Identity, Language Learning, and Critical

Pedagogies in Digital Times

Ron Darvin and Bonny Norton

Abstract
Recognizing how the social landscape of language learning has shifted with
innovations in technology, this chapter examines how critical pedagogies have
responded to the new structures and relations of power that have evolved in
increasingly digital times. As learners perform multiple and dynamic identities in
this new world order, how they navigate their investments in the language and
literacy practices of classrooms and communities also becomes more complex. To
understand the evolution of identity as a central construct of language learning,
this chapter looks to original conceptualizations of identity and earlier scholarship
that informed it. Major developments in identity research that intersect with the
digital are then discussed and classified in three categories: the construction and
performance of identities, structures and relations of power, and social and
educational inequities. The chapter then proceeds to examine two important
issues in language learning that are associated with the digital turn. First, the
multiplicity of spaces learners are able to engage with requires the mastery of new
and continually evolving literacies. Second, the mechanisms of power have
become more invisible, requiring more critical reflection in order to identify
and navigate systemic patterns of control. To respond to these challenges, the
chapter concludes by recommending specific research areas that will help create
transformative critical pedagogies: issues of political economy, digital exclusion,
and methodological innovations.

Keywords
Critical pedagogy • Language learning • Identity • Investment • Digital

R. Darvin (*) • B. Norton (*)

Department of Language and Literacy Education, University of British Columbia, Education Centre
at Ponderosa Commons, Vancouver, BC, Canada
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

# Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 43

J. Cenoz et al. (eds.), Language Awareness and Multilingualism, Encyclopedia of
Language and Education, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-02240-6_3
44 R. Darvin and B. Norton

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
Early Developments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
Major Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Work in Progress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Problems and Difficulties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
Future Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
Related Articles in the Encyclopedia of Language and Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

Introduction

Educators interested in identity, language learning, and critical pedagogies are

interested in language as a social practice and the way language constructs and is
constructed by a wide variety of social relationships. These relationships are as
varied as those between the writer and reader, teacher and student, test maker and test
taker, and school and state. What makes the educators “critical” is the shared
assumption that social relationships are seldom constituted on equal terms, reflecting
and constituting inequitable relations of power in the wider society. Further, the
plural use of “pedagogies” suggests that there are many ways in which pedagogy can
be critical; the challenge for critical language educators is to determine how best to
pursue a project of possibility for language learners, across time and diverse spaces.
In this view, language is theorized not only as a linguistic system but also as a social
practice in which experiences are organized and identities negotiated.
In the twenty-first century, as language learners navigate new digital spaces
governed by different value systems, they have to perform multiple identities and
linguistic repertoires while frequently positioned in new, often invisible ways. How
teachers, researchers, and policy-makers are able to map out these increasingly
complex spaces, while negotiating competing ideologies and pedagogies, is perhaps
one of the greatest challenges for language education in digital times. To address this
challenge, language education scholars have sought to advance new understandings
of identity that capture this changing relationship between the language learner and
the social world. This research seeks to sharpen the lens through which language
learners and teachers negotiate relations of power, challenging educational agents to
reflect on the material conditions that allow language learning to take place, and how
learners, inscribed by race, ethnicity, gender, social class, and sexual orientation are
accorded or refused the right to speak.

Early Developments

In the 1970s and 1980s, scholars interested in second-language identity tended to

draw distinctions between social identity and cultural identity. “Social identity” was
seen to reference the relationship between the individual language learner and the
Identity, Language Learning, and Critical Pedagogies in Digital Times 45

