Transcultural Digital Literacies: Cross-Border Connections and Self-Representations in an Online Forum

Abstract

Research on multicultural learning has focused on formal and local settings, such as schools, but young people are interacting with, and therefore learning from, informal settings and nonlocal contexts, including online platforms. That is, multicultural education is no longer limited to formal institutions, local contexts, or the printed word. Young people consume new media texts produced by geographically distant places but also compose their own multimodal texts around these media. Transcultural digital literacies refer to this phenomenon as using new technological affordances to learn, imagine, and create knowledge that traverses national boundaries and conventional cultural borders. To illustrate transcultural digital literacy practices, this study analyzes youths' engagements with digitally mediated texts to construct cross-border connections and self-representations. An online discussion forum about Korean dramas serves as an empirical case. Literacy practices within the forum revealed how its participants rendered it a dynamic space for multicultural learning. Participants engaged in dialogic readings of Korean culture, in addition to other cultures. Moreover, their online multimodal literacy practices allowed them to disrupt a notion of identity as constituted monolithically according to singular categories of difference, such as race, ethnicity, or nationality. Examining these informal, nonlocal, and digitally mediated literacy practices has implications for understanding a dynamic literacy landscape and multicultural and global learning.