This article appears as part of a special issue series of CITE English Language Arts Education focused on critical perspectives on digital platforms in ELA teacher education (Volumes 24:4 to 25:3).
Most research literature on remix and restory focuses on how these participatory practices support youth students’ learning in new or more effective ways (e.g., Faughey, 2022; Gainer & Lapp, 2010; Pytash et al., 2017). There is a comparative lack of attention on teachers engaging in participatory practices as creators and learners (as seen in Proudman, 2024, although the emphasis is still on student impact). This gap has implications for literacy learning in schools and for teacher education and professional development (Baize, 2019; Loomis, 2019). Given that teachers’ engagement with participatory practices like remix and restory is often only in relation to student-facing assignments, there is resulting discussion about the dangers of teachers coopting (Alvermann & Heron, 2001; Garcia, 2013) and “schoolifying” (Rubin, 2012) participatory forms of engagement when drawing on them in school-based learning for youth.
This understanding of the research and practitioner literature about participatory practices served as the impetus for a remix and restory assignment I included in an online, asynchronous graduate course I taught in spring 2021 for practicing middle and high school English language arts (ELA) teachers. I invited the graduate student educators to engage in a remix or restory of a canonical text they frequently teach in their own classrooms or have often encountered as ELA students.
I left the particulars of canonical text selection, participatory practices, and creation formats (e.g., with what digital tools) open to the graduate student educators. This openness was likely to make it feel more possible for the teachers to do this work in ways that aligned with their own creativity and their teaching contexts. I emphasized that the teachers were to be the creators in this assignment. During that course week, I also assigned articles to read that were foundational to my own understanding of remix and restory not only as participatory practices (Knobel & Lankshear, 2008; Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016; Vasudevan, 2010) but as practices of critical literacies (e.g., Janks, 2010; Luke, 2000).
I found myself disappointed, however, when the teachers did not orient toward these critical underpinnings of remix and restory, which involve close attention to and “examination of the ways that social conditions of digital media may be inviting … people to transform the meaning-making process through collective and creative” (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016, p. 314) reimagining and rewriting. The teachers did not take up remix or restory as opportunities to problematize the canonical texts they chose or as occasions to closely consider the choices they were making about digital tools and spaces as mediums for participatory practices. Instead, the graduate student educators consistently questioned whether they had sufficient “access” to do this work in their own classrooms with their students.
The teachers’ emphasis on access concerns are certainly important: Teachers need to think critically about their contexts and the ways participatory practices are possible and generative. Based on the teachers’ concerns, I conceptualized “access” as involving tool-based constraints as well as hesitations around the appropriateness of participatory practices like remix and restory as school-based learning.
However, part of teachers’ access considerations should be thinking about the digital spaces, or platforms — a term which encompasses apps and “tools,” as they are often referred to (Nichols & LeBlanc, 2020) — in which they ask students to engage in participatory practices. Access considerations for fostering participatory practices in schools include not only what forms of technological tools and platforms are available but in what roles of creation and consumption; in relation to what expectations for implementation and assessment (e.g., Zoch et al., 2016); with what types of texts; and in what spaces, when, and why (e.g., Garcia & Nichols, 2021).
I extended the same need for expanding access considerations to teacher educators like me, as I invited my graduate student practicing teachers to participate in remix and restory of a canonical text through our Canvas learning management system (LMS) and via what was then a standalone video-sharing platform, Flip. It would have been easier to remain with simply dismissing the graduate student educators as “schoolifying” participatory practices, with their dual emphasis on effectively teaching canonical texts via digital tools and tool-based access concerns. However, I came to realize that they were following along with my own schoolifying: I had unconsciously tied the assignment entirely to school-based texts, aimed sharing and reflection on only teachers’ end-product creations, and failed to critically consider the digital spaces I was using and their role in our participatory culture and practices.
We teacher educators may like to think of ourselves as more aware of our own orientations toward technology. Yet, I realized I never examined why I put the assignment together the way I did or the impacts of the digital spaces I was using — both because I had to (i.e., Canvas as our LMS) and because I had chosen them (e.g., Flip as the platform where we would share about our assignments). What were the impacts of my own choices on the ways the teachers oriented toward the assignment?
I ultimately decided to delve into a critical inquiry of my assignment. However, this inquiry started as a case study analysis of the remix and restory experiences of one teacher in my online graduate English education course, Katerina. She was selected because of her own interest in participatory practices, which resulted in discussion-based interviews between Katerina and me about remix and restory in her teaching context and experiences.
Through analysis of Katerina’s project and our conversations, I came to understand her access concerns, both about canonical works and digital tools, as indicative of her own orientations toward texts and technology. I then began to unpack what considerations of Katerina’s orientations illuminated about my own orientations as a teacher educator and about my remix and restory assignment.
Reflecting on the experiences in my course with the remix and restory assignment — both Katerina’s and my own — I came to the following research questions: The first question guided my case study inquiry of Katerina’s remix and restory coursework and experiences:
What tensions emerge when a secondary ELA teacher engages with participatory practices, specifically remix and restory, both as a graduate student and classroom educator? How can these tensions be positioned as productive?
The second question emerged from this case study, as I was spurred by my learning from and with Katerina to further consider, or reconsider, my remix and restory assignment and my own orientations as a teacher educator alongside the tensions Katerina surfaced:
How can teacher educators facilitate learning and design course assignments that encourage critical engagement with canonical texts and digital platforms while honoring teachers’ existing orientations and contexts?
Such considerations have implications for the ways ELA teacher education courses and coursework are conceptualized and implemented, with significance for practicing secondary teachers and their teacher educators. This is especially true for courses that are fully online, like mine, but also all those that rely on digital platforms for communication, material dissemination, assignment submission, and so forth.
