13 Critical Digital Pedagogy Across Learning Ecologies Studios as Sites of Partnerships for Strategic Change

Amy Collier and Sarah Lohnes Watulak

Can critical pedagogy provide a framework for enacting strategic change at institutions of higher education? In this chapter, we explore how critical pedagogy informed an approach to strategic change at Middlebury College, led in part by the digital learning organization formed to support Middlebury’s strategic framework. We highlight how critical pedagogy helped us to orient our group as a partnership organization, rather than a service organization, to engage students and faculty in critical digital fluency efforts across and throughout learning ecologies—within and outside a formal curriculum. Finally, we share an example of that partnership orientation in practice—the Information Environmentalism Studio’s Newspapers on Wikipedia project—and lessons learned from that work.

In 2017, after a 2-year process that engaged faculty, staff, and students in “Envisioning Middlebury,” Middlebury College published a new strategic framework that captured the institution’s distinctions, strategic directions, and guiding principles for pursuing those directions. Our organization, the newly formed Office of Digital Learning and Inquiry (DLINQ), formulated the mission and goals based upon one of Middlebury’s strategic directions, digital fluency and critical engagement. Although this strategic direction provided a heading for the new digital learning organization, it presented a challenge as well. How does a digital learning organization, which faculty expect to serve a supporting role on the margins of curricular change, lead curricular change that enacts a strategic direction for digital fluency? Is it possible for groups on the margins of the curriculum to shape how digital fluency is taught and learned at an institution?

As members of this new digital learning organization, our roles were characterized as in service of, not as leaders of, curricular change. Like many digital learning professionals across higher education, we were seen not as educators who could shape what and how students learned but as service providers and supporters of technologies that faculty use. We recognized that a shift in organizational culture was needed to move us from a service to a partnership orientation. The Educause Center for Analysis and Research notes that the work of an IT organization, when seen as a partner, “understands the core business of the institution, provides expertise to integrate across the campus and advance strategic directions, and spends less time focusing on wires and switches and more time building relationships and communicating about how IT can help” (Wetzel & Pomerantz, 2016, p. 18). In the same way that partnership-oriented IT organizations adapt to advance strategy and effect change, we saw partnership with faculty and students as the model to lead change effectively at Middlebury. We also recognized that the partnership model made possible new approaches to critical digital fluency. Mercer-Mapstone and Abbot (2020, p. 14) write that “partnership opens up new spaces—spaces in the margin, counter-spaces that challenge; collaborative equitable relationships in teaching and learning. Aspirational, values-based, highlighting the collocations academic selves / student selves, past selves / future selves, we’ve all been students. Partnership provokes us, destabilizing neat categorizations that abstract us.”

Our group recognized the challenge of destabilizing the neat categories of service and support expected of us, and drawing from our educational backgrounds we embraced critical pedagogy as a framework in which to lead curricular change from the margins and into partnership. Critical pedagogy emphasizes attention to the creation and erasure of agency and works toward empowering students typically marginalized by traditional education (Giroux, 2011). We were drawn to how critical pedagogy characterizes institutional change as connected to power, politics, and authority (Tristan, 2013). Mercer-Mapstone and Abbot (2020, p. 13) write that “machinations of higher education are always governed by politics. The -isms are well documented and hard to ignore. Partnership is a political process, questioning taken-for-granted ways, working against the grain.” If our goal was partnership to lead change, rather than service to existing approaches, then we needed to develop a framework and language that spoke directly to the issues of power that could impede change.

Critical pedagogy helped us to recognize the messiness and complexity inherent in learning across contexts and within institutions. It encouraged us to push back against the emphasis on formalized curriculum and to recognize the risks of working across pedagogical spaces. We began to understand that, to lead in the area of critical digital fluency, we would not be able to stay in our peripheral areas of work—working on digital projects with interested faculty. We would need to wade into the politics that are part of curricular change. Wading into curricular change is risky, especially for a group considered to be separate from academic affairs. In particular, the risk was that faculty would think that DLINQ was overstepping its role, a role primarily reserved for faculty. Because of the group’s location inside the Office of the Provost, and with the support of the provost, we were encouraged to explore models that would allow us to lead co-curricular initiatives that we hoped would seep into and shape broader formal curricular change.

