Building Critical Data Literacies with Teenagers through Metaphor

Team

Timeframe

2024 ↝ Ongoing

Keywords

  • Research Through Design
  • Speculative Design
  • Alternative Outcomes
  • Co-Speculation

Outcome

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    Intervention run with 7 high school classes
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    Best Paper Award at DIS’25

The Core Idea

Teenagers have grown up entirely within the data economy. Their everyday lives—social, emotional, and creative—are mediated by data-driven systems that monitor, predict, and influence their behavior. As early adopters of emerging technologies, they are at once the most immersed and the most vulnerable: their developmental need for connection increasingly unfolds through digital platforms that rarely meet those needs. Amid mounting concern over these effects, governments have begun implementing prohibition-style interventions, such as Australia’s teenage social media ban. Yet, these approaches risk limiting autonomy rather than building understanding or resilience.

In contrast, The Metaphor Workbooks project explores how creative, reflective practices can support teenagers in becoming informed and agentic participants in the data economy. Drawing on emerging work in critical data literacy—an approach that prepares people to ask questions about how data is constituted, who it benefits, and how it might be reimagined—the project engages Grade 9 students in examining their relationships with phones, social media, and data. Through a week-long classroom intervention, students co-created and worked through visually rich, RISO-printed workbooks designed to scaffold critical reflection through metaphor, collage, and writing. The goal was not to restrict technology use, but to cultivate awareness, curiosity, and agency within the systems that shape their lives.

Related Publications ↘

Acknowledgments

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    We thank teacher Matt DeSimone, for their generous collaboration, insight, and commitment—this work would not have been possible without their support or care for their students. We also thank Gillian Russell and Frederick Lesage, and the Imaginative Methods Lab for their support.

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    This research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), the Mellon Foundation’s Data Fluencies Project, and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

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