The Digital Tribe

The Digital Tribe: Using Social Media in the English Classroom

When the 2007 revisions to the Ontario English curriculum came out, one of the areas of growth was in the media strand. As with all the other strands, meta-cognition was added in as an overall expectation. And, among other changes, there was more emphasis added to students producing their own media and in particular, analyzing their own media. By that point, my own department had already integrated media into all of our courses that met the 2007 expectations—in most cases as extensions of other units, but occasionally as discrete units.

So, the question became what direction should we go with our new media units? We had a nice selection of the usual nineties fare: advertising, manufacturing consent, truthiness, stereotyping, along with movie-making, editing and the like, but not much Internet emphasis. So, in order to accommodate the new expanded expectations, as well as update our media education to include the Web 2.0 world, we’ve begun to include web literacy. Up until now, though, none of us has really wandered into the village of social media literacy. You know, social networking like Facebook, Twitter, Basecamp, Forums, as well as texting, and blogging. But I think it’s time.

It’s been easy to ignore, of course, since so much of social media is banned as soon as we walk in the school door. No texting, no Facebook, no YouTube. But it’s the perfect solution to the missing link in our media units. And I mean the link between us and our students. First of all, our students are living and breathing social media—anyone with a teenager in the house knows that. They are growing up in the age of the digital decentralizing of power and so we need them to be literate about it. We need them to know which medium to choose to do what, and how to exercise their corner of democracy safely, gracefully and respectfully when they’re there. We need to use the social media to teach the social media.

Second, using social media in the classroom will help unify the class--not gut it as some critics fear—with the added bonus that it can help make the teacher a better leader. Seth Godin, in Tribes, his best-selling book on leadership and change, says, “Great leaders create movements by empowering the tribe to communicate. They establish the foundation for people to make connections, as opposed to commanding people to follow them” (23). Our classes are tribes, and using a social networking tool in class is one more way to encourage our students to connect with each other.

Of course, we’re talking about occasional tools in the high school classroom, not constant companions. Consider, for example, using forums and blogs as an extension of a novel unit. Why both forums and blogs? Well, one of our jobs is to lead our students to discover the right medium for the right purpose. Particpating in a forum lets them practise being a public member of community; writing their own blog lets them publish their own personal voice.

Here’s a perfect place to incorporate forums and blogs: In ENG 2D at our school, the students read To Kill a Mockingbird on their own, and once they’re done reading it, we discuss it, we write a formal essay, and we use the topic of discrimination to segue into an informal essay unit. While the students are reading the novel, we can set up evocative personal response questions in a forum for them to bat about with each other. If we have a class webpage like pbwiki, we can use the discussion section there for a simple forum, or our Board’s forum or online software, or if we don’t mind adverts (or if we purposely want them there so we can use them to talk about advertising on social networks) we can set up a more involved forum with freeforums (phpbb). This will take next-to-no class time, but it will help the students connect with each other and with the novel.

Then, once the novel is read, and we’re discussing it in class, we can leave the forum and switch to blogs. We can have students use their personal blogs (which they can link to our class webpage) to start to build a bridge to the non-fiction (informal essays and speeches) unit on discrimination and social identify that follows.

To fulfill our meta-cognition expectations, we can ask students to reflect on their attitudes and thinking processes as they used the forums and as they are writing on their blogs—how they differ with each medium, how writing publicly may change their responses, and how discussing the book in all these different media (including live!) affects their thinking and writing.

Now, having produced their own media in two different media, they are also in a position to analyze their own media and discuss language conventions and codes in their own media creations as our expanded media expectations expect. And now we’re also set up to talk about social media literacy issues such as cyber-bullying and netiquette—that is, generally being a good cyber-citizen—and, more globally, how social networking is changing the world.

This may be the first time that students themselves are changing education. They are different than the generations of students who have gone before them. It’s not the technology that’s changing what we need to teach, it’s how our students are using the technology that’s changing what we need to teach.