Call for Manuscripts: CITE Journal Special Issue on Digital Texts and How to Teach Them

by Rabani Garg, University of Pennsylvania; Sarah Jerasa, Clemson University; & Karis Jones, Empire State University - SUNY

Guest Editorial Team

Rabani Garg, University of Pennsylvania
Dr. Sarah Jerasa, Clemson University
Dr. Karis Jones, Empire State University – SUNY

In this current teaching climate, teachers are swimming in a metaphorical riptide with respect to digital texts, navigating multiple forces pulling them in different directions. From corporate pitches and professional developments asking them to try new technologies, to school policies, state mandates, and even national bans telling them not to, it can be difficult for teachers to decide what to do. It’s not always even clear what is meant by digital texts or what types of digital texts and practices are best or safest – and who gets to decide the answers to these questions. Additionally, there is a call from the field to resist problematic dichotomies between digital vs. print, online vs. offline, formal vs. informal, and in-school vs. out-of-school (Low & Rapp, 2021) and to engage research around the complex digital meaning-making practices of underrepresented youth (Muhammad & Haddix, 2016; Wargo, 2017; Kelly, 2020; McDaniel, 2022) whose literacies are often marginalized in formal educational spaces.

These complexities exist interconnectedly within teacher education spaces and teacher certification programs. While pre-service teachers are concurrently learning reading and writing methods for classroom instruction, teacher educators are expected to solve these problems with digital texts across courses and school placements while preparing future teachers to effectively use digital texts in their classrooms. This special issue intends to be a tool for teacher educators to engage with pre- and in-service teachers about the complexities of digital texts and how to teach them.

The Multifaceted Nature of Digital Texts

Those interested in how youth engage with representational aspects of texts may look at ways digital texts are “created, interpreted, mobilized, or critiqued… [including] material, aesthetic, algorithmic, and economic activities” (Nichols & LeBlanc, 2021, p. 391). Educators can also look more expansively at performative aspects of digitally-situated texts, which considers how such texts are shaped by their situation within larger media ecologies. Thinking about youth participation in media ecologies opens us up to expansive engagement with issues like “misinformation, algorithmic discrimination, surveillance and predictive analytics, techno-capitalism, movement work and activism, [and] environmental extraction” (p. 397).

In order to engage with the multifaceted nature of digital texts, English language arts (ELA) teacher educators need support to move beyond traditional tools of print-based meaning-making toward interdisciplinary tools for reading digital and networked multimodal texts. There are general content-related, discursive, and linguistic tools for analyzing networked multimodal texts as well as tools that may be specific to particular mediums, modalities, and networked communities. Following, we provide a few examples:

  1. Analyzing texts like comics necessitates attention to unique features like “the gutter,” or the space between panels (McCloud, 1994). As comics move to online spaces, new conceptual tools emerge, such as the use of the “infinite canvas” (Goodbrey, 2013) as creators are no longer confined to the boundaries of a printed page. Reader comments posted on webcomics can also become a site of interpretive meaning-making (Jones, 2019).
  2. Topics of attribution and citation become complex in multimodal networked spaces. Though ELA teachers may be familiar with codified citation practices for print texts (e.g. MLA, APA, Chicago Style), YouTube video content creators often take up different, expansive multimodal methods of attribution. Despite these different practices, the community is still concerned with attribution of ideas as well as issues of originality and plagiarism (Marshall, 2023). Conversations about ownership and uptake also happen in the music industry around multimodal practices of sampling or remixing (Stanfill, 2021) as well as in fanfiction contexts around issues of reusing or reimagining source material (Busse & Farley, 2013; Thomas, 2019).

Special Issue Topics

In this special issue, we aim to provide ELA teacher educators with research about different types and modalities of digitally networked texts and various ways of engaging and analyzing them. We are interested in both (a) pieces that synthesize interdisciplinary tools for analyzing particular types of digital texts on networked platforms that would be useful for ELA teacher educators as well as (b) studies that investigate how such tools and texts have been taken up expansively and productively in ELA classrooms.