Literature Review
As seen in Thomas and Stornaiuolo’s (2016) arguments for incorporating the participatory literacy practice of restorying in classrooms, both teachers and students have much to gain:
Attending to young people’s digital practices, especially their imaginative play with new tools and audiences as they restory themselves, can help push schools and educators to imagine new possibilities. These possibilities extend beyond textuality, and the struggle over whose stories are told and circulated, to the positions that educators take up in relation to authors and narratives. (p. 332)
Engaging with participatory practices, whether as a learner or a teacher planner and facilitator, necessitates critical attunement to the texts involved and to the tools through which and spaces in which the participatory practices unfold.
Rather than labeling teachers as schoolifying participatory practices when they instead emphasize access issues like lacking class sets of novels or laptops, teacher educators can turn to these tensions the educators in their courses raise as opportunities to surface orientations toward texts and tools — both the educators’ and the teacher educators’ orientations. Supporting teachers and teacher educators in attuning to their own orientations toward technology and the impacts on how they participate and how they invite their students to participate can meaningfully inform course design.
In the subsections that follow, I describe literacy research literature on access concerns among teachers studying and engaging with participatory cultures, surfacing the absence of critical attunement to digital tools and spaces, in particular. The growing field of platform studies in literacy teaching and learning is then discussed as an area in need of further attention when engaging teachers in and with participatory cultures and practices, pointing toward a similar absence of teacher education research that is attuned to teacher educators’ orientations toward technology and the interrelated impact on their pre- and in-service educator students and, in turn, youth students.
Access as About Educators’ Orientations
Tool-based access constraints and concerns about the doability of participatory practices in their school contexts with their students were the most expressed and emphasized in relation to the remix and restory assignment. In their study of rural teachers in a National Writing Project (NWP) Invitational Summer Institute (ISI) for kindergarten through secondary literacy teachers, Howell et al. (2016) similarly explored the ways teachers both engaged in a participatory culture as part of the ISI and the ways they perceived the facilitation of a participatory culture in their own classrooms. Educators in the ISI that Howell et al. studied also most focused on tensions around tool-based access constraints.
The teachers in our literacy learning experiences often positioned their access constraints as ones out of their control and due to the environment of their school contexts: lack of available computers, insufficient funds for technology support and training, overemphasis on standardized learning and traditional best practices, safety site blockers, and so forth. Ertmer (1999) defined such extrinsic, uncontrollable obstacles as “first-order” barriers. However, such extrinsic barriers often “focus more upon design of resources than access” (Howell et al., 2016, p. 152).
For example, multiple teachers in Howell et al.’s (2016) study grappled with orientations toward computers as the necessary tool for digital learning in schools, noting the lack of availability of classroom computers or the logistical challenges of a computer lab setting. However, computers are not necessary for participatory engagement, whether because students can compose and collaborate via the cell phones that 95% of them have (Anderson & Jiang, 2022) or because participatory practices need not be entirely or even inherently digital (e.g., Ouyang et al., 2021).
Howell et al. (2016) emphasized this latter point, as well, when they also asserted that “a participatory culture is not dependent upon digital spaces” (p. 153). However, Howell et al. went on to contextualize this assertion: “The increasing pervasiveness of technology … increase[s] the expectation that students be capable of creating products in digital spaces, using a variety of modes to communicate with audiences” (p. 153).
The inherent educator linking of participatory culture with digital tools clearly intersects with this emphasis on tool-based access constraints, but it stops short of explaining why teachers hold particular beliefs about only certain tools (e.g., computers as solely appropriate or necessary for both school-based learning and participatory practices within schools), an indication that these access concerns are situated in teachers’ own orientations toward technology.
Shift Toward a Platform Orientation
This focus on access and tools is paralleled in the way most teachers talk about technology in their assignments as graduate students and in their classrooms as educators. The emphasis is most often on apps, spaces, and even digitally based approaches — like remix and restory — as “tools.” Teachers talk about how (not why) they use particular tools and whether the tools are generative for their goals as teachers and their students’ needs, including if and how the tools are or are not “accessible.”
Nichols and LeBlanc (2020) and other digital literacies scholars, however, have urged educators to move “beyond apps” to a “platform orientation,” where a “platform refers to digital spaces that facilitate social and economic exchange” (p. 103). Such a shift in orientation first requires recognizing that digital tools are highly distinct from other classroom tools: “Unlike a calculator or overhead projector, a digital platform is not a singular or stable technology” (Nichols & Garcia, 2022, p. 213). The digital spaces educators use for facilitating learning have far-reaching but often seemingly invisible ties — to other users; to those who created the technology; to the hardware and software used to run the technology; to the businesses, corporations, and individuals who maintain or profit from the technology; and more.
The rising area of platform studies in education, specifically in literacy teaching and learning (e.g., Garcia & Nichols, 2021; Nichols & Garcia, 2022; Nichols & LeBlanc, 2020), recognizes the social, technical, and economic aspects of platforms and challenges teacher education to interrogate them all more closely, especially the latter two. The technical aspects involve how an app is composed, from its appearance to its code, and how it is experienced by users. The economic aspects question who profits from an app and in what ways. These dimensions involve “behind the scenes” knowledge or are otherwise hidden from users and, as a result, are rarely delved into deeply by educators.
Teachers are, however, primed to emphasize the social aspects of platforms. “Most resources that aid teachers in evaluating and selecting apps to augment instruction foreground this social dimension, delineating how the software enables particular activities and practices” (Nichols & LeBlanc, 2020, p. 104). The social dimensions of how individuals create, consume, or otherwise integrate technology into our literate lives is “how casual users tend to talk about platforms” (p. 104). With teachers, this might sound like discussing whether and how a particular app works for sharing reflections on a text or for classroom management tasks, as examples.
