s core premise that teachers’ standpoints, shaped by race, class, gender, history, and place, are inseparable from the pedagogical choices they make. Our coding process, therefore, combined deductive and inductive analysis. We began with theory-informed categories derived from SR and CDL, then developed emergent subcodes as patterns became visible within and across the two cases.
To begin the cross-case analysis, we identified existing data sources to ensure sufficient comparative data. During the 2024-25 academic year, we employed iterative cycles of memo-writing and qualitative coding of our data (Miles et al., 2014) guided by the research question. We held weekly research meetings to study data across the two a priori categories, placing cases side-by-side to surface convergent and divergent patterns. These meetings allowed us to compare coded excerpts, discuss emerging interpretations, and examine how each teacher connected identity, history, digital texts, and pedagogical choices.
As patterns emerged within the two categories, we developed subcodes inductively. Within teacher identity and lived experiences, the following subcodes emerged as important: place, hometown, culture, family, community, language, and justice. These identity subcodes were further refined to capture dimensions of racial identity, class, gender identity, nationality, ethnicity, histories, and family and community ties rooted in place.
Within pedagogical values, we identified patterns that we grouped into subcodes of school contexts, digital texts, topics, controversy, and disciplinary literacies. Together, these subcodes form what we term standpoints. We use the term standpoints to refer to the patterned relationship among teachers’ identities, histories, social locations, community ties, and pedagogical values. Analytically, standpoints became visible through the convergence of codes related to identity, place, family/community histories, justice commitments, school context, digital texts, and disciplinary practice. We analyzed sensemaking as the process through which teachers narrated, interpreted, and connected these standpoints to the digital texts, topics, and pedagogical practices they selected.
From these patterns, we composed a series of analytic memos to explore emergent themes related to teachers’ identities and strategies, identifying pedagogical values within and across cases. These memos helped us develop conceptual links between identity and pedagogy, and also put the two cases side-by-side. We then recoded interviews to examine connections between teachers’ beliefs and values and their classroom strategies, followed by another round of analytic memos structured around these linkages. We also referred to media mentioned by the teachers to gain a fuller understanding of their content and pedagogical approaches to immigration, which served as a form of triangulation of the data. We treated analytic sufficiency as the point at which repeated coding and memoing no longer produced substantially new relationships among SR, standpoints, digital texts, and pedagogical practices within the bounded cases.
Researcher Positionalities
Cherise is a teacher educator and literacy researcher, Black cisgender woman. She came to know Regina through a school-university partnership over several months related to civics and digital literacy instruction. As they conducted research activities, they also developed rapport via conversations about shared experiences as Black American women significantly raised by their grandparents in the 1980s. As a former high school English teacher, Cherise brought her own personal and pedagogical experiences to bear in their discussions and interpretations while remaining attentive to the ways her institutional role and lived experiences shaped the research relationship. Cherise also remained attentive to the ways her role as a university-based researcher shaped access, authority, and interpretation in relation to Regina’s school-based expertise.
Andrea, also a teacher educator, has collaborated with Fernando since 2021 through her doctoral research on teachers’ uses of critical media literacy pedagogies in secondary English and Ethnic Studies. Their sustained collaboration supported ongoing dialogue about teaching, identity, and the sociopolitical contexts shaping ELD and Ethnic Studies education. These conversations invited reflexive examination about positionality, including Fernando’s experiences as a Filipino American cisgender male educator and Andrea’s perspectives as a white Italian American cisgender woman in teacher education and former secondary English and social studies teacher. Andrea also considered how race, class, educational trajectories, institutional position, and prior teaching experience shaped what she noticed, emphasized, and questioned in Fernando’s data.
Across both cases, our analytic conversations included attention to the ways our relationships with the teachers, our prior teaching experiences, and our roles as university-level researchers and teachers educators shaped the construction and interpretation of the cases.
Findings
Across the two cases, we found that teachers’ SR standpoints shaped both why they selected certain digital texts and how they used those texts to support humanizing CDL pedagogies. To preserve the teacher voices and their own storytelling about their pedagogical decisions, we present the findings (see Table 1) across two vignettes for each teacher organized around (a) standpoints (identity and history), and (b) digital texts and CDL approaches.
