Stories from Inequity to Justice in Literacy Education

Confronting Digital Divides

Ernest Morrell, Jennifer Rowsell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367785512
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429632662
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Challenging the assumption that access to technology is pervasive and globally balanced, this book explores the real and potential limitations placed on young people's literacy education by their limited access to technology and digital resources.

Drawing on research studies from around the globe, Stories from Inequity to Justice in Literacy Education identifies social, economic, racial, political and geographical factors which can limit populations' access to technology, and outlines the negative impact this can have on literacy attainment. Reflecting macro, meso and micro inequities, chapters highlight complex issues surrounding the productive use of technology and the mobilization of multimodal texts for academic performance and illustrate how digital divides might be remedied to resolve inequities in learning environments and beyond.

Contesting the digital divides which are implicitly embedded in aspects of everyday life and learning, this text will be of great interest to researchers and post-graduate academics in the field of literacy education.

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Introduction

Moving Stories of Inequity to Stories of Justice

Jennifer Rowsell and Ernest Morrell

The weight and force of technology and its seeming ubiquity is felt in so many parts of our everyday lives. Yet, the weight of technology is often sensed and not seen. It is often lived and not stated. Its pervasiveness and accessibility are assumed and often not realized. Slowly and insidiously, there have been inequities spread across landscapes that have been called the or a ‘digital divide’ to describe those who have the affordances of technologies and those who do not. Admittedly, there are many scholars who have complicated this notion of access and nuanced the nature and properties of access (Dolan, 2016; Sen, 1992; Servaes & Oyedemi, 2016; van Dijk, 2005; Warschauer, 2003), and in this book we feature research studies that provide grounded pictures of lived digital divide inequities. The flip-side of these inequities is also robustly captured in the book, which are stories that move inequity into justice. Contributors were by no means tasked with instructions to make their picture positive or utopian, quite the opposite actually, we simply asked them to offer us pictures of digital divides in their research contexts. We had no idea that these accounts would result in such evocative stories of ‘making it work’ within varying degrees of social, economic, racial, political, local, and global barriers and inequities. We feel humbled by the generosity of people in these sites, by educators who work to imbue justice and equity into their learning environments, and by researchers’ capacities to unveil the deeper grooves of gaps, divides, and spaces without. Hence the book has a whistle-blowing feel which opens up the complexities of digital divides that have to do with larger social inequalities and hidden truths about inequities in social worlds.

Chapters have been divided to reflect macro, meso, and micro inequities to an effort to unpeel the complex layers of digital divides. There are larger systems imposed on people in the developing world where more isolated communities exist without technologies and Wi-Fi and where there is intermittent access to information and media. Then, there are spaces of place (Castells, 2001) where individuals have technology in a catch-as-catch-can way that is also known as blackholes (Castells, 2001). Blackholes are the contexts where individuals have scant access to Wi-Fi and information more generally, but where they work within the constraints of infrastructures. Then, there are privileged groups in what Cas-tells calls spaces of flow in cities like New York, London, and Tokyo or middle-class and affluent populations in the developed world and Global North who have constant access to the trappings of technology, Wi-Fi, and media. The book structures digital divides from macro-level issues to meso-level issues to micro-level issues. Macro-level digital divide issues tell the stories of larger landscapes with limited or patchy access, but with the abilities and acumen to creatively deploy engaged digital practices to be insurgent, activist, or simply connected (a blackholes scenario). Meso-level digital divide issues consider more invisible or harder-to-reach inequities. These inequities exist in more embedded aspects of everyday life such as schooling, household tasks like paying bills online, and also, more broadly, through regulated practices that take for granted constant access to the internet and technologies. Micro-level lived divides are witnessed and felt on individual and close-up levels, and researchers capture them to paint a picture of what it is to exist in a ‘space without.’

Foregrounding Complexities of Digital Divide Research

As noted, substantial scholarship exists which offers different approaches to digital divide work. A structuralist approach to the digital divide sees inequities from solely an access perspective (Servaes & Oyedemi, 2016). However, as chapters in this volume demonstrate, the adoption of a strictly access-based view on the digital divide is myopic insofar as it obscures and excludes the myriad of other lived experiences which occur within digital divides. Van Dijk (2005), for instance, nuanced levels of access in helpful ways by developing more discrete categories: temporal access that is actual time spent on technology; material access that is possessing technologies; mental access that is having the skills and understandings of technologies; social resources that are social networks, positions, and relationships; and cultural resources that are cultural assets and status (van Deursen & van Dijk, 2014; van Dijk, 2005). These levels throw into relief how complicated access is and that it is not cut and dried. Van Dijk points to other, related implications of multiple kinds of access that range from the desire to use digital technologies (motivational access); the ability to own technologies (material access); having competencies with technologies (skills access); and the amount and freedom of time to use technologies (usage access). All of these types and degrees of access circulate within this book and sit across macro, meso, and micro contexts.