Rather than remain with this exclusive focus on the how of technology use, a platform orientation opens possibilities of thinking about the ways usage and creation is shaped by the tools themselves, including those unseen aspects of the tools. Nichols and LeBlanc (2020) explained this parallel shift in how we orient toward digital tools as literacy teachers and learners as follows:
Research on digital literacy has tended to emphasize the skills and practices students use to navigate, curate, produce, and consume digital media. In other words, it tended to focus on what students do with digital technologies rather than how digital technologies (and their social, technical, and economic underpinnings) condition these digital activities. A platform orientation offers pathways for educators to expand notions of digital literacy to include attention to the dynamics that occur outside users’ everyday view. Even more, it opens opportunities for teachers to inquire alongside students what it means to live and work in a platform society. (pp. 107-108)
Platforms bring to bear their own interests that shape their design and, ultimately, shape what participatory engagement is or can be there. The purposeful design features and economic interests of platforms have made many question to what extent genuine participatory engagement remains possible (e.g., Jenkins et al., 2016). By aiming for a platform orientation, though, teachers can not only become more aware of these influences on the participatory practices they plan for their students or engage in as learners themselves but, further, can become more critically aware digitally literate citizens.
Attention to Teacher Educators’ Orientations
Literacy teacher educators like Skerrett (2011) and Ávila (2013) exemplified how to examine courses and assignments aimed at participatory practices, with attention to tensions of implementation and design but without consideration of the platforms in which assignments take place. In her “reflections on a digital literacies course,” one also based on participatory culture, Ávila (2013) argued for “more design and earlier,” asserting that in future versions of her course she would “ask [her students] to become designers through the entire term, rather than in a couple of tokenistic responses” (p. 104).
In her study as a teacher educator implementing pedagogy of multiliteracies in a course for preservice teachers, Skerrett (2011) emphasized contradictions, dilemmas, and tensions that her educators/students experienced in their “dispositions toward” multiliteracies. “These conflicts pertained to what literacy practices and lifeworlds could be legitimated in the classroom and whether and how in- and out-of-school literacy practices, goals, and values could complement and transform each other” (p. 196). Rather than critique the educators in her multiliteracies course as engaging in schoolifying, Skerrett (2011) turned the emphasis toward the self as teacher educator, asserting that teacher educators strengthen our own pedagogies — whether in relation to multiliteracies in her context or participatory culture and practices in mine — “to demonstrate to the teacher[s] … how they might successfully negotiate the barriers … that they perceive” (p. 192). Skerrett (2011) suggested strengthening through demonstration: providing extended projects for students that allow for “overt practice,” or chances to directly engage in the tensions they are experiencing and to consider how they might navigate the barriers they perceive.
Skerrett (2011) argued that educators need more extended opportunities not only to access the various modes and tools available to create with and to think critically about their modality- and tool-based choices but, further, to critically analyze the sociocultural, political, and ideological dimensions of literacy learning (p. 193). Platform studies makes clear that such dimensions include the economic, social, and technical aspects of digital tools.
Studies that directly investigate the impact of platforms on classroom cultures and students’ and teachers’ forms of participation are fewer, but those that do exist also emphasize personal experiences and tensions. Nichols and Johnston (2020) focused “on frictions in digital practices” (p. 259), complicating notions of access by emphasizing the ways multimodal resources are unevenly available, depending upon a host of often hidden dimensions as central to a platform orientation.
For instance, what images do and do not appear in a Google Image search when creating a multimodal composition, and how does this differ depending upon the individual searching, the individualized algorithms behind the search, and more? And what is the impact on students’ experiences as creators and on teachers’ understanding of students’ work and their identities? Nichols and Johnston (2020) argued for “instruction about the mechanisms that shape availability in multimodal composing and their uneven implications for equity” (p. 259) and, further, that such instructional attunement to these tensions positions both students and educators as inquirers into what is involved in creating in our increasingly digital and platformed world.
Wright (2023) invited preservice teachers to engage in this very sort of tension-based inquiry work through a remix project, in which they “navigated and spliced together disparate representations of teaching and learning on YouTube” (p. 11). This digital remix allowed the preservice teachers to consider critically their own identities as emerging educators entering a fraught profession directly in relation to the impact of platforms on the forming, constraining, or enabling of those teacher identities.
While engaging in remixes of videos they searched for and selected about education, the preservice teachers considered the often-competing discourses and representations surrounding education; the role of platforms in shaping and disseminating those representations; and their own agency to reflect on, disrupt, or otherwise reshape these conversations. These preservice teachers were considering or reconsidering what it means to teach and learn in a platform society in the ways called for by Nichols and Johnston (2020). And they did so through one of the same participatory practices I invited the in-service teachers in my course to engage in: remix, pointing to the overall potential for surfacing tensions through teachers’ participatory practices, which can then reveal the teachers’ orientations toward technology, the recognitions of which can then help teachers and teacher educators to reconsider course design.
In what follows, I describe how I drew on Katerina’s experiences with restory as seen through her assignment and discussions of it to consider how I (and other teacher educators) can better facilitate participatory practices in similar ways that push toward critical forms of engagement beyond tool-based access and toward considerations of power, both in relation to canonicity and platform literacies.
Study Context
The remix and restory assignment and the data I collected about it come from a fully online, asynchronous graduate course for ELA teachers enrolled in an online curriculum and instruction master’s program at a large southeastern US university. The course spanned a 16-week spring semester in 2021 and was centered on participatory culture in literacy teaching and learning. In line with participatory culture as a framework for digital interactions, I approached this course as a collaborative learning community with the 14 graduate student educators who were enrolled. Eight of these teachers consented to participate in my larger qualitative research study.
Examples of participatory practices and the centering of communal knowledge and relationships include the following approaches I took to course assignments:
- collaborative digital writing documents;
- collaborative annotation of the course syllabus;
- graduate student-led course weeks (i.e., the practicing teachers created asynchronous presentations around topics and in formats of their choosing);
- participation in and analysis of communities made by and/or meant for teachers;
- engagement in remixing and restorying of canonical, school-based texts, on which I focus in this current discussion; and
- video-based forms of sharing about these practices and experiences.
