(Needs better transition)
Earth’s orbit around the sun is a result of a careful balance between
centripetal and centrifugal movement. The sun exerts a gravitational
pull on Earth; it is a centripetal force that would eventually
incinerate the planet if it were not countered by the centrifugal force
pulling on the sun, which thankfully keeps the earth in a steady orbit.
Inward and outward forces existing in a state of perfect equipoise. The
interplay between such centripetal and centrifugal movements is a useful
way of understanding the orbital relationship between the classroom and
the wider world, particularly when it comes to developing young global
citizens through educational technology. Without some form of
interaction with the global other built into their lessons, teachers’
efforts to nurture their students’ global dispositions can often
function as centripetal cultural forces, which is to say teachers may
gather texts from outside the U.S. and redirect them inward, often using
them primarily as points of comparison for their students own national
experiences. In doing so teachers can miss opportunities to create
centrifugal cultural forces, those that create outward movement
by which students can engage with the world as citizens of it. The point
is not that educators should eschew creating centripetal culture forces
in favor creating centrifugal cultural forces, but rather that educators
should work to establish a careful balance between the two such that
young people understand their soicocultural position in relation to
their global peers. It is just like the earth and the sun: young people
need a balanced understanding of their role as global citizens, one that
acknowledges their national identity and seeks to harmonize it with
their global identity.
Thomas Bean’s Cosmopolitan Critical Literacy (2016) represents a more
centrifugal expansion upon the limitations of the CCSS in that it
“moves youth conversations into a larger sphere where they may find
common ground centered on basic human rights” (p. 52). Through CCL
young people come to view their global peers as valuable cultural
resources with whom they can engage as they hew out their identities
from the signals and noise of 21st century global consumer culture.
Digital writing is an excellent vehicle for centrifugal cultural
movement, allowing young people to “communicate cross national and
international boundaries via the Internet…to find common ground around
human rights issues and collaborate to generate solutions to problems”
(Bean, 2016, p. 53). Bean points to the Space2Cre8 project (Hull &
Stornaiulo, 2010; 2014; Stornaiulo, Hull, & Sahni, 2011) as a useful
illustration of how young people can use digital writing to develop
Cosmopolitan Critical Literacy. An online social network that connects
young people to their global peers, Space2Cre8 has successfully
demonstrated that digital writing via social networking platforms can
cultivate in young people a cosmopolitan orientation towards their
global peers (Stornaiulo, Hull, & Sahni, 2011). At this point, however,
Space2Cre8 remains a relatively small-scale platform exclusive to
current participants and those who may be invited to join in the future.
How, then, can teachers create centrifugal culture forces in their
classrooms immediately?
Although Space2Cre8 offers a uniquely robust platform for connecting
global youth via digital writing, there are any number of web-based
tools currently available to teachers as they work to create centrifugal
cultural forces for their students. Here’s an example from the classroom
of one of the chapter’s authors. In the fall of 2015, amidst the
international response to Syrians fleeing their homeland in search of
safety from both ISIS and the Assad regime, the American and European
media debated the meanings of the words “refugee” and “migrant”:
using one over the other suggested a particular way of understanding the
Syrian diaspora that had real consequences on the legal status of
Syrians in their respective sheltering countries. As a lesson on
denotation and connotation, students were asked to research the meanings
of the words “refugee” and “migrant” as the global media used them
in the Syrian context, and then to post a blog entry in which they used
text and images—pics, gifs, and/or embedded video—to make a case for
whether the Syrians should be treated as “refugees” or as
“migrants.” Students then visited each other’s blogs and left comments
in which they agreed, disagreed, or qualified their peers’ arguments.
At this point, the assignment has remained a centripetal cultural force
to the extent that students have gained knowledge about the world and
re-contextualized it in their own experiences while gaining a greater
understanding of how the denotations and connotations of words can have
dramatic consequences on people’s lives. An immensely valuable
assignment in its own right, but the project only became a centrifugal
cultural force when students were directed to find an article about the
Syrian crisis on the English version of a global news outlet—Al
Jazeera, Der Spiegel International, The Guardian et
cetera—and post the text from their blog entries in the article’s
comments section. (Alternatively, they could post their comments to a
relevant pic on a news outlet’s Instagram account. At the time, National
Geographic published a number of powerful photos of Syrian refugees to
the NatGeo Instagram.) To be sure, such interaction is qualitatively
different from the wonderfully personal interaction facilitated by
Space2Cre8. Nevertheless, when students added their voices to the
millions of global voices weighing in on the “refugee”/ “migrant”
debate, they were not simply being taught how to be global citizens.
