Redacting ‘Stock Stories’ of Education Inequities: Toward Legitimate Digital Participation

Abstract

This practitioner research study examines one critical race media literacy (CRML) activity that invited students to digitally redact deficit framings of youth from minoritized and historically marginalized backgrounds. I illustrate how Latinx and Asian students used the project to re-articulate deficit narratives of themselves, their friends, and family members. I also convey how white students used the assignment to author incipient identities as racial allies. Based on these findings, I develop the notion of legitimate digital participation to distill how young people used CRML to craft more humanizing cultural narratives and self-determined political identities.