larger social world, as mediated through institutions such as families, schools,

workplaces, social services, and law courts (e.g., Gumperz 1982). “Cultural iden-
tity,” on the other hand, referenced the relationship between an individual and
members of a particular ethnic group (such as Mexican and Japanese) who share a
common history, a common language, and similar ways of understanding the world
(e.g., Valdes 1986). As Atkinson (1999) has noted, past theories of cultural identity
tended to essentialize and reify identities in problematic ways. In more recent years,
the difference between social and cultural identity is seen to be theoretically more
fluid, and the intersections between social and cultural identities are considered more
significant than their differences. In this research, identity is seen as socioculturally
constructed, and educators draw on both institutional and community practices to
understand the conditions under which language learners speak, read, and write the
target language. Such research is generally associated with a shift in the field from a
predominantly psycholinguistic approach to second-language learning to include a
greater focus on sociological and anthropological dimensions of language learning,
particularly with reference to sociocultural, poststructural, and critical theory (Doug-
las Fir Group 2016).
Scholars have noted that Norton’s work on identity, investment, and imagined
communities (Norton Peirce 1995; Norton 2013) has become foundational to
research on language learner identity (Kramsch 2013; Miller and Kubota 2013).
Drawing on poststructuralist theory and a wide range of research in the global
community, Norton conceptualizes identity as multiple, fluid, and a site of struggle.
People perform different identities in particular spaces or conditions, in the same
way that they can be positioned by others by virtue, for example, of their race and
gender. This applies as well to language learning contexts, where learners negotiate
relations of power and seek to assert their place as legitimate speakers. Recognizing
that learners are social beings with complex identities, Norton also developed the
construct of investment, which highlights the socially and historically constructed
relationship between learners and their commitment to language learning. The
construct recognizes that commitment to learning is not just a product of motivation
but that learners invest in particular language and literacy practices because such
practices will help them acquire a wider range of symbolic and material resources,
which will in turn increase the value of their cultural capital and social power. At the
same time, how learners are able to invest in a target language is contingent on the
dynamic negotiation of power in different fields and how they are granted or refused
the right to speak.
Norton’s challenge to examine issues of identity in language learning came at a
time when second-language acquisition scholars were calling for “an enhanced
awareness of the contextual and interactional dimensions of language use” (Firth
and Wagner 1997, p. 285). In 1997, Norton guest edited a special issue of TESOL
Quarterly on Language and Identity, and in 2002, the award-winning Journal of
Language, Identity, and Education was launched, providing a platform for scholars
from different parts of the world to publish research on identity and the sociocultural
issues of language learning. By 2006, Zuengler and Miller (2006) had declared that
language and identity had been established as “a research area in its own right”
46 R. Darvin and B. Norton

(p. 43). This research suggests that second-language learners frequently struggle to
appropriate the voices of others (Bakhtin), command the attention of their listeners
(Bourdieu), negotiate multiple subjectivities (Weedon), and understand the practices
of the target language community (Lave and Wenger). The research does not
suggest, however, that the language learner should bear the primary responsibility
for expanding the range of identities available to the learner; of central interest is the
investment of the native speaker as well. Drawing on such theory, becoming a
“good” language learner is seen to be a much more complicated process than earlier,
more positivistic research had suggested.
A great number of books have helped build the canon of early identity research
(see Norton 2013 for an overview). In the last decade, this interest has continued to
flourish. Block (2007) provides insight on the lived experiences of adult migrants
and foreign language learners; Byrd Clark (2009) discusses how youth of diverse
backgrounds perform multiple identities in a globalized world; and Higgins (2011)
examines an exciting range of research on identity and language learning in the new
millennium. Much of this work has begun to address the importance of the digital in
language learning and teaching and to incorporate the digital in diverse critical
pedagogical practices. Particularly noteworthy in this regard is the edited book by
Cummins and Early (2010), which illustrates how students invest their identities in
creative works or performances, what the authors call “identity texts.”

