In the wake of two major technological ruptures in education, the first in the form of emergency virtual education during Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns and the second through the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in education, English language arts (ELA) teacher educators face renewed urgency to support preservice teachers as they navigate uncertain and evolving digital terrains. These pivots have not only reshaped where and how literacy learning happens (e.g. Beck & Levine, 2024; Higgs & Stornaiuolo, 2024) but have also unsettled pedagogical certainty (e.g. Monea et al., 2022; Turner & Hicks, 2022).
In this context of persistent change, teacher educators are challenged to design learning experiences that position preservice teachers not as experts mastering tools but as learners making sense of digital writing alongside youth. Such experiences encourage what Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2009) called an “inquiry stance,” in which preservice teachers engage in critical reflection and pedagogical transformation as part of their ongoing learning.
One such space — a digital field site, or an online environment where preservice teachers engage with youth writers while observing, participating in, and reflecting on their literacy practices alongside them — demonstrates how they enact an inquiry stance. In this article, we argue that a digital field site can function as a space for taking up an inquiry stance in moments of pedagogical uncertainty and report our examination of how it transformed one master’s student preservice educator’s (MSPE) learning experiences supporting youth writers.
This study traced how Julia navigated a field placement in a digital space in an adolescent literacy course cotaught by Amy, M.E., Jen, and Clara. Through practitioner inquiry (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009), we explored how Julia, a MSPE with 1 year of prior teaching experience in a Montessori early elementary classroom, navigated her first-semester placement in a digital field site by joining Write4Change (W4C), an online, youth-led writing community housed on Discord, a text, speech, and video-chat online platform organized around affinity-based servers.
For her fieldwork, she led a small inquiry group of four high school writers (which we call the Writerly Inquiry Group or WIG), supporting them as they volunteered to join the online community for the first time in the role of community moderators. Together, we guided our inquiry with the following coconstructed research question: What does a MSPE learn by engaging in a digital field site?
As an author team, we found the third space construct (Bhabha, 1994; Gutiérrez, 2008; Gutiérrez et al., 1999) useful to describe the reconfiguration of learning enabled by inquiry-based pedagogy. We draw from Gutiérrez et al.’s definition of the third space as the discursive site in which “ alternative and competing discourses and positionings transform conflict and difference into rich zones of collaboration and learning… [enabling] expanded activity (Engeström, 1999) in which the object of activity is extended and the activity itself reorganized” (pp. 286-287).
For Julia, a third space for rich learning about what counts as meaningful adolescent writing emerged from the conflict points between the aims of the wider W4C community, the desires of the four student writers in the WIG, and the demands of her methods course for digital fieldwork. Specifically, we found that such conflict points in the digital field site grounded Julia’s learning in sustained, relational inquiry with youth, positioning her not as an apprentice gradually assuming a lead teacher’s role but as a colearner making pedagogical sense alongside young writers.
Rather than learning primarily through observation and supervised enactment within an established classroom ecology, Julia’s learning unfolded through shared authorship, dialogue, and responsiveness to youths’ evolving digital writing practices, expanding her understanding of literacy beyond institutionally sanctioned forms. In this way, Julia’s group itself became a third space for her, as her formal learning in the adolescent literacy course intersected with learning from the more informal space of the digital field site to allow for reorganization of her understanding of adolescent digital literacies alongside the youth writers in the WIG.
To trace how the meaning-making and learning of the WIG became a third space for Julia, we turned to the heuristic of emergence offered by the transliteracies analytical framework (Stornaiuolo et al., 2017), which inquires into the ways meanings surface through interactions between “people, texts, and things” (p. 77). Rather than seeing digital field sites as inherently a third space, we used emergence to understand why the WIG became such a powerful space for Julia’s learning. Thus, our findings focus on the meaning and learning which emerged for Julia when the discourses and interests of the WIG came into productive tension with those of the larger W4C server and her methods course.
The role of platforms was significant in such learning: Their affordances and constraints shaped participation and interaction, prompting critical reflection within the group about the kinds of writing and collaborating Discord made possible or limited. This reflection, in turn, suggests ways that ELA teacher educators might scaffold experiences for preservice educators to take an inquiry stance toward navigating complex platform demands and make more intentional decisions about integrating digital tools into their own teaching practices, grounded in close attention to the needs and contributions of the learners they work with.
By providing Julia a space to take up an inquiry stance toward the role of new technologies in contemporary literacy practices, this digital field site afforded Julia an opportunity to cocreate a meaningful learning experience alongside youth writers and to reconsider her assumptions about youth engagement, multimodal composition, and the affordances and constraints of online platforms for learning.
Theoretical Framework
We grounded our theoretical orientation to literacy and learning in a critical sociocultural view (Street, 1997) that sees literacy practices as socially and historically situated and implicated in larger power dynamics. Rather than studying literacy as a series of skills in reading and writing that can be taught isolated from context, this “ideological view” attends to the “nature of literacy in use” (Street, 2016, p. 336) as its meanings and uses vary given the social context, cultural norms, and power relations. Taking such a view of “literacy as social practice” or LSP (Street, 2016) means that we expand our understanding of what kinds of adolescent writing are important for MSPEs to study to encompass multimodal, digital texts that circulate in nonlinear ways.
To account for the contemporary dynamism of writing on digital platforms, we define a digital text as encompassing “all forms of communication, expression and creativity taking place through, on or with digital technologies and digital platforms” (Pandya & Sefton-Green, 2021, pp. 113-114). In particular, we posited that, by engaging with youth-produced digital texts in community with the adolescents who author and read these texts, MSPEs would come to new understandings about adolescent writing practices.