I focus here on the remix and restory assignment because of the tensions it brought to the surface around teachers’ and my own orientations to participatory practices, texts, digital platforms, and criticality.
One of the eight consenting participants, Katerina, expressed interest in learning more about remix and restory in relation to her secondary classroom. At the time of this study, Katerina taught in a rural school in the same Southeastern state as our university. She was in her 3rd year of teaching ninth grade ELA in the town in which she lived and had family roots. It was through conversations with Katerina that I came to my guiding question about these tensions, compelling me to look more closely at Katerina’s remix and restory assignment, her interview discussions of the assignment, and, ultimately, my own choices and reflections on both, the latter reflected in my emergent research question.
Methods
Aligning with Stake’s (2000) case study description as “both a process of inquiry about the case and the product of that inquiry” (p. 436), I approached my analysis of Katerina’s remix and restory assignment as case study analysis, specifically as an intrinsic case in which I first aimed to gain further insight into Katerina’s experience. In so doing, however, I also began to inquire and gain insights into my own experience. Given that practitioner research is characterized by “blurred boundaries between inquiry and practice” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009, p. 39). I developed emergent research questions about my own practice from my initial (but intertwined) case study analysis.
Tensions that Katerina surfaced in her orientations to, products from, and discussions of her remix and restory assignment compelled me to analyze not only her work but my own teaching through reflective practitioner lenses. Practitioner research is also characterized by such “systematic documentation of changing classroom practices, students’ learning, and practitioners’ questioning and narratives” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009). I position this work as practitioner inquiry in methodological framing and practice.
I worked to analyze course materials related to remix and restory by employing a combination of several kinds of qualitative coding. Open coding and in vivo coding allowed for further, in-depth readings and interpretations of data and for various patterns, themes, and relationships to emerge. Open coding, or “an inductive attempt to capture new insights” (Maxwell, 2013, p. 107), brought forth key concepts and areas of interest that continuously appeared and correlated in and across the multiple data sources. In addition, in vivo coding (Miles et al., 2014) enabled the use of teachers’ own words and ideas as codes. Such an approach allowed me to “prioritize and honor the participant[s’] voices” (p. 74).
In my case study analysis of Katerina, I first reviewed her Restory/Remix of “Canonical” Text and Report assignment, including her Flip video forms of reflection and commenting, writing researcher memos during and after these early analysis and reflection sessions. I noted any emerging themes and ideas that could serve as codes, generating an initial list. I then collapsed broad codes and codes aimed at similar content and themes, reorganizing them and looking for patterns across Katerina’s experiences with and perspectives on the remix and restory assignment as a learner and in her own secondary classroom.
This coding approach is exemplified in one of the codes that emerged: Zooming. The word choice came directly from a discussion between Katerina and me when Katerina compared participatory culture to a universe and described “zooming” across the universe. We came to conceptualize zooming as a cross-contextual form of reflection on participatory cultures and practices across spaces and roles for literacy teaching and learning. Katerina’s words brought forth important considerations around how teacher education assignments can facilitate educators in such forms of reflection.
In bringing together Katerina’s insights and my own through this combination of open (Maxwell, 2013) and in vivo (Miles et al., 2014) coding, I arrived at a core set of five codes through content analysis (Neuendorf, 2016; Saldaña, 2015) of course documents and my memos: Zooming, Access, Professional Development, Flexible Structures, and Authenticity. The codes highlight the tensions Katerina experienced as she was analyzing, discussing, and interacting through the remix and restory course assignment. The codes also served as powerful springboards for me in considering my own pedagogical choices and frameworks around participatory creation, design, and criticality in relation to canonicity and the platforms in which the students (and I) worked.
Findings
Given this dual emphasis on both Katerina’s restory work and my own pedagogical choices and framings of the assignment and how they impacted Katerina’s work, I first offer contextualizing discussion of my teaching and students’ learning related to the remix and restory assignment, including each student’s approach to the assignment. I then detail Katerina’s restory assignment process and product to ultimately think across both sections about orientations to technology, how teachers and teacher educators can work to surface them and why, and what the impact is and could be on assignment framing around texts and tools.
My Framing of the Restory and Remix Assignment
Through the Restory/Remix of “Canonical” Text and Report course assignment, I asked the graduate students/practicing teachers to choose a canonical text of focus, based on their experiences as teachers and/or learners, question what makes that text canonical and why, and consider how the text might be put into relationship with participatory practices. The assignment invited the graduate students/practicing teachers to engage in remixing or restorying themselves in relation to their chosen canonical text and to then think about their literacy processes and products alongside course readings (as in Knobel & Lankshear, 2008; Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016; Vasudevan, 2010) and their classroom contexts. See Appendix A for a full copy of the assignment explanation. The graduate students/practicing teachers ultimately shared their creations through our course group on Flip.
I initially positioned the teachers in my course as schoolifying participatory practices because most of their assignments emphasized the how of their remix and restory creations. For example, “I made this using Canva,” or “my approach was a plot-based approach.” See Appendix B for brief descriptions of and excerpts from the eight participants’ remix or restory creations.
Only two of the participants, Erma and Renee, centered issues of identity. Erma pushed back against gendered expectations raised in her canonical text choice. Renee chose to restory a novel about a character who experienced racial discrimination into one about a character who experienced transgender discrimination. In her project, Renee described her decision to focus on transgendered experiences as resulting from discussions with her students, in which they shared struggles with their gender identities and others’ understandings of, reactions to, and representations of them:
After having conversations with my students, I realized this was something that is so prevalent right now. I have a lot of middle school students who are transgender, who are transitioning and trying to find out who they really are. So discussing this with them, they actually really connect it with the [novel] character.
Renee was the sole graduate student educator to center her remix and restory project on exploring representations of her students’ identities directly.