Major Contributions

The rapid development of technology and digital innovations in recent years,

together with the intensification of neoliberal pressures on different economies,
have accelerated globalization. The paradox of globalization however is that while
we increasingly develop a sense of the interconnectedness of the world, particularly
with digital media, the world has become increasingly fragmented. The lived
realities in urban cosmopolitan centers in post-industrialist societies are markedly
different from those in villages of developing countries. Not only are there social,
cultural, and political differences across the horizontal spaces of neighborhoods,
regions, and countries but also in the vertical spaces of class, gender, and ethnicity.
At the same time, the virtual world also provides an axis where people of shared
interests and tastes are able to construct new communities and ideas of co-citizenship
(Gee and Hayes 2011). It is the intersection of these axes in the twenty-first century
that cleaves the world into very diverse, segmented spaces and that shape identities
and pedagogies in new, profound ways (De Costa and Norton 2016).
In this changing digital landscape, research on identity, language learning, and
critical pedagogies grapples with new questions of power and access, particularly
when considering implications of the research for classroom practice. As the
affordances of the digital have enabled innovative means of self-representation and
diverse sites of social participation, identity studies have taken on different tropes.
Interpretive research has examined the construction and performance of digitally
mediated identities, while more critical research has focused on issues of power and
Identity, Language Learning, and Critical Pedagogies in Digital Times 47

social inequities. The three common themes in the area of critical pedagogies that we
will address are those on (i) the construction and performance of identities,
(ii) structures and relations of power, and (iii) social and educational inequities.
The construction and performance of identities. While the digital is the
medium, at the core of the performance of multiple identities is language. Through
two case studies, Thorne and Black (2011) demonstrate how blogging and IM
enables a stylization where writers strategically mix textual conventions with differ-
ent semiotic resources to achieve more personal intentions. By developing new
performative, semiotic repertoires, they are able to enact relevant identities as they
interact with both close social networks and also distant and anonymous audiences.
As a kind of identity text, digital stories have become a significant channel for
researchers to understand how learners construct identities through textual produc-
tion. By borrowing and repurposing texts, images, and music, learners are able to
claim authorial agency and be coauthors and agents of literacy acquisition
(Lotherington 2011). In a study of the creative process of ninth-grade students as
they produce their own digital stories about “an odyssey of self,” Rowsell (2012)
demonstrated how learners are able to reposition their identity. By making multi-
modal choices to represent their lived histories, learners are granted individual
creative expression that can effect subtle shifts in disposition. Because digital stories
have very few structuring conditions and constraints, learners can improvise their
ideas, values, and histories without critical challenge, and thus, they are able to
reimagine their own self-identifications.
Conversely, Stornaiuolo et al. (2009) argue that the multiplicity of ways to
represent one’s self made available through the digital not only extends but com-
plexifies self-identifications. By sharing these stories online, learners communicate
across multiple symbolic systems and to audiences no longer confined to one’s
geographic location. While one can imagine new identities and ways of being in
the world, the implied, incidental and overt audience of one’s story may not share
one’s local understandings. Thus, there is a need to develop the adaptive, generative,
and critical capacities of learners to construct coherent texts. For Darvin and Norton
(2014a), digital storytelling is a powerful way to affirm the transnational identities of
migrant learners. Through a workshop where high school students collaborated to
produce videos narrating their own stories of migration, the learners were able to use
their mother tongue and draw from the modalities of images, music, and voice to
share their lived experiences and the material conditions that inscribed their own
transnational journeys. Like Lam and Warriner (2012), Darvin and Norton point out
that teachers who are critically informed about the material realities and inequalities
of migration can develop more transformative pedagogies.
Structures and relations of power. Not only has technology enabled the per-
formance and affirmation of learner identities, but research has also been able to
examine how the digital can be used in critical pedagogies. As learners continue to
engage with new technologies, Norton and Williams (2012) demonstrate how digital
devices become more than mere physical tools – they become meaningful symbolic
resources that accord their users’ cultural capital and social power. For example, in a
project where rural Kenyan students were provided digital cameras, laptops with
48 R. Darvin and B. Norton

connectivity, and voice recorders to conduct interviews with government officials,