In imagining literacy pedagogies that dynamically adapt to rapidly changing contexts and youth practices, we were informed by Vygotsky and Cole’s (1978) sociocultural theory and Engström’s (2001) theory of expansive learning. Both described moments of learning when the object of learning is not stable and predetermined by a competent teacher but, instead, is being created in the process of learning new forms of activity (Engström, 2001, pp. 137-138). In the context of an adolescent literacies class, rather than having MSPEs engage in more traditional classroom placements where they learn from expert educators about the practices of adolescent literacy instruction (certainly a valuable learning experience), we had MSPEs engage in the construction of new activity systems through a digital field site, where they were in direct community with adolescents and their literacy practices. The goal was to transform MSPEs’ understandings of adolescent literacy by expanding their thinking about what is possible (here centered around adolescents’ composing and interactions with digital texts).
Unlike direct skills-based writing instruction or even the mentor/mentee dynamic of a writing tutoring session, the inquiry group created a space where, as in Engeström (2001), “the object of [the] expansive learning activity [was] the entire activity system in which the learners [were] engaged. Expansive learning activity produce[d] culturally new patterns of activity” (p. 139). Julia and the youth writers constructed their own inquiry group with patterns of activity that served the participants’ writerly goals and needs. In turn, the interaction of the activity systems of the WIG, W4C community, and our adolescent literacy course allowed Julia’s learning and pedagogical approach to be expanded, which guides this study’s claims about the possibilities afforded by digital field sites for MSPEs’ learning.
Such expansive patterns of learning can be enabled by the cocreation of third spaces. In particular, we focused on ways a digital field site can lead to the emergence of a third space (Bhabha, 1994; Gutiérrez, 2008; Gutiérrez et al., 1999) when preservice educators and youth writers shift their understanding of what counts as legitimate and meaningful writing. We located our inquiry into what it looks like to learn within the third space in a lineage of education scholars (e.g., Benson, 2010; Gutiérrez, 2008; Moje et al., 2004) who have extended Bhabha’s (1994) third space theory, originally conceptualized as the new space for identity work created by formerly colonized people within institutional space, to educational contexts.
We drew from Gutiérrez’s (2008) idea of a collective third space as “a transformative space where the potential for an expanded form of learning and the development of new knowledge are heightened” (p. 152). Unlike traditional classroom structures where the teacher is the organizer of collective activity, our findings revealed that a digital field site such as W4C can act as an open-ended activity system that invites a range of literacy practices appropriated from both formal and informal learning environments. The contact points (and sometimes conflict points) between W4C, the adolescent literacy class, and the four youth writers transformed the WIG into a third space for Julia’s learning.
Like Gutiérrez (2008), we framed a third space not as a static site which enables transformation to take place but an active set of relational practices that may lead to expanded forms of learning, in this case, enacted by a digital inquiry group. Here, the WIG became its own activity system within the wider activity system of the W4C writing community, as authority and participation were redistributed: Julia moved from sole organizer to coparticipant, youth writers exercised agency in shaping discussions and writing activities, and together the group negotiated norms and responded to platform constraints, allowing new forms of collaborative literacy to emerge. Through these shared sense-making activities around tensions and dilemmas encountered in the wider activity system, the group collectively expanded what counted as meaningful writing and productive engagement, which we named “the third space” (Gutiérrez, 2008, p. 152).
Attention to the often more unbounded and dynamic ways literacies are practiced across digital contexts has informed the transliteracies (Stornaiuolo et al., 2017) framework that we drew on to read Julia’s teacher learning. Rather than staying within the “space” of Discord, we explored the ways in which the WIG wrote across multiple platforms and spaces to cocritique their activities on Discord and, in the process, cocreated new ways to learn together.
We took up transliteracies to trace the changing ways that human and material relationships are constantly recreated. In particular, we focused on emergence as an applicable heuristic offered by transliteracies, which attends to the ways “meaning bubbles up in interactions among people, texts, and things” (Stornaiuolo et al., 2017, p. 77). In the context of Julia’s group, we examined how her digital field site positioned her to actively imagine pedagogies that responded to the surprising and unprecedented ways youth make meaning across platforms through writing, challenging static notions of what counts as adolescent writing.
We framed these experiences as a form of third space, not as a wholly separate site, but as a space in which learners may extend and reconfigure conventionally accepted pedagogical relationships, where traditional hierarchies of teacher-student are disrupted and renegotiated. Importantly, it was not the digital space itself that created the transformation of the WIG into a third space but rather the mutual interplay between platform affordances and their uptake, analysis, and critique by the WIG, enabled by their responsive and inquiry-based approach.
Drawing on expansive learning (Engeström, 2001) and the critical sociocultural view of literacy (Street, 1997, 2016), we show how engagement in this digital field site enabled transformative learning for Julia as a practitioner, as she assumed the stance of a “deliberative intellectual… theoriz[ing] practice as part of practice itself” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009, p. 2). This shift from conventional pedagogical models to collaborative, dynamic activity systems opens new possibilities for understanding and producing meaningful literacy practices in digital contexts.
Literature Review
Teacher Education in Digital Spaces
We located this inquiry in decades of educational research that has uplifted the role of out-of-school learning spaces, in this case, digital communities, as important sites for students’ literacy learning that merit engagement by literacy practitioners and teacher educators alike. In their review of the research on literacy in out-of-school settings, Hull and Schultz (2001) called on the literacy field to consider, “How might teachers incorporate students’ out-of-school interests and predilections but also extend the range of the literacies with which they are conversant?” (p. 603).
For teacher educators considering the digital literacies landscape of contemporary classrooms, building preservice teachers’ understanding of youth’s digital literacy practices is key. Price-Dennis and Sealey-Ruiz (2021) argued that at a time where “students are already centering digital ways of knowing as a means of addressing social issues” (p. 6; e.g., #BlackLivesMatter), teacher education must develop educators’ racial literacies in sociotechnical spaces. Given these considerations, teacher education programs must adapt to include field experiences in virtual and out-of-school learning spaces, particularly to expand preservice teachers’ digital literacies and understanding of youth culture.
