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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.