In contrast, four of the eight graduate student educators — Natasha, Pearl, Katerina, and Camille — emphasized the ways their chosen participatory practice would aid students in better understanding or “mastering” required content, whether that was overcoming the obstacle of Shakespearean language in Camille’s remix of Hamlet into text message communication or more broadly, as Katerina described: “just to get their [students’] attention more and to help them retain the lessons or the objectives that we are using that text for.” Two of the participants, Leila and Holly, focused largely on whether or not the tools they used for their remix would be accessible to their students, which involved the ease of students navigating Canva for Leila and the familiarity of creating on their smartphones for the students in Holly’s class, who were using a meme generator website blocked on school-issued devices in her context.
Even when citing the assigned course readings on remix and restory as practices of critical literacies, these concerns about interactive engagement with a canonical text and access to digital tools predominated. For example, Holly cited Vasudevan et al.’s (2010) discussion of remix as opening capabilities for composing in new ways. However, she closed her thoughts with a return to the how of these new forms of composing rather than their impact in allowing students to explore their identities or share their perspectives in relation to or about a text.
Like Ávila (2013), rather than continue to orient toward these teachers as problematically schoolifying participatory practices, I have drawn on my data analysis as practitioner reflection to illuminate how my remix/restory assignment did not facilitate the graduate student educators in engaging in critique or even thinking from the tradition of critical literacies or critical theories.
I had positioned the project as “open” in terms of which canonical texts the graduate student educators wanted to work with and how. As West-Puckett et al. (2018) revealed in their study of participatory practices among educators within the NWP’s Connected Learning Massive, Open, Online Collaboration (CLMOOC), openness as an approach or orientation toward participatory practices is not sufficient for fostering and supporting participatory literacy learning with texts, peers, or platforms. West-Puckett et al. explained that “inviting for diversified participation and affirming for reciprocal engagement” (the former which I aimed to do through my open invitations toward text selection and remix or restory approaches and the latter through the course Flip group where the teachers shared their creations), “while necessary … these facilitative moves are still not enough to substantially remake learning relationships” (p. 204) in the ways participatory cultures and practices so aim: collaborative across contexts, critical, justice-oriented, multimodal, and more.
Simply assigning course readings that I understand to be and operationalize as “critical” (Knobel & Lankshear, 2008; Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016; Vasudevan, 2010) does not equate to inviting the teachers in my course to engage in criticality. While identity work through remix and restory as critical literacies practices is possible with canonical literature (Borsheim-Black & Sarigianidies, 2019), assignments meant to engage in and produce such work must be overtly framed as such. Borsheim-Black and Sarigianidies asserted that teachers must “investigate canonicity with students” [emphasis added], an assertion that pairs well with Ávila’s (2013) aforementioned reflection as a teacher educator in a course also centered on participatory culture: “Ask [students] to become designers through the entire term, rather than in a couple of tokenistic responses” (p. 104).
My Restory/Remix of a “Canonical” Text and Report assignment (see Appendix A) included only the following mention of canonical texts, certainly an example of a perfunctory attempt at critical engagement of the canon: “You will choose a ‘canonical’ text with which you are already familiar — and you may also use this activity as a place to question what counts as ‘canonical’ and why.”
Just as I attempted to center openness toward the canon in the remix and restory assignment through allowing teachers to self-select their texts, I also positioned the teachers’ engagement in these participatory practices as “open” through experimentation, as seen in the assignment description (Appendix A). “Your reports can be argumentative, reflective, and/or exploratory in tone and can take a variety of formats. I encourage you to experiment with different ways to ‘participate’!” However, as with leaving the canonical text selection open to the teachers, simply inviting the use of digital tools through an open approach to experiment with them does not equate to or foster criticality toward the tools and spaces selected for the participatory practices.
In their work with teachers in the CLMOOC, West-Puckett et al. (2018) drew on Bjögvinsson et al.’s (2012) notion of “infrastructuring strategies” to “assist in pushing us beyond ‘open’” (p. 209). Infrastructuring requires acknowledging and surfacing how technology is an actor “at play” in the ways individuals participate, create, and learn, aligning with a platform orientation (Nichols & Garcia, 2022; Nichols & LeBlanc, 2020) that compels educators to analyze the multiple dimensions in which tools function and impact us and our work. Although experimentation with digital tools or other multimodal formats is not sufficient for participatory engagement, it can attune educators to the ways in which platforms shape that very engagement — but only if we turn toward those platforms with awareness and critical lenses.
While this assignment invited potential critique of the canon and exploration with digital tools, it did not open space for Katerina or others to meaningfully examine or reflect on either aspect as learners or as educators. The assignment perpetuated an emphasis on solely school-based learning through participatory practices, which reinforced deterministic discussions of what is and is not possible in classrooms. The emphasis on school content also aligns me — and in turn the graduate student educators in my course — with the teacher tendency mentioned earlier to immediately connect participatory forms of engagement with school-based forms (Alvermann & Heron, 2001).
Katerina, whose restory project and experiences will be detailed in the next section, was comfortable experimenting as a creator, although with the goal of composing lesson plans for her students and with persistent questions about whether and how participatory practices were accessible in her contexts.
Katerina’s Restory of “The Lottery”
For her restory of a canonical text, Katerina utilized Shirley Jackson’s short story, “The Lottery.” Using the Google Slides presentation app, she created an interactive digital slideshow, a choose-your-own-adventure game, in which students could rewrite the ending of “The Lottery.” Katerina offered students multiple paths to select from in her version of restorying “The Lottery,” with students clicking through a series of new plot events that ultimately culminated in one of three alternative endings. See Figure 1 for one of these choices within the game.
Figure 1
Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Game Katerina Created as Part of Her Restory of “The Lottery”
Katerina’s tensions with engaging in participatory practices in her ninth-grade ELA classroom related to technology, as she wanted to experiment with digital options for her restory graduate coursework assignment that she knew would not be possible in her school context. However, she felt her constraints stemmed first from access to curricular materials.