The Covid-19 pandemic brought greater attention to the need to prepare educators to teach in online classrooms, yet little literature has considered how educators can come to know the digital environments and texts that their students interact with outside the context of emergency online education. As Schieble and Polleck (2021) reviewed in their study of a virtual field experience during the Covid-19 pandemic, little empirical research has been done on teacher learning in the context of online education, and few teacher education programs include field experience in spaces other than brick-and-mortar school classrooms. A national survey of teacher education programs found that only 1.3% of responding teacher education programs provided field experiences in virtual schools (Kennedy & Archambault, 2012).
In the context of youth produced digital texts, while other studies have considered how preservice teachers and K-12 educators can learn about providing feedback (Barnes & Chandler, 2019; Heron-Hruby et al., 2020), digital writing tool use in their pedagogy (Johnson, 2016), and participate as digital writers themselves (McKnight, 2021; Munoz et al., 2014), little research exists addressing the ways preservice educators learn about the digital writing practices of youth alongside them. Notable exceptions include Moran (2018) and Garcia and Seglem (2018).
Moran (2018) found that 17 preservice ELA teachers had an authentic field experience in a digital third space while collaborating with 30 ninth-grade ELA students asynchronously to create multimodal remixes of a shared set of texts. Moran proposed that their use of the website Slack acted as a digital third space, which she defined as “a place where the preservice teachers and secondary students could bring their out-of-school expertise and interact, each transforming the other in a shared space that belonged to neither of them, but to all of them” (p. 236).
While Moran (2018) emphasized the digital site as itself a third space, Garcia and Seglem (2018) focused on the relational power dynamics of engaging youth around their digital literacies. Their study analyzed the interplay of discourse and power in chatroom discussions between preservice educators in a majority-white Midwestern university and the majority black and brown 10th-grade students in a Los Angeles English class. By comparing how youth claimed power and expertise through exchanges in two different partnerships, the authors illustrated how digital spaces brought into the classroom can create opportunities to sustain the diverse Englishes of youth and for preservice educators to learn from a range of young people.
While both Moran (2018) and Garcia and Seglem (2018) attended to interactions between preservice teachers and youth digital writers, neither considered what the preservice educators learned about youth digital literacies from this experience. Our study began to address this gap in the literature by highlighting the potential of out-of-school digital spaces for fostering mutually generative learning between educators and young people, specifically how MSPEs and other preservice teachers can participate directly with youth’s digital writing practices and engage in reflective practice in these environments, allowing for pedagogies which respond more dynamically to youth’s emerging digital literacy practices.
Platforms and Digital Texts
This study did not view digital platforms like Discord or Zoom as inherently a third space or a site for transformation. Rather, we examine how the WIG took up the platforms’ possibilities and worked around their limitations to shape a collaborative space where youth and educators could experiment with writing, interaction, and shared decision-making — generating a third space through the interactions between individual writers, platforms, and the operating assumptions of the different activity systems. To understand the complex ways scholars have engaged in critique on and about platform environments, this study drew on platform studies (Burgess, 2021), taking as a starting point that platforms are not neutral tools but digital spaces with their own ecologies of power (Garcia & Nichols, 2021).
Recent scholarship has emphasized the literacy field’s lack of attention to equitable teaching and learning practices in a digital context (Nichols & LeBlanc, 2020; Stornaiuolo et al., 2024). Such work highlights the mutually articulated nature of youth digital writing, as paywalls, security policies, and interfaces govern the possibilities available as youth write themselves into such platforms (Robinson, 2022) and even read platforms themselves as texts (Stornauiolo & Thomas, 2025).
For example, Thrall et al. (2024) critiqued digital citizenship education and called for pedagogy that empowers youth writers to critique and interrogate the racist, capitalist impacts of such interfaces (de Roock, 2021). As youth agentively make media both in and outside of school (Ito et al., 2008), they also interact with and cocreate the governance structures that inform these interfaces (Robinson, 2022). Not only does the field of critical digital literacies challenge educators to engage more critically with such digital ecologies, but Lammers et al. (2022) emphasized that such criticality can take place through playful digital composition.
Digital literacies scholars argue that classroom contexts should be informed by research into youth’s existing digital writing practices in out-of-school online spaces. Knobel and Lankshear’s (2014) work in “new literacies” focused on a new ethos in a digitally mediated world, defined by “more participatory, collaborative, and distributed” (p. 98) social practices. While the field has moved on from this new literacies frame, paradigmatic cases for ways the digital shapes literacies continue to abound, now centered around platform ecologies. For example, Aragon and Davis (2019) highlighted the ways fanfiction communities serve as spaces where youth engage in informal mentorship and feedback, offering alternative pathways for writing growth outside traditional educational structures. These platforms provide youth with opportunities to navigate and shape their own digital texts, revealing the decentralized potential of online spaces.
Dahlström (2022) emphasized the power of multimodal composition on digital platforms, where youth combine text, visuals, and audio to craft innovative expressions of identity and experience. This powerful space for youth composing practices aligns with Haddix and Sealey-Ruiz’s (2012) argument that digital literacies — particularly in urban settings — serve as tools for youth to cultivate critical consciousness and agency through their digital writing and media engagement. McDaniel’s (2024) theory of Culturally Digitized Pedagogy builds on these scholars’ work, along with the scholarship of other asset-based pedagogical frameworks, to argue for a framework that “prioritize[s] and explore[s] youth of Color [digital] activism” (p. 206). However, a gap remains in research regarding ways preservice educators can learn to engage with and support these digital literacy practices, particularly in ways that acknowledge and build upon the ways youth use digital tools for their self-expression, activism, and own criticality.
