#teachingbydesign: Cultivating Critical Digital Literacy

With ever-increasing digital workspaces and technologies, we have reached a point where almost every field of study requires some level of digital composition. Whether it’s a multimodal essay or a slideshow, college students in every major are composing digital artifacts. Furthermore, the shift to learning management systems (LMS) like Blackboard and Canvas means that instructors are contending with the affordances and constraints of delivering course content online. The question then becomes: how do we deliver meaningful content in ways that enhance rather than hinder students’ learning? Beyond school required LMSs, Hewett’s (2015) research suggests that an additional barrier lies in avoidable disconnects between what instructors ask students to do and how they ask them to do it. In other words, instructors often fail to consider how their own written course content is “part of their instructional art … [as] the text becomes the teaching” (Hewett, 2015, p. 171-72). This presentation explores missed opportunities in modeling digital literacy through instructional design. We hope to build critical literacy practices that students can transfer into the real-world spaces they compose in. More specifically, our presentation will suggest ways for faculty and students to (1) identify the barriers in digital reading and writing, (2) consider the quality and type of digital compositions, (3) find space to practice, engage, and sometimes fail while navigating new media territory, (4) complicate notions of digital composing in ways that critically assess digital footprints, and (5) develop flexible digital composing strategies to evaluate the conventions of the writing situation