Dissertation Proposal Announcement Ph.D. in Education Program: Eowyn P. O’Dwyer “Credibility, Perspective, and Power: Critical Approaches to Supporting Civic Online Reasoning and Deliberation”

Supporting students’ active civic participation in democratic society amid the challenges of increasing political polarization and the rampant spread of online misinformation requires developing students’ capacities to reason about the information they encounter in digital spaces. Critical civic and media literacy education must provide students with rich opportunities to critically analyze the online information sources they encounter within their broader sociopolitical contexts. Doing so requires designing learning environments where students can practice evaluating the credibility of online sources, consider multiple diverse perspectives, and understand how values and ideologies may be reproduced or challenged by online texts as part of engaging in civic deliberation together.

This dissertation focuses on three studies that seek to promote students’ online civic reasoning through collaborative learning tasks that engage students in civic deliberation on critical issues to support their civic participation in pursuit of a more equitable world. The first study explores how digital epistemic scaffolds can be used to support student engagement in evidence evaluation and integration with multiple online texts to make informed judgments on a scientific topic. The second study seeks to understand the criteria and strategies students use to collaboratively evaluate online sources and engage in critical analysis of perspective and representation when deliberating on issues of equity in education. The third study examines how students negotiate the validity of lived experience as a form of evidence and how students’ discursive practices may perpetuate or challenge epistemic injustice during civic deliberation on racialized experiences with schooling. Taken together, these studies seek to move the field forward by showcasing students’ diverse and nuanced thinking around source credibility, lived experience, and the politics of representation as part of online civic reasoning, with implications for the design and implementation of civic and media literacy instruction.