We used the language and framework of critical pedagogy to guide our work with faculty and students as partners in leading efforts toward digital fluency and engagement. As we approached this work, our language included engagement with and reflection on conscientização. This word is used by Freire in his seminal critical pedagogy work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and refers to the development of critical consciousness and engagement with the world (Freire, 2018; hooks, 1994). For marginalized people and communities, conscientização involves becoming aware and intolerant of oppressors and oppressive systems and beginning to take action toward their own liberation (Darder, 2020). Freire argued that critical consciousness can be developed only if people are subjects, rather than objects, in liberatory efforts. This notion informed our thinking on the importance of partnership, rather than service, in our work with faculty and students. We envisioned that partnerships would be more likely to create conditions through which faculty and students could engage in critical analysis of “the digital,” thus developing conscientização. If we are seen as experts, not as service providers who push tools and technologies uncritically, then we are more likely to be able to meet faculty as equal partners.

Student agency is a key feature of critical pedagogy (Freire, 2013, 2018). Student agency is not only about giving students choice in decisions related to their education but also about giving them opportunities to transform their world and their knowledge to address social problems, a key feature of conscientização. Transformation is the goal of the educational endeavour. Giroux (2007, p. 7) notes that

critical pedagogy becomes a project that stresses the need for teachers and students to actively transform knowledge rather than simply consume it. . . . I believe it is crucial for educators not only to connect classroom knowledge to the experiences, histories, and resources that students bring to the classroom but also to link such knowledge to the goal of furthering their capacities to be critical agents who are responsive to moral and political problems of their time and recognize the importance of organized collective struggles.

Student agency involves engaging in what Freire (2013, p. 45) calls “an attitude of creation and re-creation, a self-transformation producing a stance of intervention in one’s context.” Inspired by this notion, our group set out to centre our critical digital fluency initiatives on developing students’ agency in digital spaces.

Gannon (2020, p. 6; emphasis added) writes that “hope is the combination of aspiration and agency.” hooks (2003, p. xiv) writes that “educating is always a vocation rooted in hopefulness” and that hope is resistance to the cynicism that sustains dominant cultures. Freire (2016, p. 24) acknowledges the essential nature of hope in critical education: “All liberating practice—which values the exercise of will, of decision, of resistance, of choice, the role of emotions, of feelings, of desires, of limits, the importance of historic awareness, of an ethical human presence in the world, and the understanding of history as possibility and never as determination—is substantively hopeful and, for this reason, produces hope.” Engaging with hope is in part a recognition that education is political work that embraces aspirations for a more socially just future. We framed our work as intersecting “criticality and hope”—a recognition that it was both important to question how educational technology and digital learning contribute to marginalization and disenfranchisement and not to accept them as determined and inalterable. Instead, our group was oriented toward hope and the work that we could do in partnership with faculty and students to change the future.

With critical pedagogy informing our approach to our work, and with the goal of partnering with faculty and students to amplify critical digital fluency at Middlebury, we began to structure our work to lead critical digital fluency initiatives. Instructional designers played a key role in our efforts to shift to a partnership model, particularly with faculty, given the direct and relational nature of their work with faculty. In many ways, the shifts were subtle as we worked to destabilize the typical balance of power (faculty member as expert, instructional designer as “mere” technician) by naming the instructional designer’s expertise in digital pedagogy and by positioning that designer as a co-expert and co-learner alongside faculty. Whenever possible, we intentionally used the language of partnership in our instructional design processes and documentations; for example, we revised our project charter document to lead with a paragraph about the expectations and assumptions that we brought to the collaboration with faculty. Relationship building was central to our ability both to demonstrate our expertise and to engage in critical conversations with faculty about their pedagogical choices, choices of tool, or considerations regarding student data privacy.

