Seminar | Centering critical digital literacy in the lives of language teaching professionals

[Please note that this is an in-person only seminar.]

[Update 19 Jan 2026] Venue has now been changed to HHBUG05, UG/F, PolyU Hung Hom Bay Campus.

Consistent with recent calls to critically recognize how digital technologies shape ideologies, inequities, and exclusion, I will explore how the digital turn in composition reflects the massive inroads that have been made with respect to multiliteracies since the New London Group put forward their pedagogical blueprint almost 30 years ago. Specifically, I will present findings from a critical collaborative autoethnography (Kim et al., 2025). By engaging in constructive dialogue with my co-authors, I will illustrate how the dual identity roles we inhabited as transnational teachers and teacher educators shaped our understanding of critical digital literacy (CDL). By adopting a CDL lens within the framework of platform studies (Nichols & Garcia, 2022), my presentation also addresses the political-economic and technological dimensions of platforms, which remain relatively underexplored. In addition to calling for incorporating CDL development into pre-service teacher education, I also extend the New London Group’s notion of multiliteracies, which highlighted critical engagement as a cornerstone of multiliteracies education, by underscoring the need to develop critical ethical literacy (Kim et al., 2026) in multiliteracies work.