While many people might recognize a widely read narrative such as “The Lottery” as inherently canonical, Katerina devoted a significant portion of her restory assignment to unpacking why the short story counts as canonical, contrasting it with what she deemed more traditional texts, like novels:
As an educator and self-appointed activist for Title 1 schools and underrepresented students, I thought it was necessary to pick a short story as my canonical text because novels were not readily accessible during my experience as a 9th grade English teacher.
In explaining her choices for selecting a short story as a canonical text, she alluded to the possibilities short stories offer for participatory practices, including how “short stories have captured and invoked the imaginations and creativity of students for generations” (personal communication, February 14, 2021). Of the eight consenting participants, Katerina and one other teacher, Natasha, chose short stories. Only three of the teachers chose novels. Katerina was the only educator who felt compelled to defend the canonicity of her chosen text. Her emphasis on whether and how her text selection counted as canonical indicates a perceived need to pair participatory practices with traditional texts to teach ELA content effectively.
In addition to her text-based access concerns, Katerina emphasized tool-based access constraints, as she and her high school students in their classroom context did not have the one-to-one devices the interactive online story game Katerina created required. Katerina talked about how she could draw on classroom resources she did have readily available for implementation to retain those participatory aspects of online gaming within her in-class activity: a whiteboard, markers, poster paper as “slides,” and sticky notes as “choices.”
In grappling with how her access constraints around technology challenged her facilitation of participatory practices, Katerina spoke to the point made earlier about teachers’ beliefs, or “dispositions” (Skerrett, 2013), being the actual barriers to exploration and implementation rather than the extrinsic (Ertmer, 1999) issues they identify, like lack of digital devices in Katerina’s teaching context. Despite focusing much of her restory assignment discussion on what was and was not possible in her context, Katerina actually showed that her access concerns were ultimately not out of her control — that she could and, in fact, did still facilitate participatory practices, even in the face of the constraints she named.
In our interviews, Katerina positioned her nondigital version of this remix in her classroom as a more meaningful integration of technology than the usual approach to digital tools in her context.
Speaking from where I come from, we don’t have computers just to type on. Our computers are missing keys. Students just type off of papers, so my experience with technology is just having students type on something. If they can type on a computer, that’s my quota for technology in the classroom. You can just be that limited. But I just want to be able to use technology in meaningful ways. And then from that I learned with the lack of technology, I learned how to take aspects of technology and make it something we can do on paper. Not technology in a digital way. … With build your own adventure games I have done, it’s just not been on PowerPoint, but we’ve done it through writing a storyboard and then putting it up on the whiteboard. (Personal communication, February 14, 2021)
Not only did Katerina surface the important but often overlooked conclusion that participatory practices need not be inherently digital, she also articulated her own orientations toward technology as a teacher. What is missing, however, is consideration of how that orientation might differ from her own experiences with technology as a learner and creator.
Although she clearly articulated that her chosen platform of Google Slides was not one that her students would have opportunities to participate in, the platform used for this particular version of the interactive experience that she presented for the assignment still became part of the unfolding pedagogical event, particularly as it moved across contexts. However, she did not delve into any discussion of why she chose Google Slides and how the platform shaped the ways she presented the aspects of the interactive game she most valued, both in the assignment itself and in a different form in her classroom.
Katerina explained her reasons for her game-based approach to the restory assignment in a purposeful choice to center her students’ experiences, their preferences for engagement via games, and their need for meaningful choice. Katerina was the creator of the changes to the short story and the choices for restorying, all of which she grounded in “The Lottery” theme of “breaking toxic traditions.” She connected this theme to her students’ lives and the Thomas and Stornaiuolo (2016) assigned article in our course on restorying:
It is beneficial to allow students to dive into the text by “playing” with its themes, figurative language, and rhetorical devices in fun and engaging ways. And what’s more fun than interactive games? Specifically, a game that lets you determine the story’s final outcome. Thomas and Stornaiuolo (2016) recalls Nigerian author, Adichie’s, experience with a reader stating, “The reader felt justified in imagining the sequel precisely because she had taken ownership of the storying process, facilitated by seeing characters who looked like her and had experiences resonant with her own.” This resonated with me because my students often struggle with remaining true to traditions that are indicative to paths leading only to generational poverty. (Personal communication, February 14, 2021)
This choose-your-own adventure game restory project was clearly student-centered, with Katerina shaping the new story choices around her understanding of her students’ backgrounds and feelings. Her connection between choices in “The Lottery” and paths in her students’ lives “leading only to generational poverty” is reflective of the fact that 92% of her student population was considered economically disadvantaged. The overall county where she and her students lived has 35.5% of its population living below the poverty line (Institute of Education Sciences, 2022-2023).
In a rural community with the only Black majority population in its state, Katerina’s high school students were 97% minority. Although Katerina did not delve deeply into the paths or traditions she was alluding to, there are limited job opportunities available within her community, and both crime and drug use are known issues across the county, where there is only one school system. Generational poverty is a reality for nearly all her students. However, this emphasis on students’ identities is one that she predetermined both in focus and in the rewritten portions of “The Lottery.”
Katerina did, however, point toward her students criticizing aspects of “The Lottery”—although she did not specify which aspects, how, why, and in what relation to their own lives: “If students are given the opportunities to remix and restory texts that are not only entertaining to them but relevant to their identities and experiences, they will be able to analyze, critique, and create their own learning outcomes” (Personal communication, February 14, 2021).
Katerina surfaced notions of student agency over both content knowledge and creation through interactive games, but her forms of participatory practices as a creator and as an educator did not afford her or her students ownership — opportunities to “inscribe themselves into existence” or to engage “collectively and creatively” with the canonical text in the ways restorying both allows and necessitates (as described in Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016).