As youth create media both in and outside of school, they do not simply consume digital texts but actively interact with and cocreate the digital environments in which their writing exists (Ito et al., 2008; Robinson, 2022). Valdivia (2021), for example, examined how youth vernacular literacies on platforms like Instagram challenge traditional literacy practices, urging a broader, more inclusive definition of literacy that incorporates the creative, often subversive, expressions found in youth digital texts. Through this process, youth engage critically with the platforms they use, interrogating the power dynamics embedded within the digital interfaces that mediate their writing. In response, we see an opportunity for literacy educators to incorporate this open-ended form of literacy inquiry, in which youth digital writers are already engaging, into their own teaching praxes.
Since Hull and Schultz’s (2001) call for research on ways out-of-school learning spaces can inform the field’s understanding of literacy teaching, we are now at a critical moment, needing to explore how preservice educators can learn about and from youth expression amidst these rapidly shifting platform ecologies through digital field experiences. Such an approach to platforms through a digital field work experience like engaging in research and writing in the W4C online writing community — on which youth are supported to digitally compose, critique, and collaborate — offer new opportunities for preservice teachers to reconsider how literacy is understood and practiced beyond traditional classroom contexts, engaging with the digital literacies youth already bring from their out-of-school worlds (Garg, 2024).
Methods
Methodologically, this study brings together the frameworks of transliteracies (Stornaiuolo et al., 2017) and practitioner inquiry (Cochran Smith & Lytle, 2009) to center youth composing across digitally and globally connected networks as a site for knowledge generation. Our practitioner inquiry stance emphasized the reciprocal relationship between theory and practice as we coconstructed meaning with participants in these digital environments. Through the process of practitioner inquiry, we discovered that attending to the Discord platform alone did not encompass the broad array and movement of the WIG’s digital literacy practices. We found that the transliteracies’ concept of emergence helped to highlight how the group became a third space for Julia, as she started moving with and alongside her inquiry group in ways that brought those contradictions to the forefront.
Taken together, these two frameworks helped us understand the contingent, unstable, and emergent nature of literacy practices as situated responses to shifting social, technological, and relational conditions. Drawing on transliteracies, we attended to ways meaning-making traveled across platforms, modes, and audiences, foregrounding the navigation, coordination, and translation work required as youth and educators moved between Discord, Zoom, and shared documents. The transliteracies and practitioner research lenses also offered us a reflective framework and way to surface how Julia and the youth writers negotiated their authority and expertise, allowing us to observe and interrogate the flows of power across the W4C Discord community, the WIG, and the adolescent literacies course as texts circulated across those spaces.
By applying transliteracies, we highlighted the ways in which literacy practices are continuously negotiated, examining how Julia and the youth writers in the WIG engaged with and adapted to the evolving demands of digital literacy and varied platforms. Through this lens, we examined how Julia and the youth writers actively adapted their literacy practices in response to platform affordances and constraints, coconstructing norms for what counted as meaningful participation and writing in the inquiry group.
Digital Field Site
The WIG, situated within the larger W4C community of youth writers on Discord (a text, speech, and video-chat online platform organized around affinity-based servers) was comprised of youth writers who had volunteered to participate as community moderators for the W4C server as part of a semester-long fellowship. The W4C Discord server invites youth writers to share their work, which includes a range of digital texts from digitally published novels in progress to fan art and fanfiction for popular IP [DEFINE ACRONYM] along with original characters to original music by singer/songwriters. The server also provides community for youth writers, taking the form of feedback on shared artistic work by community moderators, writing prompts and conversation topics shared for inspiration, and informal synchronous voice-chat gatherings to share writing coffee house style or play games (see Talian et al., 2025 for more information about the transition of the W4C community to Discord).
Participants
The WIG for this digital field site was composed of four high school students from the metropolitan area of a large Eastern US city, along with one MSPE enrolled in an adolescent literacy course at a private urban research university in the city. Amina, a sophomore at a magnet school in the city, joined as a self-described poet with interests in social justice and politics. Already a member of her local government’s teen advisory board, where she worked on programs around housing insecurity and language classes for immigrants, she joined the group with the goal of using her voice for change. Hawa, a junior at the same magnet school, already ran her own blog focused on bringing attention to the mental health needs of teens. She saw the group as a space to grow as a youth advocate through research and writing alongside mentors. Anika, a junior at a project-based school in the city, came in with experience as a journalist and social media manager for school clubs. She wanted to explore how to do research on topics of interest to her and create work that expressed those passions. Finally, Kiran, a sophomore in a suburban district near the city, committed to issues of social justice, brought experiences in student groups focused on writing and art.
They saw the W4C Discord community as a chance to connect with other people interested in art and writing. Together, they formed a writing group (WIG) that met weekly from September to November 2023 via Zoom to share and discuss their work and moderate the online writing community. The relationship between the youth and the MSPE was reciprocal: the youth contributed their voices and perspectives while Julia shared her insights from an educational standpoint. This back and forth created a collaborative environment where youth and adult alike shaped the direction of the discussions and writing activities.
This collaborative and reciprocal dynamic is echoed in the process of authoring this article. While each of the authors brings previous experience as classroom educators to this study, we see spaces such as the WIG and the W4C online writing community on Discord as a fruitful digital field site for an MSPE such as Julia and the youth in her inquiry group to intentionally disrupt the often inherently hierarchical nature of teacher/student dynamics in a formal classroom.
By engaging alongside high school aged writers and MSPEs, we considered what opportunities were opened for expansive forms of learning, as well as what challenges were posed by existing structures (both in our relationality and in the platforms we used). While our analysis in this piece focuses on Julia’s learning through this process to address our central interest in what learning is made possible for preservice educators through digital field sites, we see such expansive learning as applying to all members, from the new high school moderators through the university professor teaching the course for its 11th iteration.
Taking part in an adolescent literacy course for MSPEs as instructors and learners while participating in the W4C community, the authors shared an investment in more horizontal forms of knowledge-building across age and experience. As we critically reflected on our positionalities as white, cisgendered, female educators, we took up these participatory practices and pedagogies and critical writing to use the institutional power such identities have afforded us to challenge hierarchies in both research and learning environments, fostering more reciprocal and equitable partnerships.
