In this episode of Conceptually Speaking, I sit down with Karis Jones, Sarah Jerasa, and Rabani Garg, friends of the show and the team behind the award-winning #HackYourStack initiative, to talk about how to teach digital and networked texts and cultivate literacies in the plural. #HackYourStack started as a play on NCTE’s Build Your Stack initiative and as a response to its Critical Media Literacy Task Force’s call for more teacher facing digital and multimodal instructional resources. Over the course of several years’ worth of conference hangs and Zoom calls, we eventually developed a Notion database of educational resources organized by different modalities (video essays, fan fiction, hip-hop, TikTok, webtoons, zines, podcasts, digital storytelling to name a few). Each Notion card in the database contains curated scholarly research, mentor texts, and teacher-facing instructional materials all in the same place. It is truly a one stop shop for all things multimodal composing—analogue, digital, and otherwise.
Over the course of our dialogue, we get into the differences between EdTech and (what I referred to in a previous article as) MADTech, what it looks like to regard young people as knowers and doers rather than casualties of a never ending literacy crisis, and why a retreat to RETVRN pedagogy misreads the post-literacy problem entirely. For some added zest, there are even some cringe confessionals about times where Karis and I tried and failed to be ~cool young millennial teachers~ before we learned more responsive and participatory ways to invite youth culture into our classrooms. This is a conversation long in the making considering the work we’ve put into this database, various workshops, and even a Special Issue they co-edited for the Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education (CITE) journal. The culmination of this work was our receiving the 2025 English Language Arts Teacher Educators’ National Technology Leadership Fellowship award.
Affordances and Limitations
Every medium makes some kinds of meaning possible and closes others off. The pedagogical work is asking what a medium opens up and how communities build practices through and with its affordances.
“Schoolifying” these practices by turning them into worksheets or templates tends to strip out the exact thing that made it worth borrowing in the first place: the audience, stakes, and network.
Youth as Knowers & Doers
Based on Rabani’s research (and the base of scholarship she’s building on) we should take heart that students are reading, writing, and using tools like LLMs in ways that are more creative and expansive than we might think
Applied to the “literacy crisis,” this reframes the panic as more of an issue of measurement and recognition than the full blown catastrophe it’s often seen as. Yes, it is possible to acknowledge literacy is changing while also advocating for holding onto the many benefits of print literacy.
The Post-Digital Classroom
Drawing on the concept of postdigitalality from folks like Petr Jandrić and Jennifer Rowsell, we should regard the digital as another embedded layer of meaning-making, sitting alongside the analog rather than above or outside it.
The pedagogical payoff of such a move is teaching that neither fetishizes nor demonizes the screen. With this shift, analogue tools are used as a deliberate choice rather than a nostalgic default and screens are used for creative communication instead of content delivery. As we discuss, it’s all about intention!
What AI Can’t Do
The cheating panic pushes teachers toward school-ish blue book and exam writing, but we argue for the opposite move: composing that demands presence and audience—podcasts, video essays, presentations, etc. made within and for real communities.
Persona, voice, and embodiment don’t replicate the way a five-paragraph essay does, which makes multimodal genres a harder thing to fake and a more honest picture of what a student can actually do.
Regular readers of Becoming Literary and listeners of Conceptually Speaking will recognize quite a few of my “greatest hits” in this episode: the convergence of new media and the humanities, postdigital aesthetics, English teaching, and a healthy dose cringey millennial humor. Karis, Sarah, and Rabani are good friends and great collaborators so this episode was a blast to record and I think it shows in our spirited discussion. Conversations about literacy in the postdigital age tend to be rather bleak, so I hope the joy you hear in our conversation offers a little injection of hope amidst all the doom and gloom.
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