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 what it actually means 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 practical digital and multimodal resources for teacher educators and practitioners. 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, gaming, podcasts, digital storytelling). Each Notion card contained 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 treat young people as knowers rather than casualties of a never ending “literacy crisis,” and why a total retreat to RETVRN pedagogies misreads the post-literacy problem entirely. There are even some cringe confessionals about times where Karis and I tried and failed to be cool young millennial teachers before we learned about 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 with the Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education (CITE) journal. The culmination of which was our receiving the 2025 English Language Arts Teacher Educators’ National Technology Leadership Fellowship award. We hope you have as much fun listening as we did recording.

Key Concepts from the Episode:

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

• Rabani’s framework treats young people’s out-of-school literacies as knowledge rather than deficit, which changes what the adult in the room is actually there to do.
• Applied to the “literacy crisis,” this reframes the panic as a measurement and framing problem without discounting its concerns entirely. Kids are reading and writing constantly; school just hasn’t counted the forms they’re doing it in.

The Post-Digital Classroom

• Drawing on Jandrić and Rowsell, the digital becomes another embedded layer of meaning-making, sitting alongside the analog rather than above it.
• The payoff is a classroom that neither fetishizes nor demonizes the screen. The analogue becomes a deliberate choice rather than a nostalgic default. Screens are for creative communication, not content delivery

What AI Can’t Do

• The cheating panic pushes teachers toward blue books and handwriting. The episode argues for the opposite move: composing that demands presence and audience—podcasts, video essays, 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 will recognize quite a few throughlines: the convergence of new media and the humanities, postdigital aesthetics, English teaching, and cringey millennial humor. 

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