Table 1
Findings: Standpoints, Digital Texts, and CDL Pedagogies
| Standpoints | Digital Texts and CDL Pedagogies | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Regina | Fernando | Regina | Fernando | |
| Identity Racial Identity Class Gender Identity Nationality Ethnicity Histories Family & Community Place Schooling | X X X X X X X X | X X X X X X X X | Digital Texts/Content - An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (1991) paired with digital news media - Mike Brown v. Donald Trump digital news coverage and comparing representations of George Floyd protests / January 6, 2021 Insurrection - Online articles, social media, and primary/secondary source examples - Music, film, and digital research connecting personal, cultural, and historical experiences | Digital Texts/Content - Digital identity posters - Wellness check-ins using Google Forms and Mentimeter< - Patron Saints of Nothing (Ribay, 2019) in print and audiobook format paired with Vice News reporting and digital media about Rodrigo Duterte; - Critical digital letter-writing to President Duterte - Instagram posts and YouTube videos about I.C.E. raids paired with CNN, The Guardian, and “Know Your Rights” multimedia - Podcasts, documentaries, and first-person digital accounts (migration and family separation) |
| Topics - Immigration - Xenophobia - Patriotism | Topics - Identity - Governance - Immigration - State-sanctioned violence |
|||
| Pedagogical Values - History - Belonging | Pedagogical Values - History - Belonging - Family & Community - Place |
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| Pedagogical Practices - Questioning - Discussing - Composing - Analyzing Sources - Critical Thinking - Reading | Pedagogical Practices - Questioning - Discussing - Composing - Analyzing Sources - Critical Thinking - Reading |
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Case 1 Regina: Humanizing Critical Digital Literacy Pedagogies
Regina’s narrative began by tracing her own journey as an educator and her experiences as a Black woman in America. Her case shows how she brings her own standpoints, her students’ identities, and critical questioning frameworks into her teaching with digital texts.
Standpoints: Identity and History
Regina is a veteran educator with 16 years of experience teaching the same large urban school district where she was born, raised, and educated. She cites her own educational experiences as impetus for who and how she teaches, reflecting in a one-on-one interview, “I got to where I am because I had bad experiences.”
As a student who loved history, Regina often found herself in uncomfortable situations where she felt judged for the schools she attended and others seemed to question her intellect. She remembered how one college classmate, in front of a class of over 200 students, mocked her for not recognizing a Shakespearean reference of “et tu Brutus”: “I thought you were a history major. What kind of ghetto ass school did you go to?” the classmate said, followed by widespread laughter from her peers.
Regina recalled this story in the context of sharing her journey as a teacher and what has given her a sense of motivation: “I want to always teach my minority students, specifically my Black students, but my Black and Brown students. I want to help them because they deserve me.” Fast forward nearly two decades and in her 10th– and 12th-grade civics and history classrooms, Regina leverages her experiences, facilitating teaching that tackles the fraught sociopolitical moment head-on. She integrates digital texts within the district’s civics curriculum, which focuses on foundations of democracy, government, and students becoming civic actors in the world.
As she critically reflected on her use of district-approved curriculum maps, topics, and materials, Regina acknowledged that she will often “branch off and do [her] own little thing.” This adaptability draws from several influences, such as her extensive engagement with extramural professional development, where she actively seeks out additional training resources and frameworks and has obtained several certifications from public media organizations, including as a PBS Certified Media Literacy Educator (https://teach.kqed.org/p/certification).
As a civics and history teacher, Regina integrates current events and democratic principles into her curriculum, often prompting discussions on the meaning of Americanness and patriotism. She challenges students to critically examine the contradictions embedded in these concepts. During another one-on-one interview, she offered insights into her approach to teaching civics from a critical lens: “This is America. We have freedom of speech. We are always trying to state the freedoms and the glories that are America and it’s hypocritical.”
Regina’s teaching is deeply personal, reflecting an interconnectedness between her own identities and familial history:
My husband is a Marine vet. My father wanted to be a police officer. He was a police officer for a while, and he ended up leaving because of discrimination that he left. My grandfather was in the Korean War. My uncle was in the Vietnam War. My brother and my cousins were in the Persian war. … My grandfather’s great uncle fought in the Civil War. He came home in his uniform, and he was hung in Louisiana. So the reason why I’m passionate about it is because when people think of being patriotic, when people think about these different aspects … and we can’t talk about this, then I think about, well, what about my family?… My husband and everybody else, what about them and their sacrifices? When you think of the American dream and being patriotic, you’re not thinking about them.
For Regina, teaching about democracy and civic participation are not just disciplinary concepts. It is a way of making visible the sacrifices of Black Americans whose contributions to the nation have been historically erased or diminished. Her selection of digital texts and instructional materials seeks to broaden students’ understanding of patriotism beyond dominant narratives, ensuring that voices like those in her own family are centered as part of the conversation.