Despite ties to students’ experiences and stances toward “toxic traditions,” Katerina’s restory project remained largely focused on plot elements over in-depth critique and creation. The choose-your-own adventure game is likely a more effective way of engaging students in and with a canonical or traditional text. Yet, whether and how her approach invited students to engage in the sorts of criticism she broadly mentioned is unclear, especially in ways that align with challenging power structures and the status quo of authorship in schools, as the Thomas and Stornaiuolo (2016) piece on restorying she referenced does.
Katerina remains focused on how students could engage with the plot of the selected short story in interactive ways, rather than on how students could choose to incorporate aspects of their identities or offer alternative representations beyond those portrayed in the story or by her alternative versions of it. Katerina articulated her emphasis on plot comprehension in her aims for the restory project:
I wanted to use this as a way to especially show that you can take a short text such as “The Lottery” that doesn’t have a lot of plot points, but you can dive into those specific themes, the specific foreshadowing, the specific figurative language. (personal communication, February 14, 2021)
A centering of plot over representation, although sparked by a course reading steeped in critical orientations (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016) and by a connection between a canonical text and her own students’ lives, also demonstrates the point Alvermann and Heron (2021) made about teacher’s first emphasis when engaging in participatory forms of literacy teaching and learning being on traditional aspects of content.
Although the remix and restory assignment in our participatory culture course was situated in the teachers’ own experiences with texts considered canonical or ones they otherwise frequently assigned as educators or read as students, again it stopped short of “draw[ing] on students’ meaning-making experiences in their numerous lifeworlds” (Skerrett, 2011, p. 187) — either those of the graduate student educators in my classroom or their own secondary students. As a teacher educator, I now see that there were numerous opportunities to approach Katerina’s choices around participatory creation for her coursework and for her students with further criticality, both in orientation toward her selected canonical text and her use — or not — of technological tools and when.
Discussion and Implications
Katerina focused on students’ identities almost entirely through the notion that students use and prefer interactive approaches. Such positioning was done, however, without attunement to the technologies used, whether digital or not, as spaces — platforms — with their own influences. Katerina was able to tap into her students’ preferences for game playing, recognizing students’ needs for engagement across their in- and out-of-school literate identities and practices. However, her restory project centered solely on working with digital, multimodal, or otherwise interactive versions of canonical stories. Her project, which was a proposed lesson for her secondary students, did not involve analyzing or even speaking back to notions of representation and power in canonical stories, expressing individual identities in relationship to class texts, or considering how technology (or perceived lack thereof) impacts thoughts about and goals with these forms of criticality.
Investigating Canonicity With Educators
My course project, then, ultimately functioned as a way for the teachers to facilitate more effective means of engaging students in white-authored canonical texts like “The Lottery,” with Katerina even devoting significant assignment discussion to defending the short story as canonical. Katerina invited her students to change the ending of “The Lottery” through a series of alternative choices she designed. She did not consider notions of power or agency through canonicity, authorship, or creation for herself or her secondary students.
While Katerina surfaced connections to her students’ identities in relation to a theme from “The Lottery,” she did not open space for students to consider themselves differently nor did she consider her own identities. Katerina undoubtedly created a project that included a new assignment for her students that is highly engaging, but using games to bolster engagement with traditional content because teachers understand that students enjoy such approaches does not equate to drawing on students’ own cultures, identities, or knowledge to reconsider texts. Yet, this is precisely what I did with the overall assignment to which Katerina responded in turn: ask students to work with a canonical text by experimenting with multimodality through different tools without critical consideration of either, which is akin to that “tokenistic” approach Ávila (2013) surfaced in her own participatory culture class — here in relation to both canonicity and platforms.
One way to more effectively foster the sort of criticality I had imagined teachers would take up is through “extended learning activities,” which Skerrett (2013) emphasized in her multiliteracies course, opportunities that move beyond tokenistic attempts at interrogation of texts and at creation; opportunites that allow teachers to not just surface some of the tensions they might have already perceived or even faced in terms of engaging in participatory practices but to reflect purposefully on them. Rather than briefly touch on their self-selected canonical texts in this one-off project, the graduate student educators could spend the entire semester with their chosen texts, considering their place and purpose and students’ (and their own) relationships to them in and out of schools alongside each week of course readings, particularly those that center authors of color; in weekly discussion post assignments; in a culminating lesson plan assignment; and so forth. The students should also be in direct conversation and collaboration with other members of the course community, problematizing live rather than sharing a finished remix or restory product after it has been created. We did the latter in our previously mentioned course Flip group and topic, which also emphasized an orientation toward apps and spaces as merely tools rather than a platform orientation.
While Katerina raised tensions in her restory project, she focused on tool-based access constraints almost entirely, including her unpacking of “The Lottery” as canonical in her classroom due to class sets of novels not being available. Such discussion of her selected canonical text was a necessary initial step for Katerina in contextualizing participatory practices in her classroom, and she made important connections to her students’ identities as she perceived them in relation to the short story’s themes. However, she stopped short of truly centering identity-based textual analysis and reconstruction through restorying in the ways Thomas and Stornaiuolo (2016), who she drew on in her analysis, advocated.
Assignments related to participatory practices with canonical texts can and should invite the graduate students as educators and as literate citizens to interrogate their own biases and apply critical literacies lenses to their teaching and personal reading and writing practices. Offering prompts aligned with these aims would facilitate engagement with issues like identities and representations. For instance, in feedback I offered to Katerina’s remix project, rather than only comment on the content of the finished product as a game, I could have prompted her to consider during her creation process how her game was positioning students and why; whether the game offered students opportunities to represent themselves or to represent characters or themes or how the game could do so; and what text types have to do with and reveal about her understandings of canonicity.