There are helpful ways of framing digital divide issues that move beyond a structural gaze, focusing more on a mindset and set of practices that reinforce a perception that blurs reality. Warschauer (2003) talks about four resources that are necessary to promote social inclusion: (1) physical resources (devices and conduits); (2) digital resources (contents—health, education, and language); (3) human resources (literacy and education); and (4) social resources (community and institution). Warschauer’s resources exist like layers in an onion with some stronger, thicker, and more dominant gaps or abundance depending on the nature and properties of the context. These resources run to the heart of the collection because in the series of stories that you will read, there are varying degrees of each one telling a larger story in itself. There are potentially more subtle differences that have to do with connection speed or the amount of internet access people have, and then there are more gaping differences such as outmoded technologies or no technology/ies at all. This kind of digital stratification starts to separate the haves from the have-nots or as Dolan (2016) argues, the cans from the cannots. Disparities in socioeconomic class correspond to disproportionate rates of access to information and understanding—that is, a range of inequities are exacerbated by the fact that those in higher socioeconomic situations receive information faster than those in lower socioeconomic situations, making it difficult to gauge the full impact of digital divide issues.

Highly technology-equipped and media-infused areas do not help matters because they often construct a middle-class version of social worlds that is simply not the reality. Media in general—television, social media, advertisements—represent a world where people have smartphones, tablets, and desktops readily at hand. In other words, mass media supports a view of the social world as intrinsically linked with media ownership, and constant access is taken for granted in ways that distort reality.

Digital Lives as a State of Being and Becoming

To untie some of the knots in digital divide work, an account of contemporary states of being and temporal rhythms (Heidegger, 1953) is productive in thinking across our collection. Applying Heidegger’s notion of Dasein (‘there-being’), for us, generatively draws out the varied ways that people live through digital divides and make them work on macro, meso, and micro levels. The appeal of Heidegger’s notion of Dasein lies in its emphasis on presence and being in the moment as opposed to Bourdieu’s notion of capital, as some have applied to digital divide work (Kvasny & Keil, 2005). Capital relies heavily on the cachet and influence that digital and media worlds bring to an individual or group, whereas Dasein focuses more on being, becoming, and sentient instances as one goes about their everyday life. Dasein exposes the ways that people transform moments of inequity into moments of justice. In other words, Dasein depicts more of an embodied and lived engagement with technology that is borne out across the chapters in this edited volume. Seeking information or lived practices with media are exactly that: they are habitual, tacit practices and experiences on the edges or centres of people’s habits and ways of being. Although capital is certainly present in this picture, those who have access all of the time frequently take it for granted; it is so habituated that it is a state of being that is simply not the case for so many people. Imagine watching states of being that are unattainable and unassailable because these states of being are complexly interwoven into invisible systems that require money to access them and these systems are nationally regulated. To us, these systems reinforce inequities and a state of being that cannot be experienced by a large percentage of populations. There is an idiosyncratic feel to the ways that people live through technologies as a form of Dasein in their lives. Nonetheless, what is not often highlighted are the equally idiosyncratic ways that people suffer at the hands of little to no technology in their lives.

Heidegger’s writings on Dasein are wide-ranging and far more primor-dial than our application in the book, yet the draw for us as editors in applying Dasein as a concept to explain the substantive arc of the book lies in its emphasis on how we become through being with technology. We argue this point strongly and this is borne out in the collection: technologies, communication, and digital worlds have profoundly altered people’s being in the world (on broader and specific levels). It is through contemplating the Dasein, the being or presence with the digital and technologies, that we have been able to untie the macro-meso-micro knots evident in the book. As Heidegger (1953) writes, “The explicit and lucid formulation of the question of the meaning of being requires a prior suitable explication of a being [Dasein] with regard to its being” (p. 7). The very nature of Dasein does not necessarily look back or forward, but instead exists on an ever-present continuum. Stories of digital divides in the book bracket off being—they capture telling instances of people being with technologies and digital worlds that signal larger truths.

The notion of Dasein involves time and the role of temporality within digital divide issues. Heidegger speaks of a de-distancing of time and space that happens in relation to the presence/being/Dasein that de-distance time and space. That is, time and distance collapse on themselves in the face of Dasein—it is a persistent force that crosses time and space. As Heidegger (1953) articulates it, “An essential tendency toward nearness lies in Dasein” (p. 103, emphasis original). Heidegger proffers the example of the radio as a form of de-distancing at the time of his writing in the 1950s, and one could argue today that the digital is an even more powerful way of de-distancing the everyday surrounding world. Reflecting on the role of technology and ‘the digital’ in our lives, time and place elide around the globe as people in places constantly access information at any time all of the time. Heidegger (1953) maintains, “it is a freeing of the spatial belongingness of things at hand. The essential disclosure of space lies in the significance with which Dasein as heedful being-in is familiar” (p. 107). Experiencing technology as a lived property (as many people in the Global North with the affordances to do so live) defies lines of space and time, because technology becomes its own state of being and becoming. As scholars who have full access to technologies and Wi-Fi most of the time, we can travel from one part of the world to another and access the same information at any time by typing and clicking. Granted that connection time may vary and facility with Wi-Fi and bandwidth needs to be navigated, but we still exist in a different de-distancing plane that is “deprived of its worldliness” (Heidegger, 1953, p. 109).