Digital Texts and CDL Practices
Within Regina’s storytelling about her practice, it becomes apparent that she ensures her teaching is not only aligned with required curricular standards but also attuned to the experiences and cultural contexts of her students. She pairs content-specific questions and several media-focused questioning frameworks, including those of the News Literacy Project (https://newslit.org/educators/resources/framework-for-teaching-news-literacy/), and Civic Online Reasoning (COR; https://cor.inquirygroup.org/). She offered a video classroom tour that showed how, drawing from COR materials, one classroom poster directed students to “Read Laterally” (https://cor.inquirygroup.org/curriculum/lessons/lateral-reading-poster/) and “Open More Tabs!!!”
The practice of lateral reading involves not staying on one webpage to consume information but, instead, investigating claims and author information across sites, asking questions such as “Who’s behind the information?” and “What do other sources say?” as part of evaluating authority and expertise (Breakstone et al., 2021; Wineburg & McGrew, 2019). Alongside her posters of those frameworks, Regina has posters of African kings such as Mansa Musa and a series of large regional maps displaying the world. During a classroom tour, Regina emphasized, “Notice the Middle East in the middle,” before describing that her class involved referring to that map a lot recently, linking to current news about Palestine and Israel.
Regina explained in an interview how she leverages media as a bridge for engaging students in relevant discussions about real world contexts and current issues while cultivating digital literacy. In the second semester of the course, she introduces students to a timeline of American music starting with African roots and moving to the 1600s, blues, jazz, soul, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, electronica, hip-hop and more. One element of her curriculum is for students to further research these to complete a research project on the history of music. Here, and in other ways Regina draws from her own repertoires of practice with media, as she references superhero comic books, Instagram, and online articles when describing what she aims to teach her students around digital literacy.
For example, Regina shared that she relates her own use of websites like Buzzfeed to how she might teach students to determine trustworthy sources: “I like Buzzfeed, but I wouldn’t want my kids to get information from Buzzfeed. … It’s somebody else [reporting the information]; it’s too secondary. It’s like secondary squared.” She offered an example of a Beyoncé interview, where rather than a summary or “fourth-hand interpretation,” which could be full of bias, she would prefer accessing source material directly from the interview. She broke it down even further in the way she would explain the concept of primary versus secondary sources to students by likening the process to playing a game of telephone. Regina also includes digital media from her early childhood that she hopes will help expand student perspectives.
A central digital text in her instruction is a song from her coming-of-age, titled “There Are No Cats in America” from the animated musical film An American Tail (Nibbelink & Wells, 1991). Regina encourages students to use questioning frameworks to analyze the context of the film and allegorical representations of oppression and power. She describes how the protagonist, Fievel Mousekewitz, emigrates from Russia with his family to the US to escape an oppressive regime, drawing parallels to historical and contemporary migration experiences. Regina highlights a particular scene where the mice, representing various cultural backgrounds (one from Italy, and the other from Ireland), share their struggles and hopes aboard the ship, culminating in their collective refrain: “But there are nooo cats in America! And the streets are paved with cheeeese!”
This moment becomes a focal point for student analysis, prompting them to examine multiple perspectives on migration and the myths of the American dream. Regina emphasizes that discussing “emigration with an e” (the reasons and circumstances compelling people to leave their countries) broadens students’ understanding beyond the dominant narratives of immigration. Her instructional approach underscores the importance of integrating omitted historical contexts into civics education, which her use of digital texts and questioning frameworks helps support. This also allows students to widen their understanding of what constitutes Americanness by considering how migration, forced movement, exclusion, and the treatment of migrants and refugees have shaped US history and the present.
In using digital media created at least a decade before any of them were born, Regina’s curricular choice also demonstrates the longstanding history of present-day injustices. In this way, Regina uses the film to challenge dominant narratives that frame immigration as individual choice, threat, or burden, instead guiding students to consider migration as historically situated, shaped by oppression, hope, and unequal promises of belonging.
Regina’s commitment to belonging was also tested by shifting migration patterns in her school community. She noted the presence of migrant students in her classes, with students from Haiti, Ecuador, Mexico, Libya, and Venezuela. Some students’ first language is a language other than English, including French and Spanish. Even with Regina’s efforts to offer a broadened view of migration and community, she described noticing recent conflict between her US-born Black students and new immigrant communities and students: “I always thought up until this year that I was great. I was an expert at creating a safe space, but then I realized within the last 3 weeks, that it’s only conditional depending on who the group is.”
Regina’s school has more Venezuelan immigrants entering their classrooms than has been the case in the past. She described that in her predominantly Black school, students are welcoming of Mexican students, regardless of how long they have been in the United States. But in this new landscape of immigration, students can be less welcoming to newcomers. In this context, Regina’s constructions of safe spaces seem to have fallen through, as she described a “race-related conflict” among lower grades that has spilled over into her classroom of juniors and seniors.
