Institutional Ethnography and Cellphilming: Supporting Critical Digital Literacy Practices in Secondary Education

This chapter explores the value of utilizing cellphilming and participatory, visual, arts-based methods in an institutional ethnographic study aimed at supporting the development of students’ critical digital literacy practices. After defining critical digital literacy practices and unpacking how they support the broadening of students’ agency, I will lay out conceptual and methodological frameworks for participant-centred research based in institutional ethnography and cellphilming. Then, by sharing some of my findings, I will highlight how this research supported students’ potential to involve themselves more actively in the social relations orienting their and their classmates online and digital experiences. By unpacking and analysing students’ cellphilming inquiries, this research uncovers how the participants I worked with think about digital infrastructures and the potential impacts that they can have on one another. Going beyond their individual role in the social relations that organize how they engage digital technologies, this research project reached towards and revealed ways in which students were similarly oriented by their experiences online, asking how they can collectively participate in discourses through digital tools in critical and transformative ways.