After going through resources about digital citizenship and trying to connect them to ELA B10, I can see that there is a lot out there and a lot of potential for what can be done in trying to infuse high school ELA course with digital citizenship content. However, there needs to be a clear commitment about this from all stakeholders involved, including government and school divisions.
ELA B10 is a course that centres around themes of “Equity and Ethics” and the “World Around Us and Within Us.” Both of these are fantastic themes that make students ask questions around right and wrong, as well as what makes them them. By the end of the course, I hope that students come out of it with a better idea of their morals and how the world they have been surrounded with has influenced their identity. In the modern age, this also includes questions of digital ethics and how constructed online world influence who we become. The lessons I have curated in this project provide a good start for how to have students begin to ask these questions, but they are just that. A start.
The Saskatchewan ELA 10 curriculum came out in 2011, and while that is still much newer than many other curricula in the province, it is still starting to show its age. Students are still asked to write a business letter to file a complaint, or to write journal entries. While these tasks do have value, they can still feel inauthentic to the lives of students in 2023. The curriculum should continue to change and adapt with the lives of the students it is serving. While teachers are free adapt outcomes to fit their needs, the curriculum should still reflect the types of skills we want students to be able to receive.
By providing more digital citizenship and media literacy content to students, we are getting closer to providing students with those key skills that they need. Students should grapple with questions in the spaces they inhabit now, especially online spaces. That is why it is valuable for students to take some of those questions about racism, sexism, and other ethical issues and shift them to online space to better reflect the lives of our students, and to give them the skills to use these skills in their real lives.
The biggest takeaway from this project I got came from Cho, Cannon, Lopez, and Li’s “Social media literacy: A conceptual framework” (2022). This article made me change my view of what literacy is, and what it needs to look like going forward. The article asserts that if social media literacy is going to be affective, we need to shift our view of what literacy means. Instead of being about the finished product that is being analysed, the individual choices of consumers is what needs to be looked at. What social media literacy looks like is going from an evaluation of a finished product to “the evaluation of one’s values” and going from “production to contribution” (2022) to the greater common good. Seeing these words made me want to bring more reflective practices into my classroom, not just about students’ reading and writing goals, but their contributions to the world.
Much like how Cho and company spoke about a shift in literacies, we too need to shift our view of what ELA can look like. With the infusion of more digital citizenship and media literacy into our ELA classes, teachers across Saskatchewan can let this shift begin.
References
Cho, H., Cannon, J., Lopez, R., Li, W. (2022). Social media literacy: A conceptual framework. New Media and Society, p. 1-20. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/14614448211068530.
Saskatchewan Ministry of Education. (2011). Saskatchewan Curriculum: English Language Arts 10. https://curriculum.gov.sk.ca/CurriculumHome?id=37.
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