But there has been race related conflict between the freshmen and sophomores. I don’t teach freshman or sophomores. I didn’t worry about it, but I actually saw it in my classroom, and that shocked me so much. So it was like, Okay, I’ve had — it shocked me so much because I’ve had these kids before. I’ve had you before. And I’ve taught you these lessons. But you still could be xenophobic towards this student, because they come from a different —. It’s a conditional classroom; classroom culture is conditional. But I didn’t know that till 3 weeks ago.
When confronted with these rifts in student community building and application of the content, Regina used the opportunity to reconsider her practices as a teacher. She acknowledged that despite having explored the dangers of xenophobia within historical patterns of immigration and emigration, her students were still capable of repeating xenophobic talking points advanced by anti-immigrant politicians of today. One such example was the repeated idea that Venezuelan migrants are a threat by moving to Chicago’s Black neighborhoods, and “They’re taking your jobs.” Regina heard students express “animosity” and complain, “They’re getting more money than us.” She shared her shock, “I was like, wait, y’all are — but y’all are my students. There Are No Cats in America 2 years ago. How do you think—? Is it because it’s in their neighborhood now? And so it’s blowing my mind…”
Maintaining a focus on community, history, and storytelling, Regina decided on a couple of ways to intervene. One way was to integrate social realities and media representations of the city where their school is and where most of her students live. For example, she had students discuss a local unarmed young person who was killed by law enforcement. “It wasn’t even history for them because it was their lived experience,” she said, pointing to the salience of current events in helping students connect to the course content around protest movements. These priorities were reflected in her decisions to bring in current media:
So if we’re looking at specifically, let’s do the Mike Brown versus the Donald Trump service, the insurrection versus the George Floyd protest, right. And so, I show students, for example, for the Trump protests, how it was portrayed before the actual insurrection the days before, and then different points of view from different news agencies.
She simultaneously integrated COR questioning strategies as a pedagogical tool, asking, “Can you trust this source?” or “What biases would the source have?” as a way to stimulate shared dialogue. Regina prioritized topics that help get students engaged, citing that she “love[s] teaching during election periods. It makes me so happy!” In looking forward to the 2024 election season she said,
Everything’s so polarizing already and it won’t be hard for me to draw out opinions because kids have opinions. What they don’t have is factual knowledge of what they can trust and not trust. That’s the easy thing to me because I find things that they care about.
Here, Regina uses common events to get students talking to one another and engaging their shared political contexts.
Another activity invited students to share their cultures with one another in a project. Her (recent) immigrant students were invited to share with the class more about where they came from and all students were provided a template to share what they wanted. Regina put her own spin on it by offering an example showing a broad view of culture as including historical events and media practices. The prompts, such as, “What was your favorite song?” offered students a portal to not only identify commonalities, but to learn things about each other they may not have assumed.
Regina discussed the example she used in class. She shared with students about her love for Lenny Kravitz’s songs, “It Ain’t Over Til It’s Over” and “Fly Away,” and vulnerably described living the impacts of social issues like the AIDS epidemic, 9/11, and US involvement in the 1998-99 war in Kosovo. Once again, Regina expanded notions of culture by showing how personal stories are rooted in historical events, media practices, and collective memory. Regina was clear that she wants students to identify patterns across history including the present day, particularly how “we’ve seen this movie before.” Even in the metaphors she used, Regina reinforced the ways she uses media as a disciplinary tool for understanding recurring forms of injustice and possibility.
Case 2 Fernando: Humanizing Critical Digital Literacy Pedagogies
Fernando’s narrative begins by tracing the ways his Filipino American identity, family and community histories, and return to teach in his hometown shape his commitments as an ELD practitioner. His case shows how he brings his own standpoints and students’ identities into instruction by using critical media literacy questions, multimodal texts, and historically grounded inquiry. His SR is evident in how he selects digital texts, frames inquiry, and teaches about identity, governance, immigration, and state-sanctioned violence.
Standpoints: Identity and History
As a Filipino American teacher working in the community where he was educated, Fernando framed his teaching as identity-affirming, historically grounded, and responsive to systemic erasure affecting students’ lives. His standpoint is shaped by his own identity, including his racial, national, and ethnic positioning as a Filipino American educator. He returned to teach at the high school he attended because he wanted students to see themselves reflected in their teacher’s identity and to challenge deficit narratives about their school as a “drop-out factory” (Interview Transcript 1). He also shared that as a young person, he “really wanted to…work with [his] city and one day, become a resource.”
Fernando’s standpoint is also influenced by histories rooted in family and community, place, and schooling. He reflected on his grandfather’s journey as a migrant farm worker and activist in the United Farmworkers’ Movement. Fernando commented on the disconnect between what he learned from his family and neighbors versus what he was taught in his K-12 education. In his first one-on-one interview, he recalled, “As a young person, I wanted change and I knew that, but I didn’t really have the language … to know where to begin or to name what I saw going on, like high asthma rates, pollution, and institutionalized racism.” He described ways that taking Ethnic Studies courses during his higher education helped him understand histories and contexts that were left out of the curriculum at school.
