Cosmopolitan Literacies: Writing for Social Change in an Online Global Community

Submitted by: Amy Stornaiuolo
Abstract: This presentation centers on how educators can foster young people’s cosmopolitan literacies – hospitable, ethical, and rhetorically attuned cross-cultural communication practices – as youth learn to communicate with others online across differences in language, culture, belief, and ideology. Focused on an educational social network connecting young people online, the design-based study presented here documents how youth used new forms of networked writing—which included multiple languages, multiple modes, and socially networked ways of collaborating and sharing—to work toward social justice and engage in public dialogue. The presentation will examine the rhetorical moves made by 160 students and the ways teachers supported students’ efforts. This study illustrates how young people learn to write in rhetorically, aesthetically, and ethically alert ways, developing cosmopolitan literacies that they need to navigate the multimodal, multilingual, and transnational complexities of participating online.


Proposal
One of the greatest challenges of our time involves preparing youth to be ethical, empathetic, and effective global communicators online, citizens who write, read, and curate impactfully and responsibly via digital tools (Canagarajah, 2012). Despite a recent proliferation of communication technologies, it remains profoundly difficult to initiate, sustain, and nurture virtual conversations and connections across traditional divides (Sorrells, 2013). This presentation centers on how educators can foster young people’s cosmopolitan literacies – hospitable, ethical, and rhetorically attuned cross-cultural communication practices – as youth learn to communicate with others online across differences in language, culture, belief, and ideology.

The context of the presentation is an educator-moderated social network (called W4C here) where youth share their multilingual, multimodal writing to take social action and catalyze change in and beyond their local communities. The W4C project explores and documents how youth use new forms of networked writing—which include multiple languages, multiple modes (like image and video), and socially networked ways of collaborating and sharing—to work toward social justice and engage in public dialogue. One of the central elements of the project is its exploration of how young people understand the impact of their writing on others.

The qualitative, design-based research study (Collins et al., 2004) was guided by the following questions: 1) How do youth from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds share their writing and collaborate with one another in the online community? 2) How do they use writing and online composing resources in their efforts to address issues of inequality in and across their communities? Data were collected during one 12-week ‘activity cycle’ in which five teachers and 160 students in the U.S., Canada, India, and Italy connected online. Data included semi-structured interviews, observations, video/audio recordings, network analytics, and daily archives of online postings (Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2014).

Findings center on how young people use writing as a form of participatory, democratic action (Flower, 2008) that can address global inequalities. Specifically, the presentation examines different rhetorical moves young authors engaged in to take others into account in their writing, whether by orchestrating across modes to represent lived experience or using data visualizations to see how they were connected to other community members. This study illustrates how young people learn to write in rhetorically, aesthetically, and ethically alert ways, developing cosmopolitan literacies that they need to navigate the multimodal, multilingual, and transnational complexities of participating online.

References

Canagarajah, S. (2012). Translingual practice: Global Englishes and cosmopolitan relations. New York: Routledge.

Collins, A., Joseph, D., & Bielaczyc, K. (2003). Design research: Theoretical and methodological issues. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 13(1), 15-42.

Flower, L. (2008). Community literacy and the rhetoric of public engagement. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Miles, M. B., Huberman, A. M., & Saldaña, J. (2014). Qualitative data analysis: A methods sourcebook (3rd ed.). United States of America: Sage Publications, Inc.

Sorrells, K. (2013). Intercultural communication: Globalization and social justice. Los Angeles: Sage Publications.

Bio
Amy Stornaiuolo is an assistant professor of literacy education at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on adolescents' digital literacy practices, especially new forms of networked writing and cross-cultural collaboration online.