Digital Hidden Transcripts: Exploring Student Resistance in Blogs

This study explores the ways in which blogging as literacy practice can serve as an instrument of student resistance. Drawing on interviews with students and teachers, it analyzes the intentions and contentions surrounding a single blog entry authored by a 15-year-old secondary school student in which fictional strategies were artfully deployed in a covert assault on teacher authority. Adapting James C. Scott's (1990) notion of the “hidden transcript,” I explore the ways in which students’ interests and identities find subversive expression through the underlife of the “digital hidden transcript.” The discussion examines how such writing practices constitute acts of dialogic resistance that enable students to negotiate the premises and promises of teacher-student power relations.