They were using digital writing to be global citizens.
Reading about the world through literary or informational texts is a
centripetal cultural force—an important and necessary one, to be
sure—but if young people are to engage as global citizens in classroom
contexts, educators must embrace the centrifugal power of writing,
digital writing specifically. Digital writing on its own, however, is
insufficient; it must be directed towards media and interaction. Mills
and Chandra (2011) have shown “how meaningful contexts for literacy
practice can be created through secure and free microblogging platforms
designed for educational communities” (p. 35). Looking specifically at
Edmodo, a secure platform built with schools in mind, Mills and Chandra
found that microblogging changed the shape of students writing practices
as well as the classroom community (p. 38). Ultimately, however, the
secure nature of Edmodo works against its potential to create
centrifugal culture force. Mills and Chandra argue that microblogging in
the classroom via platforms like Edmodo “appropriate[s] digitally
mediated literacies of youth in a social ecology of the classroom in
ways that are meaningful and consistent with their uses in the world”
(p. 44). Such thinking betrays an unnecessary division between “the
world” and “the social ecology of the classroom,” one researchers and
educators must complicate in the service of young people’s emergent
cosmopolitan dispositions. Of course, there are reasonable explanations
for this division, ones we should take seriously. For example, many
young people’s parents and guardians remain hesitant to allow their
children to maintain social networking accounts, fearing they represent
an unnecessary distraction at best, a life-threatening danger at worst
(boyd, 2014). At the same time, younger children—particularly those in
elementary school—may not be developmentally ready to navigate complex
socio-technological spaces like Twitter and Facebook.
The good news, however, is that educators can supplement secure
platforms with assignments and projects that ask students to venture
outside Edmodo and similar services in search of interaction with people
from around the world. The growing popularity of Learning Management
Systems (LMS) such as Moodle, Canvas, and Google Classroom risks
creating a similar dynamic, as the main function of an LMS is to serve
as a self-contained ecosystem for delivering instruction, assessing
student work, and facilitating student-to-student and student-to-teacher
communication. Such platforms can function as walled gardens where
students develop innovative literacy practices and meaningful
relationships with classmates without ever looking beyond the walls to
the world outside. While it is clear that administrators at both local
and state levels will find the security of Learning Management Systems
and platforms like Edmodo appealing—and therefore be more inclined to
fund them—researchers and educators must be conscious that such
mechanisms can work against efforts to develop young people’s global
citizenship through digital writing and interaction. As researchers
continue making a case for the importance of youths’ global engagement
in digital environments, educators must work within and around the
constraints of programs such as the Schools and Libraries Program of the
Universal Service Fund (often referred to as E-rate), which gives
network administrators a great deal of power to censor what students can
access on school networks. Even if the most popular social networks are
blocked—Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr et cetera—teachers are able to
direct their students toward online news outlets, where they can
participate as global citizens through digital writing.
Because the development of youths’ global citizenship through digital
writing demands the centrifugal cultural force created by social
interactions with the global other, it is worth taking a moment to
consider the sanctioning of the social in traditional classroom
settings. Classrooms are fundamentally social spaces, but teachers are
in the position to authorize and de-authorize various forms of
interaction, allowing those that serve instructional aims while
prohibiting those that hinder them. While teachers will often authorize
students to collaborate in groups—understanding that their
conversations will to some extent move in, around, and through the task
at hand—teacher (and institutions) frequently de-authorize the use of
social media platforms in the classroom, positioning them as
unsanctioned forms of socializing, those more likely to distract than to
edify. When combined with the walled gardens of educational social
media platforms like Edmodo and most LMO’s, the sanctioning of the
social—even in the most digitally connected classrooms—can present a
serious and complex obstacle to the creation of centrifugal culture
forces in the classroom.