Reassembling the civic: a sociomaterial account of two innovative technology-mediated civic learning infrastructures

Smirnov, Natalia

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-0c79-x383

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Reassembling the civic: a sociomaterial account of two innovative technology-mediated civic learning infrastructures

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This dissertation uses the lens of sociomateriality to examine two cases of innovative, technology-mediated civic learning programs, a U.S. Government class in a suburban high school that engages students in a simulation of the legislative process, and an English Language Arts unit in an urban public school in which students create political memes, author investigative news articles, and analyze online social movements. The first paper looks across both contexts to surface the “infrastructural labor” teachers perform to orchestrate innovative and authentic civic pedagogy, which includes integrating technology in creative and non-standard ways and bending school and classroom boundaries to facilitate political participation. The second paper focuses on the urban school context to examine the aftermath of a grant-funded intervention that catalyzed the design of the civic journalism unit. Analyzing the school as a “liminal educational landscape,” I demonstrate how the precarious, negotiable, and vulnerable climate of the school interacted with the intervention's "innovation debris" digital devices and infrastructural remains of prior pedagogical innovations – to form shifting activity assemblages that often competed with, contradicted, and occasionally cohered with the teacher's civic learning goals. The third paper uses student interview data from the Government simulation to rethink the contentious notion of “transfer,” conceptualizing it as a sociomaterial accomplishment. I explore how the simulation supported students to develop a variety of social, experiential, identity, discursive, and conceptual resources that influenced their deepening interest in civic issues and document a variety of ways students then instrumentalized available-to-them tools to sustain this developing and deepening interest outside of class.

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