For Fernando, teaching ELD is more than scaffolding language instruction; it is a way to help students name the historical, racialized, and political conditions shaping their lives. Beyond his classroom, he has supported Ethnic Studies and ELD initiatives through grassroots organizing, policy development, school, and district contexts. Across his leadership roles, he said that he emphasizes the need for honoring students’ identities, histories, and literacies. He explained that in his school, many young people “still weren’t learning about who they are, the history [of] where they’re from, [or about]. … solidarity amongst different groups” (Interview Transcript 1).
Fernando framed his work as especially urgent in the current sociopolitical moment, where people’s identities and histories are under attack. In his second interview, he reflected that what concerns him is “literacy in all forms,” especially as students and teachers confront misinformation and increasingly polarized conditions that bear direct impacts on young people’s lives and communities. For Fernando, CDL is a form of real-time sensemaking through which students can interpret the social and political conditions they are actively experiencing. He described that literacy must also include historical understanding. In his second interview he stated the importance of asking how students learn to “interpret [media] and understand this from historical context,” instead of considering current social and environmental issues as disassociated from the past.
At the same time, Fernando described his teaching as relational and strategic. Reflecting on how to build relationships across different identities and perspectives, he described a core value of “moving at the speed of trust” (Interview Transcript 2). Referencing his work as a teacher and school-based leader, he recommended building trust with colleagues and students carefully, creating clarity, and developing the conditions for deeper understanding across differences. During his second interview, he also noted that, “if there’s no clarity on this and no understanding, it’s hard to move forward.” This stance shows how Fernando’s SR is guided by community accountability, bridge-building, and a commitment to solidarity.
Fernando draws from critical pedagogy, Ethnic Studies, critical media literacy, and Community and Cultural Wealth (Yosso, 2005) frameworks that deepen his asset-based view of students, families, and communities as sources of knowledge, history, and strength (Interview Transcript 1). He explained that these lenses help him make meaning of his own life while teaching toward “self love, self care, wellness, and a respect for his existence and his people’s histories.” Collectively, Fernando’s SR shapes both the purpose behind his CDL practices and the types of digital texts, topics, and activities he takes up in solidarity with students.
Digital Texts and Critical Digital Literacy Practices
Within Fernando’s storytelling about his practice, he uses digital texts to support students’ literacies and meaning-making about their identities, histories, and justice. Across his ELD teaching, digital and multimodal texts become tools for questioning, discussion, composing, source analysis, critical thinking, and reading about topics such as identity, governance, immigration, and state-sanctioned violence.
One starting point for Fernando’s CDL work is scaffolding identity-affirming media production. He described using digital poster production to help emergent bilingual students share who they are and to build pride, connection, and belonging in the classroom (Interview Transcript 1). Modeling this practice himself, he used “images, colors and shorthand print descriptions” to communicate aspects of his identity, teaching, and activism. He explained his openness with students by saying, “I want them to know who I am. I am very open with my students, and we’re here for each other.” Like Regina’s use of personal and cultural media to build classroom belonging, Fernando uses media-making to support self-expression and help develop a classroom culture where students can explore their identities, families, communities, and place, while also learning from perspectives outside of their own.
Fernando also foregrounds questioning as a core CDL practice by drawing on the Critical Media Literacy Framework: Conceptual Understandings and Guiding Questions (Kellner & Share, 2019, p. 8). He described critical media literacy instruction as “teaching [students] how to have a stronger sense of awareness of how information is communicated and shared, and presented to them” (Interview Transcript 1).
To help students deepen their critical awareness, he uses questioning routines that ask who created a text, how language and visuals shape meaning, and what perspectives are included or left out. He explained prompting students to think about “who wrote this, who makes money off of this, and what stories are being told or left out?” These questions help students analyze a range of digital texts (e.g., news and social media) as a regular classroom practice in relation to authorship, representation, and power, while also giving them practical strategies for interpreting what they were seeing online and disparities in their communities.
Fernando’s questioning practices were also responsive to students’ immediate sociopolitical concerns. Through daily digital wellness check-ins using the Google Forms application and the presentation tool Mentimeter, followed by class dialogue, he learned what students were seeing online and in their neighborhoods, including misinformation, police brutality, and threats toward undocumented communities. He then used critical media literacy questions to help students examine how these issues were represented in news and social media and consider possible responses. When one student shared that she was organizing a Black Lives Matter protest, Fernando created space for the class to discuss solidarity and civic participation. Here, CDL moved from personal reflection and media analysis toward collective sensemaking and action.