Kendrick et al. (2012) note how digital tools became signifiers of membership in a
journalistic context, which provided students with agentive power. Through role-
playing that emboldened students to ask about controversial issues like dissent and
police corruption, they were able to negotiate the performance of new, more
empowered identities. Similarly, in a project that promoted digital literacy with
girls and women from poorly resourced communities in Uganda, Norton
et al. (2011) helped the participants gain access to digital tools that allowed them
to research about HIV/AIDS. By accessing the internet privately, they were able to
pose questions about the female body and teenage pregnancy that they might
otherwise not be comfortable discussing in larger groups. Engaging with the digital
allowed them not only to access English in new ways but also to construct their
identities as empowered young women fully invested in learning.
In a study of how migrant learners negotiate competing language ideologies in
their adoptive countries, Shin (2012) examines how some Korean students who
study abroad, originally mocked by Korean immigrants as unsophisticated, were
able to gain strategies of distinction through the creation of their own particular ways
of communicating. By integrating Korean youth slang with English, transliterated
Korean, and Korean internet shorthand and emoticons in their text messages and IM
chats, they were able to style “Korean cool” and reinvest their linguistic resources
with new values. Recognizing the rising prominence of South Korea in the global
stage and the increased economic value of the Korean language, these learners, while
originally wanting to acquire English to become global cosmopolitan citizens,
reversed the indices by constructing Korean language and culture as an index of
coolness, to gain more empowered identities.
Social and educational inequities. Not only does the digital construct and
empower identities, it can also reproduce social inequities. A learner’s identity, his
or her social position and possession of capital, shapes digital access, use, and
outcomes (Warschauer and Matuchniak 2010). In an ethnographic study of the
digital media engagements of two families from contrasting socioeconomic settings
in South Africa, Lemphane and Prinsloo (2014) demonstrate how the identities of
youth shape their language use and digital practices. The middle class children who
had digital devices and unlimited broadband connectivity gained access to more
English language resources, allowing them to develop topic-specific vocabulary and
meta-awareness of language. Adapting avatars that became identity markers, they
were able to experiment with different accents and become familiar with global
middle class cultural references, while developing class-specific dispositions. The
working-class children, on the other hand, had only mobile phone access, and the
games they were able to play on these devices provided no language development
opportunities. They spoke mostly a colloquial version of the local language, index-
ical of their working-class status and not valued in school. In this context, the
contrasting digital practices lead to different resources, tacit knowledge, and habits
that may or may not be bridged to school literacies and classroom practices.
Recognizing digital literacies as a social practice, North et al. (2008) assert that
technology use is tied to one’s identity. What is valued in the home greatly
Identity, Language Learning, and Critical Pedagogies in Digital Times 49

determines digital tastes, which appear to be consistent among learners of a partic-

ular social class. Home socializes learners into understanding, accepting, or rejecting
digital practices, and this socialization involves the appropriation of technology into
existing family norms, values, and lifestyles. Whereas some families value technol-
ogy for consumption of information, those who are not directed toward traditional
academic success may view new media and technologies as entertainment tools.
These different mindsets shape varied digital tastes that may be valued or devalued
in different contexts like school and have important implications for critical
pedagogies.