While we are open to a wide range of entry points into the topic, some topics and questions we hope this issue will address include:

  1. Learning
    1. What kinds of learning are possible through engagement with digital texts, including traditionally valued outcomes (e.g. reading comprehension) as well as more expansive objectives (e.g. critical media literacy)? What complex meaning-making practices are possible even through brief engagement with short, informal, networked digital texts?
    2. What are the genres or sub-genres within digital texts used in ELA classrooms? How are these genres distinct to digital texts and what are the affordances of framing digital texts in this genre format? How is meaning constructed differently within these digital texts?
  2. Interdisciplinary Textal Tools
    1. What interdisciplinary tools exist to analyze digitally networked texts, including both representational content as well as performative relations (Nichols & LeBlanc, 2021)?
    2. Which tools do ELA educators and teacher educators take up to analyze digital texts across a range of classroom contexts (primary, secondary, higher education)?
  3. Instruction and Pedagogy
    1. How do ELA teacher educators conceptualize or teach about various types of digital networked texts in their courses or mentoring, including youth-produced texts?
    2. How are ELA teacher candidates learning to take up digitally networked texts and related interdisciplinary tools for analysis in their teaching contexts?
    3. What strategies or practices are useful for critically engaging with digitally networked texts in ELA teacher education and/or ELA classrooms? How do such practices support social justice-aligned educational aims?

CITE English Education Journal solicits rigorous conceptual and/or empirical manuscripts that explore innovative uses of technology in ELA teacher education in remote and/or virtual contexts. The works to be included in these issues should go beyond simple description of ELA teacher education activities that utilize digital texts; they should include analysis of the nature, purpose, and outcomes of teaching digital texts by drawing upon relevant theoretical and methodological frameworks. Special attention should be paid to issues of equity and access, and types of digital texts should be contextualized (and problematized) as necessary.

In alignment with this topic, we strongly encourage the submission of manuscripts that take advantage of CITE English Education’s capacities to publish multimedia content (i.e., images, video, web links, etc.). However, such content is optional and should be integral to the arguments being developed and not a decorative afterthought.

Abstracts for proposed manuscripts (maximum 500 words) should be submitted to Dr. Jones by email ([email protected]) by August 15, 2024, at 11:59pm PST. Please title submissions “Special Issue Abstract: [Article Title].”

Questions about the special issue should be directed to the Special Issue editors, Rabani Garg ([email protected]), Sarah Jerasa ([email protected]), and Karis Jones ([email protected]).

Timeline

Call released: June 15, 2024

Abstracts due: August 15, 2024

Authors notified: September 15, 2024

Initial manuscripts due: February 1, 2025

Anticipated publication date: starting June 2025

References

Busse, K., & Farley, S. (2013). Remixing the Remix: Fannish Appropriation and the Limits of Unauthorised Use. M/C Journal, 16(4). https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.659

Goodbrey, D. M. (2013). Digital comics—New tools and tropes. Studies in Comics, 4(1), 185–197. https://doi.org/10.1386/stic.4.1.185_1

Jones, K. (2019). Death’s friend hug: Analyzing the personification of death in three webcomics. In J. S. Kirchoff & M. P. Cook (Eds.), Perspectives on digital comics: Theoretical, critical and pedagogical essays (pp. 109–137). McFarland.

Kelly, L. L. (2020). Exploring Black girls’ subversive literacies as acts of freedom. Journal of Literacy Research, 52(4), 456–481. https://doi.org/10.1177/1086296X20966367

Low, D. E., & Rapp, S. M. (2021). Youth identities and affinities on the move: Using a transliteracies framework to critique digital dichotomies. Pedagogies, 16(2), 111–124. https://doi.org/10.1080/1554480X.2021.1914053

Marshall, C. (2023, December 6). Hbomberguy’s 4-hour YouTube video about plagiarism set social media abuzz. Polygon. https://www.polygon.com/23989686/hbomberguy-plagarism-youtube-video-james-somerton

McCloud, S. (1994). Understanding comics: The invisible art. William Morrow Paperbacks.

McDaniel, D. (2024). Tatum’s social media activism as multiliteracies: Connecting, advocating, and resisting social injustices. Journal of Language & Literacy Education, 20(1), 1–26.

Muhammad, G. E., & Haddix, M. (2016). Centering Black girls’ literacies: A review of literature on the multiple ways of knowing of Black girls. English Education, 48(4), 299–336.

Nichols, T. P., & LeBlanc, R. J. (2021). Media education and the limits of “literacy”: Ecological orientations to performative platforms. Curriculum Inquiry, 51(4), 389–412. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2020.1865104

Stanfill, M. (2021). Can’t nobody tell me nothin’: ‘Old Town Road’, resisting musical norms, and queer remix reproduction. Popular Music, 40(3–4), 347–363. https://doi.org/10.1017/S026114302100057X

Thomas, E. E. (2019). The dark fantastic: Race and the imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games. NYU Press.

Wargo, J. M. (2017). “Every selfie tells a story …”: LGBTQ youth lifestreams and new media narratives as connective identity texts. New Media & Society, 19(4), 560–578. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444815612447

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