While Julia began as a student in Amy, M.E., Jen, and Clara’s course, her transition back into the classroom during the writing of this piece shifted our relationality. From sharing anecdotes from Julia’s first grade classroom to seeking critical feedback on course assignments for the course’s next iteration, we remained close and trusted collaborators after the course, traveling to conferences and cowriting as peers.
Data Collection and Analysis
We collected Zoom recordings, Discord chats, Google Docs, and a Google Form survey from the WIG to explore how the youth and Julia engaged with these platforms, alongside artifacts produced by Julia about her field placement during the course in the form of field notes, a digital story about the inquiry group, and reflections in her final course portfolio. Clara also conducted a retrospective interview with one of the youth as a form of member checking about their experience as a youth writer in the WIG. To read and analyze the group’s experience in the WIG, we drew on descriptive review (Himley et al., 2011), as well as autoethnographic analytical approaches (Chang, 2016) to conduct two group analysis sessions as an authorship team on digital artifacts, both from during the fieldwork experience and from Julia’s reflections afterwards.
We started with Julia’s retrospective memo, composed after assembling and revisiting the artifacts from the WIG a year later. We then read across the artifacts during our collaborative sense-making session on Zoom, populating a shared digital whiteboard (see Figure 1) with our individual noticings. We then each shared thematic overlap we saw from those insights, using the descriptive review process (Himley et al., 2011) to provide each researcher space to share their perspective.
Figure 1
Canva Board for Shared Sense Making of Reading Across Artifacts
Through the lenses of transliteracies and platform studies (Burgess, 2021; Stornaiuolo et al., 2017), we traced what emerged as Julia’s group openly explored the boundaries between themselves and the platforms used (i.e. Discord, Zoom and Google docs) as part of their co-inquiry practice. Emergence served as a “thinking device” (Stornaiuolo et al., 2017, p. 77) for us to attune ourselves to the “intertwining of cognitive and affective aspects of meaning making” (Stornaiuolo, et al., 2017, p, 77), while leaving ourselves open to “the unprecedented, surprising, and meaningful [moments]… without predetermined and text-centric endpoints of explanation” (p. 78).
By reimmersing ourselves in the artifacts from that earlier time, alongside Julia’s reflections on what her field site experience had come to mean to her, we were able to parse through the contradictions between expected activity on the Discord platform and the asymmetrical realities of the WIG members’ moment-to-moment engagement with both their small group and the wider W4C community. By attending to the third space that had emerged in the WIG at the contact zone between the W4C community, the youth writers’ interests and needs, and the adolescent literacies course, we named some initial themes. From these themes, we determined a “holy trinity” (Miles et al., 2020) of findings that most clearly reflected the data and Julia’s experience with her group, in particular. Julia’s retrospective memo then became the basis for the three critical incidents that frame the findings section.
These collaborative analysis sessions also functioned as a site of retrospective learning for Julia, as she revisited the data alongside course instructors and coauthors, engaging as a peer in sense-making conversations that deepened her understanding of both the inquiry group and the research process itself.While we had limited access to the youth writers’ retrospective reflections on the experience, we drew upon artifacts produced by the youth during the WIG to make sense of their perspectives on the platforms used (i.e., group Discord survey and Kiran’s walkthrough of the W4C Discord server) and digital literacies more broadly (i.e., Julia’s interview with Hawa as part of an assignment for the adolescent literacies course).
Findings
Through our collaborative sense-making activities, we identified three critical incidents (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009), or moments, where contradictions between the expected activity set out by the larger W4C community and the Discord platform rubbed against the desired activity of the smaller WIG. In the section that follows is Julia’s retrospective narrative, which she used to evoke these three incidents, each followed by our analysis of the significance of this moment on Julia’s learning, made possible within the digital field site through the group’s inquiry-based approach.
Addressing Disconnection by Recentering Student Needs in Digital Writing Spaces
“What are we supposed to be doing?” Three weeks into our W4C small group weekly Zoom sessions, this question made me pause. Following the direction of the whole group leaders, we spent our first three sessions dutifully answering the prompts outlined for us to discuss in our sessions. The prompts all aligned with W4C’s interest in exploring digital writing using the platform Discord. While the inquiry group’s agenda aligned well with the broader interests of the Discord Community, it quickly became clear that the four high schoolers in my small group felt disconnected from Discord and our W4C meetings.
As the question lingered in the air, along with my own confusion, I knew that as the group moderator I had to be purposeful in moving the group towards feeling connected rather than lost in the inquiries, tasks, and meetings that guided their engagement. In a swift attempt to move the students towards meaningful collaboration, I launched the response, “Mmm. It’s a good question. When you decided to join the group, what were you hoping to be doing?” After a few moments of thoughtful musing, the students began to articulate their desire to write together, share their writing, and explore independent research interests. From there, we decided to put aside time during each weekly meeting to first do 10 minutes of free-writing, modeled after Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz’s “Writing for Full Presence”(Naputi & Sealey-Ruiz, 2022), followed by an optional sharing period for anything they had written over the past week or during the free-writing time. We then used the remaining time to continue exploring the inquiries laid out on the agenda, now purposefully connecting their writing identities to the larger group goals.
This group adjustment to aligning with the personal “why” of each group member led to increased trust within our group and elevated student voice throughout our small group discussions. By the end of the semester, the students were actively voicing their desire to meet in person for our final session to share their work and provide each other with feedback – no internet connection needed.
In the midst of the W4C community’s structured exploration of digital writing via Discord, a pivotal moment emerged that challenged the trajectory of the Julia’s inquiry group’s engagement. A youth participant’s candid question, “What are we supposed to be doing?” served as a critical incident (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009), necessitating immediate reflection and redirection. This inquiry, raised during the 3rd week of Zoom sessions, illuminated the growing disconnect between the group members and the platform-centric agenda of the wider W4C community.
