UC Berkeley

Contemporary conversations about digital tools in education tend to focus on technology integration and notions of “digital transformation” without careful attention to pedagogy or sociocultural ecosystems related to education. Before COVID-19, prevailing conversations of educational technology left largely unaddressed digital divides and associated impacts on nondominant communities. This dissertation study focuses on one year (Year 3, or Y3) of a 3-year course redesign organized around principles of equity, design, and community participation to mediate literacy teacher candidates’ preparation to center sociocultural knowledge in their use of digital tools. Building on earlier foundations of Learn, Tinker, Create/Share of the two previous iterations, Y3 uniquely featured a digitally-networked community of learners that included pre-service and in-service teachers. The study employed qualitative methods of multi-sited ethnography and digital ethnography to investigate teacher candidates’ (n=10) meaning-making in participatory networks, their expansive learning related to Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and their development, revealing, and applications of sociocultural knowledge across their designs of digitally mediated learning. Data sources included blog posts, Twitter posts, participant coursework, digitally-mediated learning designs (e.g. lesson plans, tool tutorials, and flipped instruction designs), multimodal compositions, all of which were created with free web-based ICTs. Findings from this study lay the groundwork for humanizing, critical digital pedagogy—a term coined to identify digital pedagogy that honors the lived subjectivities of nondominant communities and centralizes humanizing critical sociocultural knowledge throughout. The findings have research and practice implications related to teacher learning and collegiality (including in digital environments), critical digital literacies in teacher education, and pedagogical design. This vision of humanizing, critical digital pedagogy positions teachers as not only pedagogical designers, but also digital designers who can shape educational technology design cycles toward socially just futures through their uniquely intersecting knowledge domains.