Pulling the threads of Filipino identities and histories, Fernando noted the importance of helping students see that social issues do not occur in a vacuum. To support these goals and ELD language acquisition, Fernando selected Ribay’s (2019) Patron Saints of Nothing, providing both print and audiobook formats.
The paired use of print and audiobook formats supported emergent bilingual students’ access to the text and development of English comprehension and listening skills. Fernando discussed that students “read the book and listen[ed] to the stories, and the narration” (Interview Transcript 1). This approach challenged commonplace assumptions at his school suggesting that rigorous ELD instruction must include only print-based texts by expanding the usage of aural digital texts. It also helped challenge deficit-based perspectives that ELD students should use simplified narratives instead of historically and culturally relevant texts.
Additionally, the Patron Saints of Nothing (Ribay, 2019) opened up space for students to discuss Filipino identity, histories of governance, and political violence in the Philippines. Fernando noted that students connected the text’s political conditions to family histories and experiences of migration, including migration shaped by political and economic instability. Fernando described students’ efforts to make sense of family support for President Rodrigo Duterte despite his authoritarian leadership and state-sanctioned killings.
To deepen their understanding, he supplemented the novel/audiobook reading with additional digital text sets, including news articles, images, and video clips from the Vice News’ Rodrigo Duterte digital archive (https://www.vice.com/en/tag/rodrigo-duterte/). “We had really great discussions, and students really rethought their perspectives on things” (Interview Transcript 1). The combination of Fernando’s usage of Ribay’s novel/audiobook and related digital texts supported students in developing more complex understandings of Filipino identities, forced migration, and political violence.
Fernando then extended this learning through a digital composition project. He assigned a critical digital letter-writing project, in which students addressed President Duterte, articulating what they had learned and how their thinking had shifted. When revisiting this learning moment in his second interview, Fernando described this work as moving beyond literacy alone:
It’s, like, it’s more than just literacies, it’s also histories — how do we interpret this and understand this from historical context. I ask questions like, “How do you see this in your community and in your life? How do we improve it based on what you’re learning now? What concerns and issues do you have?”
Students connected Filipino histories to their own family and migration stories. He explained in his first one-on-one interview: “A lot of students who weren’t Filipino were making connections to the countries they came from or their reasons for migrating. It was possible for us to dig deep into the text and to something historical and current.” Here, Fernando situated reading and listening to historical interpretation, writing, and civic reflection. His use of print, audio, news media, and letter writing positioned ELD students as capable interpreters of complex histories and as authors.
Fernando also has adapted his teaching in response to evolving current events affecting students’ lives. For example, through class discussions, he invited students to identify pressing social issues and select a topic of study. When students expressed fears about misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech circulating through Instagram posts and YouTube videos about undocumented communities, the class decided to focus on local I.C.E. raids. Though no students disclosed their status, they “asked a lot of questions about knowing your rights, what you should do, how to protect yourself, and your family, and your community” (Interview Transcript 1). In response, Fernando curated “Know Your Rights” brochures, digital explainer videos, infographics, and other materials from a local legal services center that students could use and share with their families. He paired these resources with digital primary sources accessible from local museum and library archives, including podcasts and documentaries featuring undocumented people’s experiences of migration, family separation, resistance, and survival.
Students also compared the Instagram posts and YouTube videos they saw with mainstream reporting from CNN and independent journalism from The Guardian. To further support his students and their families in knowing and exercising their rights, Fernando invited representatives from the local legal services center who had developed some of the classroom materials to respond to students’ questions. Fernando reflected,
There are moments when I may have this whole lesson plan lined up, but students bring in something that’s like, huh, let’s push that shit aside. And let’s talk about that. And when this happened, I learned, again, how sometimes we need to do that in the classroom. (Interview Transcript 1)
Fernando’s instructional pivot demonstrates how his CDL pedagogy moves beyond evaluating information. He uses digital texts, source comparison, and community expertise to respond to students’ immediate social realities while centering protection, solidarity, and community care.
Across these examples, Fernando’s CDL pedagogies connected literacies with histories. His careful selection of print and digital texts helps students situate present-day issues within longer histories of power, violence, and forced migration. Emphasizing the importance of historical context, Fernando explained,
Without students knowing the bigger context around how the present systems and powers at be exist in a larger period that goes back to the origin stories around how this place was colonized, we can’t get a sense of where we’ve been, and ways to build solidarity and community in ways that don’t repeat the systems of the past. (Interview Transcript 2)
Fernando’s case shows how SR informs humanizing CDL pedagogy by connecting identity, historical knowledge, multimodal text use, and students’ questions about justice. Like Regina, he uses CDL and digital texts as pathways for students to interpret the present, locate themselves within broader histories, and respond through reflection, composition, and solidarity.