Next we describe the organizational infrastructure that we created (DLINQ Studios) to continue shifting our role toward partnership in formal and informal curricular change, highlighting the Information Environmentalism Studio’s Newspapers on Wikipedia project.

Creating Studios through Partnership and Strategic Change

Our critical pedagogy framework laid a foundation for our office, DLINQ, to form partnerships with faculty and students at Middlebury toward critical digital fluency, working within and outside traditional power-informed structures of formal and informal curriculums. A key part of our new organizational partnership-focused infrastructure was DLINQ Studios, a nexus of inquiry and project work on issues related to critical digital fluency. From a pedagogical perspective, the studio approach draws from the metaphor of a learning ecology (Barron, 2004; Jackson, 2013), a framework for looking holistically at the range of opportunities for a student to engage with learning across what Jackson (2013) terms a student’s “learning lifespan.”

Barron (2004, p. 6) defines a learning ecology as “the accessed set of contexts, comprised of configurations of activities, material resources and relationships, found in co-located physical or virtual spaces that provide opportunities for learning.” These contexts and opportunities for learning influence each other as activities, resources, and relationships flow between contexts. Jackson (2013) elaborates four learning ecology scenarios: traditional/formal; enquiry, problem, and project based; self-directed but supported; and independent self-directed. These scenarios vary by context and process and by whether they were created by the learner or by others for the learner.

The learning ecologies framework helped us to conceptualize DLINQ Studios—the Information Environmentalism Studio, the Inclusive Design Studio, and the Extended Reality Studio—as situated at the intersection of these scenarios. Modelled on our successful Animation Studio, began via external funding for digital scholarship and later integrated into DLINQ, each studio is led by a DLINQ staff member who can identify and launch projects related to its topic. In addition, students, faculty, staff, and external partners can propose a project to be hosted, coordinated, and/or supported by the studio. For example, students in the Animation Studio pursue individual or small group animation projects, driven by their own interests. Many of these students use animation as a medium to explore core academic inquiry from a different perspective, and this has been the catalyst for faculty involvement in Animation Studio projects. The studio also produces animated short films, including the award-winning Estrellita (see dlinq.middcreate.net), which tells a piercing story about the constant threat of family separation and deportation for undocumented farmworkers in Vermont.

This dynamic of work by a studio and its members, rather than by individual faculty interests, gave DLINQ the opportunity to establish partnerships on projects and ensure that those projects aligned with Middlebury’s strategic directions. Launched by Amy Collier, the Information Environmentalism Studio coordinates activities to detoxify digital environments. “Information environmentalism,” a term created by Mike Caulfield (2017), signals the need to recognize digital pollution on the web (e.g., mis/disinformation) and take steps to address it. Given our institution’s focus on environmentalism, the notion of information environmentalism resonated with faculty and students and created an alignment among multiple strategic institutional foci. Information environmentalism, we argued, fostered critical digital fluency by developing students’ ability to engage critically and take action in a digital world dominated by misinformation, toxicity, and extractive data practices of digital platforms.

Led by Collier, the Information Environmentalism Studio launches initiatives that weave together “contexts and interactions that provide [students] with opportunities and resources for learning, development and achievement” (Jackson, 2013, p. 2) and explores what praxis looks like in polluted digital environments that shape students’ social, political, and learning/educational contexts. These opportunities sometimes originate in a formal scenario, such as a course; at other times, the learning opportunity arises from an informal, self-directed, but supported workshop. Through studio projects, students are encouraged to critique digital platforms, to examine the role of digital technologies in social and educational spaces, and to experiment with ways of counteracting the deleterious effects of digital technologies on their worlds.