A finer point here about Dasein as connected to digital divide runs throughout the book which concerns the issue of the individual and the collective. The individual is fairly clear here in terms of Dasein, in that a person has a state of being and becoming through technology that entails a timeless and spaceless experience of being in a (digital) world (or not). Picture someone sitting in a coffee shop or in a park retrieving and reading information on their phone. Heidegger’s (1953) theorizing of Dasein argues for a “with-bound being in the world” (p. 115). That is, the world “is always and already the one that I share with others” (p. 116). The collective is not as clear but can be seen through media vehicles like Twitter or Instagram when people gather virtually to talk about issues, people, events, or ideas. Dasein is therefore a with-world and being-with others that involves galvanizing the digital to speak across local-global spaces on topics that matter to people. Additionally, there are times in the present collection when chapters describe moments of what Ahmed (2015) calls ‘sticky relations’ across bodies, people, and objects, and these sticky relations manifest in online spaces, sometimes for activist purposes. Then again, there are also other moments in this being-in with others in the digital when life becomes more subjectively experienced on an individual level as flows of knowledges, experiences, and emotions (Massumi, 2007). Therefore, the notion of Dasein implies an entanglement of self and others in Dasein that translate well into how people with constant access to the affordances of technology and the internet make it a part of their everyday lives.

As the book moves from macro issues of digital divides, there is a steady movement mediated by the conceptual framework of Dasein, into and through the intricate ways that people live, sporadically, through Dasein in digital, media-infused worlds. There are surges of the digital in individual and collective lives and then, in equal measure, there are swathes of contexts with sporadic or without chances to experience Dasein with the digital. What follows is an outline of sections within the book that possess inequity and justice in (relatively) equal measure and that tell compelling stories of lived digital divides.

Macro Perspectives in the Book: Big Gaps, Divides, and Inequities

Macro perspectives represent big picture digital divides in remote communities and the developing world. The first concerns of people who are impacted by macro digital divide issues relate not so much with minor aspects like the speed of the internet or the latest technologies, but instead more pressing questions like: where can they go and how far do they need to travel to get the latest information? These issues come to the surface in the three featured chapters in this section.

In Chapter Two, Kerryn Dixon telescopes into a South African context to present her research in a primary school in Limpopo. Within the chapter, Dixon reveals how at a policy level technology is constructed as a panacea for South Africa’s educational woes. Whilst there is a recognition that technology can and does play an important role in Africa, the reality is that access to basic forms of technology is not a given and the cost of providing technology support comes at a huge price in the developing world. Africa remains the most underdeveloped part of the world and is the most affected by poverty. A lack of basic infrastructure like electricity and network infrastructure make Sub-Saharan Africa, where South Africa is located, the least computerized region in the world. Despite this, Dixon illustrates powerfully in her chapter that there are schools in South African communities with high levels of unemployment and poverty who understand the role that technology can play in learning. Drawing on stories in such a school, she explores the ways in which the resourcefulness of the school principal creates spaces for learning, how classroom and community practices normalize children’s engagements with technology that enable and constrain, how access to technology at home (mis) aligns with privileged genres embedded in school learning, and what this reveals about the digital divide in this context.

In Chapter Three, Inge Kral builds on her important work in remote Indigenous Australian communities examining digital divide issues and how people make such situations work despite obstacles and struggles. When Indigenous youth in remote Australia have access to digital technologies and resources the uptake is high, often leading to productive learning and innovative applications. However, so much of this productive learning depends either on institutional support or individual access to mobile phones and broadband provisions. Kral shows how a digital divide is still evident in remote communities in terms of home technologies and access to resources in public and private domains. Like Dixon, she has witnessed policy initiatives to improve ‘e-learning’ with good intentions, but that seemed to fall short of the mark. Kral’s chapter explores one such initiative by the State Library of Western Australia that attempts to bridge the digital divide in remote communities and towns. The chapter focuses on what is happening in homes and communities with low incomes, minimal access to resources, and non-mainstream digital practices. Kral gives the reader a story with promise, where there are cross-cultural interactions and collaborative engagements between different generations and between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. It also enables engagement with new technology and facilitates the availability of material to make stuff. Resources are now at people’s fingertips.

In Chapter Four by S.M. Hani Sadati, Claudia Mitchell, and Lisa J. Starr, the authors explore a digital initiative to deal with sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), which is a global concern affecting the psychosocial health and overall well-being of millions of girls and women around the world. To probe the topic, the authors look to a research study taking place in Ethiopia in which they are involved. Ethiopia has high prevalence rates of SGBV, including in universities and rural agricultural colleges. There have been promising forms of intervention through the idea of participatory game design in which the end-users (in this case both male and female students) write storylines for games that address SGBV. In the chapter, Sadati, Mitchell, and Starr look at the use of cellphilming (cell phone + video) as a participatory visual method for engaging students from...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Moving Stories of Inequity to Stories of Justice
• SECTION 1 Macro Perspectives: Big Gaps, Divides, and Inequities
• SECTION 2 Meso Perspectives: Making It Work on the Margins
• SECTION 3 Micro Perspectives: Race and Social Class Digital Divides in Communities
• Afterword
• Index