Discussion/Implications
Taken together, these two teachers’ stories offer insight into how and why teachers use digital texts as part of a humanizing pedagogy. A key contribution of our analysis is that teachers’ SR shapes not only their pedagogical choices, but also the standpoints from which they select, interpret, and teach digital texts. Across the cases, SR helped Regina and Fernando connect justice-engaged standpoints, literacies with histories, and classroom practices that facilitate belonging and community. These connections matter in the current sociopolitical moment, as teachers and students navigate intensified misinformation, anti-immigrant rhetoric, racialized violence, and curricular censorship. These humanizing standpoints and CDL practices offer important implications for ELA teaching and teacher education.
Justice-Engaged Standpoints
SR is essential for understanding how teachers’ standpoints shape “why” and “how” they teach digital texts. Across the two cases, Regina’s and Fernando’s pedagogies were highly contextual and deeply connected to their identities, histories, and lived experiences. Their curricular choices were not neutral or incidental; they were informed by their own schooling experiences, family and community histories, and commitments to racial justice and immigrants’ rights.
Both teachers engaged in a SR process that foregrounded their identities and intersectionality, revealing how lived experiences shaped their critical engagement with education and society. They highlighted the limitations of standardized Westernized curricula and inequitable structures in public education, reflecting on personal experiences in their own schooling. These narratives help explain why both teachers felt responsible for creating classroom conditions where students could encounter histories, identities, and forms of knowledge often omitted from traditional curricula.
Through SR, both teachers problematized dominant curricular omissions, recognizing how their personal and societal histories inform their instructional approaches. A key theme across cases was their commitment to being the teachers they wished they had. Both returned to their hometowns to cultivate a sense of self- and communal solidarity in their students. Regina and Fernando emphasized the need for racially affirming curricula and histories reflective of students’ identities, demonstrating a deep sense of responsibility for integrating localized, justice-oriented topics into their teaching. Ultimately, their standpoints shaped how they approached digital texts about immigration, race, civic participation, political violence, and belonging.
This finding is particularly important now, when public schools are pressured to avoid or depoliticize discussions of race, migration, and structural injustice. Regina and Fernando demonstrate that humanizing CDL pedagogies require teachers to bring historical and political clarity to the texts students witness, rather than viewing digital literacy as a neutral set of skills. Regina’s pedagogical approach illustrates how her sense of identity is intertwined with historical inquiry and contextualizing the present moment. Fernando’s teaching similarly disrupts dominant narratives, using his own and his students’ lived experiences to challenge systemic inequities in media and education. Despite structural barriers, both teachers remain committed to expanding students’ critical perspectives through digital texts, discussion, and composing.
Supporting teachers in developing these practices requires institutional time and space for critical self-reflection and dialogue. As our research positionalities indicate, fostering authentic exchanges between teachers and researchers with shared commitments to justice-oriented education provides an opportunity to imagine humanizing CDL pedagogies. Regina’s and Fernando’s cases also highlight the importance of centering the experiential knowledge and pedagogical expertise of Teachers of Color in teacher education research and praxis, especially in a moment when histories and communities they teach are often marginalized or contested.
Literacies With Histories
A second contribution of this study is the finding that humanizing CDL pedagogies require literacies with histories. Equity-oriented teaching must attend to local histories, community knowledge, and legacies of place. We learned from Regina and Fernando that curriculum, teaching, and discussion of digital texts benefit from engagement with history as a central part of how students interpret the present.
Their praxis, rooted in SR, helps educators recognize that digital texts offer opportunities to examine history through a media landscape that is evolving and not static. Regina and Fernando demonstrated how textual practices build on the past, while making room for new information, formats, and modalities.
Regina, for example, integrates film from her own childhood into contemporary conversations about migration, xenophobia, and the promises and failures of Americanness. Her use of An American Tail helps students see how old narratives about immigration, belonging, and exclusion continue to circulate in new political contexts. Fernando’s pairing of literary media with contemporary news and social media similarly creates entry points for students to examine identity, migration, state-sanctioned violence, and community histories. He pairs the print and audiobook versions of Patron Saints of Nothing with Vice News reporting on Rodrigo Duterte, and asks students to compare Instagram posts and YouTube videos about I.C.E. raids with reporting from CNN, The Guardian, and “Know Your Rights” multimedia. Across both cases, these pairings help students connect present-day media messages to longer histories of power, resistance, and survival.