For example, the Information Environmentalism Studio recently joined Newspapers on Wikipedia (NOW), a project founded by Caulfield as part of the Digital Polarization Initiative of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities to combat misinformation and polarization. NOW invited participants to add or improve Wikipedia entries for local newspapers, thus helping professional and citizen fact checkers to find accurate information on Wikipedia about news sources. With more accurate information available via Wikipedia, consumers of news on the web can do lateral reading—the process of verifying a source by reading what others have said about that source on other sites like Wikipedia—and better understand the legitimacy of the news and information that they find. Key to this project is participants’ work in the Wikipedia community, authoring and editing articles, to understand Wikipedia’s role in the digital information ecology. The DLINQ Information Environmentalism Studio staff lead saw the NOW project as an opportunity for Middlebury students to better understand and combat misinformation online.

For Middlebury’s NOW project to succeed, the studio needed to work at intersections between formal and informal learning opportunities. To reach into the formal curriculum, we needed to partner with faculty to bring NOW into their courses. Partnerships with faculty began with building upon existing relationships and then doing outreach to establish new relationships with faculty teaching topics related to NOW. As a result of that outreach, Collier was invited to offer NOW workshops in several undergraduate and graduate classes, including a course on the sociology of big data and a course on news journalism in the digital age. We also helped faculty to develop Wikipedia assignments in their classes that advanced the aims of NOW. For example, we worked with a professor who taught writing and editing courses to create a Wikipedia assignment through which students contributed to the project.

We also provided opportunities for participation as part of an informal curriculum for students. The NOW project offered several paid internships for students to work directly on it, and we invited DLINQ interns, hired to work on a variety of projects, to dedicate weekly work hours to the NOW project.

We hosted two simultaneous NOW edit-a-thons—one on each of our campuses—and invited students, faculty, and staff to join the effort. The edit-a-thons were 3-hour events hosted in active learning classrooms on our two campuses that were connected during the event via Zoom (video-conferencing software used for synchronous communication). Modelled on Art+Feminism Wikipedia edit-a-thons, our NOW edit-a-thons invited students, faculty, and staff to create and improve Wikipedia entries for newspapers in Vermont and California (the states where our two campuses are located). We identified local papers for which there were no existing Wikipedia entries and—coordinating through a shared document—assigned participants to research and write Wikipedia pages for them. To incentivize participation, we invited partnering professors to incorporate edit-a-thon participation as a course assignment; we invited several staff in Library and Information Technology Services to serve as mentors during the event; and we paid DLINQ interns to participate during their shifts. We also offered refreshments, swag, and door prizes. Across both campuses, 30–40 students, faculty, and staff participated in the edit-a-thons.

The results of these efforts were notable. The NOW initiative at Middlebury resulted in the creation of Wikipedia pages for more than 60 local newspapers in Vermont and California; additionally, several students contributed to other NOW initiatives (e.g., helping to research and write articles for a NOW edit-a-thon at the Open Education conference in Niagara Falls that year) (see Students, 2018). Students worked with tools and practices that further developed their critical digital fluency (e.g., editing Wikipedia articles). The experience that students gained through participation in NOW supported their agency by providing a set of tools and practices to go beyond the project and engage in additional information environmentalism work on Wikipedia, on topics of personal interest and concern. For example, several students who participated in the NOW project went on to join the Art+Feminism Wikipedia edit-a-thon to add more feminist content on topics that they were studying, such as equal pay in sports and black feminism in environmentalism.