Initially, the group’s sessions followed the prompts provided by the whole-group leaders, designed to align with W4C’s broader objectives. Over time, it became evident that these prompts offered only a partial connection to the writers’ interests and experiences in the WIG. The high schoolers expressed a sense of detachment, both from the platform itself and from tasks that felt less personally relevant to their writing identities. While the W4C Discord server had been built alongside a previous cohort of youth moderators as a decidedly nonschool/unschooled space (see Talian et al., 2025), this group of youth writers experienced the space in distinct ways, bringing their own goals, humor, and interpretations of the prompts and selectively engaging with features of the platform that resonated with their writing identities rather than following the expected patterns of participation.
Faced with this moment of confusion, Julia’s response was both reflexive and transformative. She redirected the conversation by asking the students about their initial hopes for joining the group, thereby shifting the focus from the external agenda to the internal motivations of the participants. The students revealed their desire for a space to write together, share their work, and explore their own research interests. This prompted a restructuring of the sessions, incorporating free-writing exercises and other group-driven norms and dialogue. These exercises provided a more personal and reflective space, enabling the students to reconnect with their writing on a deeper level.
In this way, youth’s unfamiliarity with the platform of Discord did not lead to a dead end in the group. Because Julia and the students reframed their tensions with Discord through an inquiry stance (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009), their collective inquiry surfaced additional histories and knowledge about their digital writing practices. In a subsequent interview about their experiences in the WIG, 15-year-old Kiran reflected that the experience transformed their lens on social media from that of a “consumer” to that of a “researcher,” turning a more critical eye to “how users interact with different views and different features of apps, or how users interact with themselves or see themselves online.” A researcher, Kiran reflected, might look “more holistically at the entire environment” of a social media platform. Kiran’s reflections speak to the ways the group’s zoom-out from Discord afforded a researcher’s lens, looking across social media environments through their own activities and histories. Rather than treating the group’s experience with Discord as a hurdle to face, approaching it as itself a compelling question to investigate afforded a broader look into youth social media practices that transcended the Discord platform.
This shift Kiran outlined, from a “consumer” to “researcher” approach, signaled the emergence of a third space, which involved WIG members forming an expanded vision of acceptable activity and moved the group from a collection of disengaged members to one defined by more consistent collaboration, sharing, and participation. The newly centered approach not only addressed the initial disconnection but also fostered increased engagement and trust. By the end of the semester, the students expressed a desire to meet in person to share their work, reflecting that the connections and collaborative practices developed online were meaningful to them.
This incident highlights the way digital spaces can become sites of tension when the group and platform are not aligned, with the platform’s expectations or structure potentially limiting the group’s ability to fully engage or express themselves in ways that resonate with their goals and identities. In these moments, there is something to be said about the synchronous nature of Zoom as a platform and the affordances of writing and sharing writing together, even with cameras off. A critical component of this transformation was the platform affordances of Zoom as used by WIG members: participants mostly kept their cameras off, which allowed them to verbally share vulnerable writing while maintaining a degree of visual anonymity before known attendees. This feature appeared essential for building trust, particularly for writers like Amina, who could participate fully without the social pressures of being on camera.
By contrast, engagement with the predominantly asynchronous Discord server was limited, suggesting that platform features (synchronous versus asynchronous interaction and visual anonymity versus persistent usernames) shaped how participants could engage, express themselves, and take risks in different spaces. While the W4C Discord server did host the occasional live event via that platform’s video call feature (such as the “coffee house” event for sharing writing synchronously), WIG members were hesitant to join, given the unknowns of who would be attending, how their writing would be received, and so forth.
When participants reflected on these tensions and Julia adapted the sessions to center their identities and interests, the group transformed Zoom into a space for reflexivity, collaboration, and shared creative exploration. This experience underscores the importance of responsiveness to both participant needs and platform affordances in digital educational settings: Aligning technical design with learners’ goals can cultivate meaningful engagement. Ultimately, this case illustrates that digital spaces are not fixed; they are adaptable environments in which platform-specific features can mediate trust, collaboration, and the emergence of a participatory writing community.
Pivoting Toward Vulnerable and Meaningful Participation
Even after the youth expressed their desire to write and share their written work, I was surprised and delighted during our 4th meeting when Amina brought a piece of work to share. My surprise did not stem from lack of belief in the youth as writers or members of the W4C community but rather from the bravery and vulnerability required of Amina to read aloud a piece of personal work to a live audience of relative strangers.
Amina prefaced her reading with a few comments about how she had written the piece quickly and it was incomplete. I remember she read fast, and, to me, seemed nervous. After she finished, each member of the group shared with Amina all that they loved about her piece, asking questions and encouraging Amina to continue writing. As Amina accepted the affirmations from her peers, she opened up more about the inspiration behind the piece and her desire to transform the work into a book. In the coming weeks, Amina continued to share more of her writing and update the group on her progress.
In this moment, listening to the youth’s comments for Amina and witnessing Amina become empowered in her identity as a writer, I felt a weight lifted. The group had a foundation of trust built upon vulnerability and affirmation and now the wheels of our non-hierarchical inquiry-group were in motion.
While the W4C Discord server was meant to be a space for youth writers to share youth-produced digital texts (and was used by both youth moderators and those who had joined the server on their own for these purposes), this did not mean that all youth felt comfortable sharing their writing in this semipublic venue. As Julia’s reflection on Amina’s sharing of her work in progress in the group’s fourth meeting demonstrates, some youth needed a smaller, more intimate space carved out to step into this kind of vulnerability. Amina’s piece, titled “interesting,” addressed ideas around foundational relationships, inspired by her experiences in an immigrant family and the challenges she faced building close friendships with people outside her family. As she explained to the WIG as they responded to her reading aloud of her writing, she sought to create “a wishful dynamic for her family and the world” as she explored the idea of “missed opportunities” through her writing.