Unpacking Teachers’ Access Concerns as Orientations Toward Technology
In future versions of this remix and restory project, I aim to support teachers in not merely naming but reframing tensions in their experiences and orientations toward texts, participatory practices, digital tools, and their teaching and learning contexts and goals. Doing so should also include attunement to the platforms in which the teachers choose to work as graduate students or have to work as teachers and the impacts on participatory practices as learners and educators (and for their students). Teachers and teacher educators can and should think more carefully and critically about not just the choices they make regarding digital tools but also about how the tools themselves function as platforms with their own impacts, which opens up questions about pedagogical practices and relationships (social dimensions), accessibility (technical dimensions), and data collection and safety (economic dimensions).
With this assignment, as with most teachers (and others) who talk about technology in their literate lives, my graduate students focused on the social dimensions of the platforms they chose. They commented in their analyses and Flip video reflections about whether or not an approach or tool was “easy” to use, accessible in their teaching contexts, and enjoyable to engage with or not. Similar to avoiding the tendency to cast teachers as schoolifying participatory practices in problematic ways, these social aspects of platforms can be capitalized on with the teachers talking about them. Initially, the ways teachers already focus on the social dimensions of platforms can serve as a means of exploring their intentions for tool selection and then to compare those intentions to the impact of the usage of the tool. Ultimately, the social dimensions can act as a springboard for shifting toward the “out of view” dynamics (i.e., the technical and economic) that are too often left entirely undiscussed in education.
Aligning with Bjögvinsson et al.’s (2012) “infrastructuring strategies” as a means of moving past “openness,” Nichols and LeBlanc (2020) offered several helpful prompts about the social dimension of platforms that would be generative for teachers in moving “beyond apps” and other tool-based orientations toward technology. These questions include the following:
“How does a platform’s intended and actual uses differ?”
“How does it reconfigure teaching and learning?”
“How does it alter teacher–student–parent relationships?”
“How does it transform existing practices or necessitate new ones?” (p. 105).
Through these and similar questions, investigation of the teachers’ tool-based choices for their participatory practices could become a key aspect of the assignment, allowing for a platform orientation to be fostered.
In future versions of the assignment, I would capitalize on these and similar prompts, along with Skerrett’s (2013) discussion of orienting toward tensions, offering the teachers direct questions that push them to not merely surface what their tensions are with participatory practices and technology but to openly reflect on how they did or would navigate them.
Even when digital tools do not seem like an accessible option, as in Katerina’s context, there are ways to draw on a platform orientation, as evidenced by this additional prompt from Nichols and LeBlanc (2020): “How does the platform address this problem differently than other platforms (or nontechnological resources)?” (p. 107). Posing a similar question as part of the assignment — incorporating critical analysis of the platforms used — would have afforded Katerina an opportunity to reconsider her constraints and choices and the outcomes. For instance, what aspects of her interactive game did Katerina feel were participatory, and how were they impacted by a shift across digital and nondigital formats? What were the strengths and challenges of each and why?
In upcoming iterations of this course and with this assignment, I now have a similar opportunity to consider how platforms shape pedagogical possibilities, and further, to do so transparently with my graduate students. Flip had been my platform of choice for many years within my fully online, asynchronous courses like this one on participatory culture. I drew on its video-based forms of sharing as a means of building community and of sharing resources and reflections among my students who live and teach in disparate counties and contexts in our large state.
However, Flip as a standalone website and app was discontinued in fall 2024, although key features of its functionality, namely the “Flip camera,” have been integrated into Microsoft Teams for Education. I have since turned to Padlet in more recent courses to achieve similar pedagogical goals. While such a shift might seem like a minor inconvenience, it serves as a concrete example of how “a digital platform is not a singular or stable technology” (Nichols & Garcia, 2022). Features of Flip persist but in new packaging and branding, shaped by corporate economics and interests. As a teacher educator, I had to adapt to this particular evolving platform ecology, but I could and still can do so with more criticality and intention, including providing opportunities for the teachers with whom I work to engage directly with this evolution and to consider ways in which they have similarly been impacted and have adapted and with what personal and pedagogical consequences.
Building critical considerations of and questions about platforms into assignments and course content would allow the discussions had among teachers about their creations — as in our course Flip group topic for this remix and restory assignment — to be not just about how they put together what they did (e.g., the tools, mediums, and tasks) and with what access constraints but further about why they made their choices in relationship to their contexts and to the tools and what this says about them as educators and literate citizens and about their students as well as about how systems of power shape all of these lenses.
Conclusion
Further attention should be paid within teacher education to teachers’ and teacher educators’ orientations toward technology and the impact on the students with whom they work. The tensions Katerina and I raised in our experiences with engaging in and facilitating participatory practices are important starting points for more critically attuned conversations about texts and tools, ones that inform our pedagogical and curricular choices in ways that speak back to issues of power, whether regarding textual representations or platform ownerships. And so the question has become for me how to reframe the negative connotations around schoolifying and coopting participatory practices in ways that both allow for recognition of where educators are at with their experiences and orientations and for pushing toward more critical frameworks around and practices with literacies, including toward a platform orientation.
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Appendix A
Copy of Restory/remix Assignment Description in Canvas Course Site
Restory/remix of “Canonical” Text Activity and Report
Our sixth course week will focus on the topic of “Restorying and Remixing.” You will engage with this week’s topic by experimenting with the elements and strategies of participatory reading and writing discussed in the week’s assigned readings (as well as with others you might know from your own practices, research, etc.).
You will choose a “canonical” text with which you are already familiar—and you may also use this remix activity as a place to question what counts as “canonical” and why. The text can be a book, play, or film, but it should be one often read/viewed in school-based literacy learning environments. You will narrow your remix to a smaller sub-section of your chosen text.
Exactly “how” you choose to restory or remix is open-ended, as is the format for how you will share out about your restory or remix. The goal of this activity is to make connections across the readings and their restorying and remix discussions and to consider how students might engage in restorying and remixing of “canonical” texts assigned in their schools.
Appendix B
All Teacher Participants’ Restory or Remix Project Approaches and Key Quotes
v25i2English2AppB 