Work in Progress

Recognizing that the achievement gap between rich and poor learners in the United
States is now twice that of white and black, Jones and Vagle (2013) call for a social
class-sensitive pedagogy that recognizes and addresses these inequalities. Because
of prevailing neoliberal discourses of upward mobility, status, and entrepreneurial
success, classism can be unwittingly inscribed in curriculum, pedagogy, and school
practices. The authors propose locating and disrupting social class hierarchies in
schools and communities and integrating social class and marginalized perspectives
into the curriculum. They challenge educators to have a more informed understand-
ing of the web of economic theory, globalization, immigration policies, and labor
laws, to construct a critical pedagogy that responds to differences in social class.
Aligned with such a pedagogy, online content, media, and texts produced by
students are used to not only represent diverse lived experiences but also to examine
“assumptions of (classed) normality” (p. 134).
In this spirit, Darvin and Norton (2014b) have done a comparative case study of
two adolescent migrant Filipino learners from different social class positions in
Canada. They examine how differences in levels of capital shape students’ language
use, home literacies, and digital practices, with important implications for critical
pedagogies. The youngest child of an entrepreneur and full-time homemaker, Ayrton
lives in a wealthy neighborhood and speaks English almost exclusively at home and
with his classmates in a private school. He has enrolled in an online course on
currency trading and he views technology as a rich source of information, which can
realize powerful imagined identities. In contrast, John is raised solely by his care-
giver mother and lives with her and two siblings in a one-bedroom apartment. His
social network is almost entirely Filipino, and he speaks about his struggle to adjust
his English. In this case, the linguistic, cultural, and social capital of the two learners
appear to already lead them toward different social trajectories and educational
opportunities.
In 2015, a colloquium in Calgary organized by Rahat Naqvi and Jennifer Rowsell
brought together renowned scholars of New Literacy Studies to discuss how literacy
pedagogies need to evolve in transcultural cosmopolitan times. The work of Toohey
et al. (2012) is particularly exciting in this regard, drawing on the use of video to
build communities of language learners across global sites. In a multi-country
50 R. Darvin and B. Norton

videomaking project with school children in India, Mexico, and Canada, the authors
found that the making of videos offered language learners opportunities for meaning
making that extended beyond their particular second-language capabilities. As
educators imagine critical pedagogies that foster transnational identities, there is
increasing need for critical language educators to examine issues of power and
inequality (Hawkins and Norton 2009). Such pedagogies not only bring together
transcultural practices, multimodal epistemologies, and multilingual forms of com-
munication, but they also weave in a critical examination of how these practices are
inscribed by relations of power.

Problems and Difficulties

As digital affordances continue to offer a more flexible engagement with the world,
the implications of the virtual on identity are becoming increasingly significant.
However, two important issues confront educators interested in identity, language
learning, and critical pedagogies. First, these new spaces that allow learners to
access, select, and transform information for individual aims and to participate in a
more global community continue to multiply (Kress 2009). How learners negotiate
these spaces and new forms of sociality through language becomes even more
crucial, as these spaces require continually evolving forms of literacy. Second, as
learners occupy more virtual and isolated spaces, the capillaries of power that
manage these contexts, together with concomitant processes of inclusion and exclu-
sion, become more invisible. As learners move fluidly across different contexts, the
challenge lies in their capacity to identify and navigate systemic patterns of control,
which impact their investments in particular language and literacy practices (Darvin
and Norton 2015).
While the digital shapes identity by demanding new literacies and strategies, it
also constructs new forms of inequality that impinge on the agency of learners as
they pursue their life trajectories. As the fulcrum of the knowledge economy,
technology, according to Castells (2001), can lead to “one of the most damaging
forms of exclusion” (p. 3). Social class greatly impacts access and use of tech-
nology (Darvin and Norton 2014b; North et al. 2008), but in recent language
education research, it has been a largely underexamined construct (Kanno and
Vandrick 2014). Traditional models of class structure, together with class-
inscribed identities like “middle class” or “working class,” no longer capture the
realities of the new world order. For Kramsch (2013), the political promise of
identity as a site of resistance is in danger of being commodified in a competitive,
deregulated fast capitalism, as a means of personal gain. “Identity might then
cease to be a matter of investment and imagination and might become once again a
matter of birth privilege and social class” (p. 199). To respond to this threat, new,
more fluid conceptualizations of class and a sharper analysis of digital inequalities
are necessary to investigate identity, language learning, and critical pedagogies in
the twenty-first century.
Identity, Language Learning, and Critical Pedagogies in Digital Times 51

