Pedagogy,” Yen-Ju Lin utilized the social media platform, Twitter, to build a critical learning community. ←8 | 9→The network of dialogues engages the community in creating a critical space for emergent knowledge using feminist online pedagogy focused on distributed leadership. The community was formed through negotiation, mutual articulation, and collaboration, further building the entanglement of the community. Lin’s social media pedagogy relies on dialogic exchange to construct knowledge through mutual articulation between the self and otherness, while she seeks to enact feminist pedagogical processes and engage conversations between differences in online learning environments.
As a key digital technology in community formation, social media extends people’s connections to global and local communities like never before. The ubiquity of social media suggests a critical need to understand the changing human relationships impacting the formation of communities. Social media has had positive and negative effects on political discourse in our society (Ceron & Memoli, 2016; Singer, 2019; Tufekci, 2017). As techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci (2017) showed the power of social media makes some social movements successful while also creating fractures in others, or worse, enabling an erosion of democratic values. Nevertheless, Henry Giroux (2011) argues we need to recognize the educational value of social media and understand the political and pedagogical struggle “over the public values and modes of identity that construct and mediate new forms of agency and social interaction” (p. 24). Kristi Oliver’s chapter, “Contemporary Photographic Practice as a Critical Pathway Toward Visual Literacy,” examines and challenges the practices of social media and increased abilities for mobile media production using smartphones. Offering a range of practices by contemporary artists, Oliver examines phoneography as an inquiry into how these artists critically interrogate our perception of the world through the digital image. She argues these works offer students a way to understand important questions about contemporary society and the engagement of these visual communities teaches students critical media literacy.
As suggested in the opening of this chapter, critical digital making has pedagogical implications inside and outside of educational settings and is therefore connected to discourses in critical media literacy. From a pedagogical viewpoint, many critical digital making projects discussed in this volume focus on the influential power of media and critical approaches to media education is at the core of critical media literacy (Giroux, 2011; Hammer, 2011; Kellner & Share, 2007). Critical media literacy is an educational framework to “understand, interpret, and criticize the meaning and messages of media culture” (Hammer, 2011, p. 358). Approaches in critical pedagogy and critical media literacy education have been advocated in art education as visual culture (Tavin, 2003) and calls for art-making as a critical strategy of resistance (Garoian, 1999). Thus, the term “critical media literacy art education” is used by some art educators to describe teaching students not only to understand and critique media messages but also to be able to use digital media for expression and activism (Chung & Kirby, 2009). Flavia Bastos ←9 | 10→and James Rees’ chapter “Who Is American Today? Promoting Critical Digital Citizenship with High School Students” discusses a classroom project using digital art-making as a critical pedagogical approach to teach civic engagement and creative citizenship. Asking students to reflect and examine social, political, and civic understandings and perceptions of citizenship from their own family history and experience, the creation of digital media engages students in creative activities that extend critical literacy into critical making. Bastos and Rees’ project in critical digital making develops skills beyond expression to foment participation in democratic communities as critical citizens.
Archiving can also be seen as an artistic media to be produced within a critical project (Wallin, 2017). In their work War on the Poor (2007–2011), artist collective Ultra-red created an audio archive asking participants “what is the sound of the war on the poor?” The archivization is as important, if not more than, the event (Derrida & Prenowitz, 1995). Archives provide important ways for the public to access and learn about community stories and responses that is both pedagogical and in the act of co-constructing communities. Cassie Lynn Smith’s chapter, “Critical Pedagogy in the Borderlands: Employing Digital Archives to Support a Local to Global Social Justice Curriculum,” discusses the use of public space and digital archive resources to create works that would prompt the discussion of social justice issues. In considering critical use of the digital archives, Smith offers an example of using the digital archive in critical practices that forms communities. She engages students in creative digital media production and arts performances prompted by digital archives to challenge institutionalized power structures.
Much of the collection, and especially the themes in co-construction and intervention, move making and learning outside of strictly school spaces into what Helguera (2011) calls “transpedagogy” to describe socially engaged art as unique educational processes through making, distinct from experiences of art education found in schools. He states, “in Transpedagogy the pedagogical process is the core of the artwork” (p. 78). Helguera hints at the blurring boundary of pedagogy and art objects provokes the thinking of pedagogy as art. However, these transdisciplinary practices crossing the boundary between art and technology can also be practices folding back into a rethinking of schools and institutions of learning as pedagogical acts challenging the rigidity of disciplines in education. Emiel Heijnen, Melissa Bremmer, Michiel Koelink, and Talita Groenendijk’s chapter “Arts Laboratories and Science Studios: How ArtsSciences Can Innovate Arts Education” discusses a transdisciplinary approach in bringing art, technology, and science together into school arts education having the potential to subvert existing school norms. Their transdisciplinary approach connects learning with real-life problems from a broad perspective that is socially engaging and conceptually challenging by probing the role of innovation to question the formation of our intellectual and learning communities.
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INTERVENTION: DISRUPTING THROUGH CRITICAL DIGITAL PRACTICE
For centuries art has been a vehicle to disrupt the status quo. Early twentieth-century art movements like Futurism, Constructivism, and Social Realism communicated visions of massive societal changes. Contemporary political movements involving gender equality, racial justice, environmentalism, and LGBTQIA+ rights have catalyzed artists whose work reflects, responds, or critiques society to use artistic practice as an intervention on power and social order. The ability to create artwork that spreads virally worldwide or engaging the broader public through digital devices and networks has created new avenues for artists in political and social arenas in the form of tactical media (Richardson, 2002). Screens, sensors, and communication networks allow digital media to be viewed in large common spaces as well as the private confines of one’s home. GPS and biometrics sensors allow for digital art experiences to be personal and site-specific. Public art in the digital age can be understood as collecting data from the public, the public’s participation in the artwork, or broadcasting artworks while still allowing for the work to be customized based on data-driven analytics.