As we went back to read the inquiry group’s contributions to the Discord (including 2 weeks where the group was responsible for crafting questions and providing a resource for a Daily Theme channel meant to inspire writing and conversation in the server), we noted in particular Amina’s absence from that space. This absence draws a stark contrast to her full presence in the small inquiry group, where Amina’s sharing of her writing, read out loud from the black box of her Zoom screen to a live digital audience, would seem a greater act of vulnerability than writing a prompt about Halloween (see Figure 2).
Figure 2
Inquiry Group’s Drafting Space for Daily Theme Posts to Discord
This moment of emergence opened a third space, where Julia’s learning from the adolescent literacies course intersected with the goals of the wider W4C community to make possible Amina’s act of vulnerability and the WIG’s supportive response to that act. The reorganization of the WIG’s activity from the previous session, when Julia had introduced the practice of “Writing for Full Presence,” made space for Amina to voice her story after the free writing time during the optional sharing period. This shift in her engagement was partly made possible by the ethos of the W4C community, which is designed to foster a space where youth can explore their voices and ideas through writing, supported by collaborative and reflective youth and adult moderators. When the suggested modes of participation for community moderators (e.g., posting regularly to the Discord server) did not resonate for Amina and the other members of their writing group, Julia, as the adult facilitator of the group, was afforded the flexibility to allow the group’s desires to motivate their activity.
This interplay between Julia’s course learning and the WIG’s digital environment created conditions for a deeper engagement. The open-ended nature of Julia’s digital field site, alongside recent discussion of “Writing as Reflective/Reflexive Practice” in our adolescent literacies course, positioned Julia to support Amina’s pivot to a more vulnerable mode of participation. In this environment, sharing her writing with others was not just about completing a task; it became a meaningful step in Amina’s development as a writer and a member of an intergenerational supportive community.
After hearing the other members’ responses to her writing, she expressed that she was excited to write more and even proposed creating a Refugee-style story (Alan Gratz’s [YEAR? ADD TO REFERENCE LIST] young adult historical fiction novel following three refugee children from different eras), where each member of the WIG could write their stories and put them together. This moment of emergence transformed the WIG into a third space for Julia (and perhaps for the other members of the group as well), one that was built through the flexibility, inquiry stance (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009), and platform practices intersecting between the wider W4C activity system, Julia’s formal course learning, and the WIG community.
As an MSPE, Julia learned through the digital text of the small group about the importance of carving spaces of intimacy and vulnerability for young people to share their writing. Within this context, the Discord becomes analogous to the whole class space, where individual student voices may struggle to be heard. Here, the small group crafted their own more intimate space through their Zoom meetings and shared writing practices that represented the reorganized and expanded activity of the third space. They did so by carefully negotiating between their responsibilities to the wider W4C community (e.g., posting daily theme content, conducting a collaborative research project about Discord usage through the W4C Discord server and Google Forms) and their collaboratively established desire to create a space to write together and share their writing. Julia was able to attune to the needs of the writers within the group, engaging in activity alongside the youth writers rather than imposing the flow of activity onto participants.
Productive Tensions Surfaced in Multimodal Reflection
As I endeavored to encapsulate my experience as an adult moderator through creating a short video for my class on adolescent literacies, I grappled with and reflected upon all that I felt “did not go well” in my experience; my inquiry group did not engage very much (if at all) with Discord, the youth did not turn their cameras on during our group meetings, and we did not complete our shared research project. While addressing that these preexisting expectations were not met, I was able to see more clearly what happened instead in my inquiry group – the youth voiced their personal goals, we explored as a collective why Discord wasn’t working through a Google survey, and the youth created a platform to write and share work with one another through establishing a trust with one another.
This narrative of challenge – adjustment – and change only became clear to me through creative reflection. The task of making a video requires visual evidence of what transpired. However, for my inquiry group, no such footage existed. Once again, I asked myself the question, how can I make this work? Through short animations, some self-made and some found on the internet, along with personal narration, I was able to make sense of all that I learned in not meeting my expectations, but rather truly learning from the youth and the experience.
The WIG ultimately approached the W4C community in an entirely unique way, and the tensions between the group members and the Discord platform actually offered a productive space for group inquiry, as well as for Julia’s reflection as an educator. In Julia’s digital story (Video 1), which looked back on her experience with the small group, she reflected, “A small identity crisis set in. What were we doing here? Five strangers on Zoom, most cameras off, students at different schools, and little to no experience with the very terrain of our writing community.” Such an “identity crisis,” she reflected, forged an opportunity for the group to discuss the many reasons they were drawn to W4C, from interests in artwork, to social change, to social media.
Video 1
Julia’s Digital Story About the Inquiry Group
Having reflected on their own habits with Discord and discomfort with the platform, the group conducted a survey for the W4C community to better understand their experience with the platform as their small group’s research project (Appendix). Their questions reflect their own disconnection from the platform. Their survey garnered six responses, a mix of the adult moderators (n = 3), youth moderators from a previous fellowship iteration (n = 2), and one current fellow. At the time, the group was disappointed to see that all respondents responded “yes” to the question of previous Discord use, seemingly leaving their group as an outlier for their novice relationship to the platform. But the responses to their question about comfort with the app affirmed their experience: five out of the six respondents believed that prior comfort with Discord impacted the frequency of responses to the W4C server. The final question, however, illustrated that they are not alone in steering toward other platforms; four out of six selected Instagram as their most frequently used social media platform, while only one out of six selected Discord.
This inquiry, which arose from the group’s limited experience with Discord, highlights the sense of purpose the group found from experiencing tensions with the server. Although it was uncomfortable in the moment, as Julia’s video reflects, the group’s limited experience with Discord ultimately formed a reflective space for the group to share what had brought them to W4C and understand what the rest of the community was doing on the server. It placed their experiences within the broader context of other youth digital writers.