To support historical thinking practices like those seen in their cases, teacher education must move beyond the taken-for-granted assumption that students, as “digital natives,” are effectively navigating digital texts. Instead, this study shows how pairing pedagogical practices such as evaluating claims, questioning sources, discussion, composing, and media-making with digital texts such as film, audiobooks, and online materials can deepen students’ analysis of context, corroboration, and power. By inviting students to ask questions such as, “What happened here?” and “How did we get here?” Fernando and Regina make room for investigating the evolution of ideas and messaging in digital media.
For ELA teacher education, this suggests that digital text instruction should not be limited to platform skills, source evaluation, or media production alone. It should also support teachers in helping students historicize digital texts: to ask whose histories are present, whose are missing, what dominant narratives are being reproduced, and what more humanizing interpretations become possible. Teacher education can support practitioners in examining such questions as they develop lessons and curricula that reflect the contexts of their students.Additionally, teacher education might also embody the kinds of humanizing pedagogical approaches extended for teachers to practice in their own classrooms, ones that prioritize student curiosity, mistakes, lived social realities, compassion, and imagination.
Belonging and Community
Through these teachers’ SR, a pedagogical focus on belonging and community can be identified. Given their own experiences with race, class, migration, patriotism, schooling, and place, Regina and Fernando seek to offer students a sense that their full humanity belongs in the classroom. Regina, for example, is forthcoming about her own digital practices — her favorite childhood movies, news sites, and social media platforms for example — and invites dialogue with students in relation to pop culture, history, and current events as a way to practice disciplinary concepts like lateral reading and source corroboration. In the learning environments these teachers create, addressing breakdowns in community is part of the work of humanizing pedagogy. Regina tracks the conversations she has had with students and points them back to their community norms and the ethos of inclusion she has sought to promote through their classroom’s activities and conversations.
Similarly, Fernando uses interrelated practices to build community and generate solidarity. Through his own SR, he models critical self-knowledge through digital poster-making and invites students to share their identities, passions, concerns, and connections to pop culture. Like Regina, Fernando bridges these community-building practices into the digital texts and source corroboration activities he chooses. His attention to Ethnic Studies, Community and Cultural Wealth, and the Critical Media Literacy Framework supports a learning ecology where students can name what they are experiencing, ask questions about power, and connect their lives to broader histories.
This attention to belonging is crucial in a sociopolitical moment marked by racialized division, anti-immigrant violence, and efforts to narrow what can be discussed in classrooms. Regina and Fernando show that humanizing CDL pedagogies can create spaces where students are not only evaluating information, but also learning how to remain in relationship, build solidarity, and respond to harm. Both teachers use problem-posing and culturally affirming dialogue to bridge self-place-world connections within their studies of digital media and society. These critical and compassionate practices offer multiple ways for naming injustice and working toward informed solidarity, including using digital texts as tools for envisioning repair and healing.
These SR narratives also demonstrate the kind of frequent, often untold moments between teachers and students that cultivate relationality and community. Regina reveals this through humor, joy, and stories from her own childhood, using digital texts as a pedagogical tool for teacher-student connection and intergroup understanding. Fernando similarly uses digital texts and media production as methods for creative self-expression, inviting students to join him as media-makers and meaning-makers. In both cases, digital text analysis is used strategically to develop place, belonging, and mutuality.
For teacher education, these cases suggest that learning to develop classroom community begins with helping teachers examine their own relationships to belonging, exclusion, identity, and place. Teacher education can support future and practicing teachers in developing repertoires of practice that connect SR, digital texts, and community-building. Additionally, ELA teacher education can prioritize digital texts and tools as modes through which students encounter histories, compose media, and build more humanizing relationships with one another.
Conclusion
We recognize the expertise and wisdom of Teachers of Color in shaping humanizing approaches to CDL across ELA, ELD, civics, and teacher education. Across two cases, we demonstrated how teachers’ SR shapes their standpoints and informs why and how they select digital texts, frame inquiry, and respond to students’ lived realities. Regina and Fernando show that digital texts are not neutral classroom materials; when taught through justice-engaged standpoints, they become tools for connecting literacies with histories, examining dominant narratives, fostering belonging, and supporting students’ sensemaking amid dehumanizing sociopolitical conditions. Their pedagogies illustrate the importance of preparing teachers to engage digital texts not only through source evaluation, multimodal analysis, and media production, but also through critical attention to identity, place, history, power, and community. For ELA teacher education, these cases invite sustained attention to teachers’ SR praxis as a foundation for humanizing CDL pedagogies that help students read, question, compose, and imagine more just futures.
Author Notes
Thank you, Regina and Fernando, for your authentic teaching of digital texts and real world issues in humanizing ways. Special thanks to our colleagues at The Stanford Graduate School of Education (Digital Inquiry Group) for your steadfast mentoring and financial support of this research.
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