Kritiskt digitalt textarbete i klassrummet

Abstract

Increasingly sophisticated technologies are expanding opportunities to create, use and share digital and multimodal texts based on different perspectives and motives. Among the prerequisites for participating actively in a democratic society is adopting an analytical and reflective approach towards texts – that is, developing critical digital literacy. Therefore, research on teaching and learning activities aimed at developing critical digital literacy awareness – namely, critical digital literacy work – is crucial. The aim of this thesis is to contribute knowledge of critical digital literacy work as part of in situ classroom activities. The thesis is underpinned by a sociocultural perspective and includes two substudies following a design-based approach. The empirical material, comprising field notes, video- and audio recordings and interviews, was generated from two different classes in two secondary schools in 2011–2012 and 2016–2017. The first substudy explored opportunities for critical digital literacy work in a digitalised classroom and revealed that there were good conditions for such work, including frequent use of digital multimodal texts and a climate of openness and exploration that enabled students to use their previous experiences of texts. However, the critical digital literacy work was limited due to a focus on traditional texts in the students’ end products, and critical aspects were not made explicit in the lesson design. The second substudy explored the development of critical literacy work through instructional design, focusing on students’ deconstruction of digital multimodal texts, and the specific lesson design supported the students’ development of critical digital literacy. The findings showed that critical digital literacy work must be an ongoing activity for students to develop not only an understanding of every mode involved but also an appreciation of what these modes mean when they intertwine. The results of the studies in this thesis suggest that developing critical digital literacy demands extensive access to texts in the classroom and a lesson design that teaches about the construction of digital multimodal texts. Thus, detailed instruction is key and must comprise several steps to enable students to grasp the complexity of digital multimodal texts.