Viewed through a transliteracies (Stornaiuolo et al., 2017) lens, Julia’s retrospective framing of the group’s tensions with Discord as “unfamiliar terrain” takes on new meaning. As the group’s writing moved from their respective Google Docs to their group Zoom calls to the terrain of Discord, the group encountered a tension between the ways they were writing and the ways the platform typically asked them to write, or Discord as a “habit” as Julia articulates.
After stepping back and inquiring into these digital writing habits together, their goals and identities as writers, they could begin to create their own habits and practices as a group through discussions, writing workshops, and shared prompts on the Discord server. The ecological metaphors of Discord as a “terrain” and “unknown land” Julia used in her reflections on the partnership stand out in particular. The group saw Discord as an unfamiliar digital space to share their writing, but created their own intimate space through the WIG to share writing with one another in response.
Within the W4C community they, thus, created their own digital space, facilitated through the synchronicity and partial anonymity of a cameras-off Zoom call, to reflect on their writing practices and identities in contrast to Discord. In the complexities of writing across a new digital space together, a third space emerged, as the group found valuable questions to ask about the digital literacy practices of youth on the server.
Discussion
As teacher educators consider how to prepare ELA preservice educators to work with digital texts in rapidly changing digital environments, this study offers one MSPE and four teacher educators’ perspectives on the affordances of a digital field site. While previous literature has often focused on digital literacy through the lens of digital spaces as teaching tools (e.g. McKnight, 2021) or on teachers’ own technology self-efficacy (e.g. Moran, 2018), we offer our analysis of how one small writing group’s conflict with the platform of a wider activity system created a third space for genuine connection and learning for an MSPE and four young people.
As Julia navigated various and sometimes competing expectations of activity from the adolescent literacies course, the W4C community, and the youth in her inquiry group, she had to pivot from a top-down model of engagement with youth to a responsive one to meet the needs of the young people in front of her. The participatory nature of the digital field site and the adoption of “inquiry as stance” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) made space for Julia to center her learning on the youth writers’ practices and interests, rather than the goal of producing particular outcomes predetermined by the course instructors. Through the ability to learn about youth digital literacies alongside youth writers, this digital field site offered Julia a third space for learning, through the hybrid nature of the WIG as both a student-centered digital inquiry space and a site for Julia’s formal fieldwork as part of a methods course.
From the singular case example of Julia’s experience, we see possibilities for ELA teacher education to potentially adapt digital field sites like W4C to provide preservice educators opportunities to learn from the emergence of third spaces. Drawing from Gutiérrez et al.’s (1999) framing of third space as sites of extended activity through transforming conflict into moments of collaboration, we propose that digital field sites can create such opportunities when the formal learning from the preservice classroom comes into contact with youths’ digital literacies and identities as preservice educators work alongside youth to reorganize activity for their collective learning. Julia’s experience in the WIG provides one example of how a digital field site was transformed into such a third space, enabling her to create digital texts alongside and in response to her experience working with youth, and providing her with a pedagogical experience ripe for reflection and inquiry.
Through the WIG, Julia had space to experiment with her approach to adolescent digital literacies. When the group found they had trouble taking part in the fellowship as it was organized on the Discord platform, Julia practiced stepping back and reframing the tension as a productive line of learning and inquiry. This move toward an inquiry stance (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) shifted the group dynamic to one of critical thought partnership. By struggling with the platform together, all the while conducting their learning together across numerous platforms, the group could work together to learn from such an experience, opening up a third space through opportunities for more expansive learning (Engström, 2001).
For teachers, dwelling in the uncertainty of platforms alongside students can lead to more horizontal forms of learning, where partnering alongside youth as they engage in digital writing can allow for greater prioritization of the writer’s needs. In political contexts and spaces where platforms and learning apps can be imposed on classrooms from the top down (Nichols & LeBlanc, 2020), this study posed an alternative vision of what is possible when youth and educators attempt to navigate the affordances and constraints of platforms alongside one another, with suggestions, rather than mandates for how they use those platforms for educational purposes.
Conclusion
Digital field sites like Julia’s inquiry group within the larger W4C writing community illuminate the possibilities of collaborative literacy practices that transcend traditional boundaries of teaching and learning. Taking an inquiry stance (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) toward digital spaces when working alongside youth, opens the possibility of cocreating a third space (Gutiérrez, 2008) where more responsive ways of writing and learning with students happen. Rather than seeing points of tension between the desires of youth writers and the agendas of educators (in this case, represented by the expectations for moderators from the W4C community) a problem to be solved, the third space construct (Bhabha, 1994; Gutiérrez et al., 1999; Gutiérrez, 2008) helped us to name how activity was productively reorganized and extended through grappling with differences (in this case, tensions around the platform for engagement, Discord).
Whether through works-in-progress about family and immigration shared in small groups or questions about Halloween meant to spark conversation amongst digital audiences, the digital field site can empower preservice educators to reflect on their digital literacy practices alongside youth writers. Participating in these communities opens space for preservice educators to grapple with their own assumptions about literacy and authorship while developing an inquiry stance that integrates formal and informal learning.
For young people, these spaces offer opportunities to share their expertise and see their lived experiences valued by their communities, including adult educators like Julia. For teacher educators, such a digital field site (and practitioner inquiry study of such sites) could enable teacher educators to sit side by side with MSPEs in their learning about youth digital literacies, both through course activities such as multimodal storytelling and through analysis and cowriting such as that which led to this piece. Building more expansive models for teacher learning through digital field sites in ELA teacher preparation has the potential to cultivate more inclusive, contextually and socially relevant understandings of literacy that ELA preservice educators can bring to their future classroom communities.
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Appendix
Discord Use Survey Questions