Future Directions

As a central construct in the sociocultural dimension of language education research,

identity will continue to be a significant topic of discussion among teachers,
scholars, and policy-makers. Further, the comprehensive model of investment and
language learning, developed by Darvin and Norton (2015), invites future research
on the relationship between identity, capital, and ideology. In this spirit, three
particular areas are shaping new, exciting paths for research on identity, language
learning, and critical pedagogies in digital times: issues of political economy, digital
identities and literacies, and methodological innovations.
Issues of political economy. The neoliberal forces of deregulation and free
market continue to structure relations in a rapidly globalizing and digitalizing
world. Technology comes with a cost, and the capacity to access, produce, and
distribute digitally mediated information considered valuable in the knowledge
economy is increasingly linked to mechanisms of profit. The commodification of
languages, the marketization of language learning, and the role of language in
regulating and legitimizing geopolitical spaces make political economy a very
important focus in applied linguistics (Block et al. 2012; Duchêne and Heller
2012). This lens enables researchers to dissect identity and to understand the
challenges of learners in an increasingly polarized and segmented world. How social
class intersects with other categories such as ethnicity and gender promises to be a
very fruitful way to understand how learners are positioned in different learning
contexts in the twenty-first century (De Costa and Norton 2016).
Digital exclusion. As the digital playground carved out by new media becomes a
more ubiquitous space of language acquisition and socialization, researchers and
scholars have gravitated toward this domain to examine and to discover new
pedagogical opportunities. Studies however have usually come from wealthier
contexts (Snyder and Prinsloo 2007), and the emerging issue is that the distribution
of digital tools that enable mediation is unequal (Warschauer and Matuchniak 2010),
not just across the horizontal dimensions of localities and nations but also the vertical
axis of class, gender, and ethnicity. Differences in digital use, tastes, and preferences
(Snyder et al. 2008) also determine learners’ inclusion in these spaces. Hence, there
needs to be more research that not only examines the positioning of identities in the
“unglobalized” areas of the world but also in the virtual spaces where learners of
different backgrounds can be granted or refused access and the right to speak.
Methodological issues and innovations. As the digital transforms conceptions of
time and space by making artifacts permanent and perpetually present, multimedia
self-presentations of learners can also fix representations of identity and influence their
lives in complex, consequential ways (Nelson et al. 2008). At the same time, ethnog-
raphers traverse digital frontiers where boundaries of private and public are blurred,
and together, this raises new questions regarding ethics, informed consent, and
researcher identity (De Costa and Norton 2016). Researchers also need more sophis-
ticated tools to observe and interpret contexts of learning, where learners move
seamlessly online and offline, using Language, Education and Technology in ways
52 R. Darvin and B. Norton

that are continually evolving. How these lead to more complex methodological issues
in examining identity promises to be an exciting area in language education research.
If we take seriously the argument that the identity of the language learner is not
just a character trait or “personality variable” but a socially and historically
constructed relationship to both institutional and community practices, then it
follows that teachers, researchers, administrators, testers, and policy-makers are all
implicated in the range of identities available to the language learner. As both
institutions and communities navigate new digital frontiers in an area of increasing
globalization, the implications for critical pedagogies are profound.

Cross-References

▶ Knowledge About Language and Learner Autonomy

▶ Knowledge About Language in the Mother Tongue and Foreign Language
Curricula
▶ Translanguaging as a Pedagogical Tool in Multilingual Education

Related Articles in the Encyclopedia of Language and Education

Ron Darvin and Bonny Norton: Language, Identity, and Investment in the Twenty-
First Century. In Volume: Language Policy and Political Issues in Education
Patricia Duff: Language Socialization, Participation and Identity: Ethnographic
Approaches. In Volume: Discourse and Education
Saeed Rezaei: Researching Identity in Language and Education. In Volume:
Research Methods in Language and Education
Taehee Choi: Identity, Transnationalism and Bilingual Education. In Volume: Bilin-
gual and Multilingual Education

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