Lessons Learned

From a learning ecology perspective, our attempt to create learning experiences that intentionally crossed boundaries provided a model for future learning experiences with students and faculty. The Information Environmentalism Studio’s location outside the formal curriculum allowed us to create informal, student-centred learning experiences (edit-a-thons) that also intersected with more formal learning spaces (courses). At the same time, even though we worked with students across conceptual spaces in their learning ecologies, during the NOW project, intersections with the formal curriculum emerged from formal partnerships with faculty forged by Collier, as a staff member, in her role as the studio lead. Such relationship building is work—and it is often affective, political, and slow. As brown (2017, p. 42) notes, this work often needs to “move at the speed of trust.” Digital learning organizations that want to work across learning ecologies need to provide support and time for staff to pursue trusting relationships with faculty that create opportunities for partnership. Building trust in the context of partnerships involves acknowledging the messiness of the shared space created by the partnership. We recommend that faculty, staff, and students who enter into partnerships have explicit conversations about the partnership itself (Bell et al., 2020)—about their beliefs and values related to partnering, the potential challenges that they might encounter when working in the messy space, and the goals that they hope to achieve together.

More student leadership is needed to increase opportunities for student agency and to weave information environmentalism more fully into the fabric of students’ learning experiences. For example, a student might take a project begun in the studio and continue it as part of class work or a senior project. To enable this, institutions and faculty need to foster more supportive structures for students to create their own intersections with the formal curriculum. In our organization, we have increased our focus recently on our student employment program, adjusting DLINQ interns’ work to provide more opportunities to explore digital topics across their learning ecologies.

We also suggest that the format of the studio, located at the intersection of formal and informal, provided a space for us to develop and facilitate learning experiences that positioned digital learning organization staff as educators in their own right. Here, outside the existing power structure that dictates who is worthy to teach and what is worthy of being taught, we found an agentive space in which to create meaningful learning experiences for students. Digital learning organizations that want to explore work across learning ecologies must be cheerleaders and advocates for their staff, working continually and intentionally to highlight their expertise as educators and professionals. We should acknowledge, however, that in taking on the role of educators at the intersection of formal and informal learning we became the target of confusion and anger among some faculty. A small number of faculty pushed back against our studios’ work by raising budgetary concerns about DLINQ and advocating the elimination of our group entirely. Although they were unsuccessful in garnering support for the elimination of DLINQ, their pushback did shine a spotlight on DLINQ and required us to justify our work, budget, mission, and alignment with Middlebury’s strategy.

Conclusion

At the beginning of this chapter, we posed the question is it possible for groups on the margins of the curriculum to shape how digital fluency is taught and learned at an institution? Using a critical pedagogy framework to re-envision our organization as partners, we were able to begin a transition in our relationship with faculty, laying the groundwork for the staff of a digital learning organization to be seen as experts and educators in their own right. At the same time, we created a space (studios) outside the formal curriculum in which we could design and facilitate learning opportunities around critical digital fluency that intersected the formal curriculum. The partnership approach was central to our ability to make those connections between informal and formal learning.

The transition to a partnership model is ongoing, and like any context in which power and privilege are at play it has not unfolded in a straight line. For example, the COVID-19 crisis has brought both opportunities and setbacks in terms of our attempts to implement the partnership model. Many more faculty are now aware of, and have interacted with, our organization; however, many of these new interactions occurred when we had to work much more in the support model than the partnership model, as the circumstances required us to help faculty get up to speed with digital tools in order to continue their teaching. Our challenge moving forward will be to reintroduce DLINQ and our partnership approach to these faculty, requiring us to continue to explain and defend our expertise and our field as valid and useful to the academic mission of the institution.

As we look to the future, we anticipate launching more projects through our DLINQ studios, with careful attention to the alignment of those projects with Middlebury’s strategic plan and in close partnership with faculty. We also hope to partner with groups like ours at other institutions in order to develop collaborations that increase our digital learning organizations’ opportunities to shape students’ learning within and across formal and informal ecologies.

Key Takeaways

As members of a digital learning organization responsible for strategic initiatives on digital fluency, we recognized the need to move from a service orientation to a partnership orientation to effect institutional and curricular change.
Critical pedagogy helped us to orient our group as a partnership organization by providing a framework and shared language to shape how we work with faculty and students.
Studios and studio-led initiatives such as the Newspapers on Wikipedia project became successful vehicles for interacting with students and faculty as partners across students’ learning ecologies.

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Conclusion