Abstract
This chapter shares the findings from a study of civic educators who used Twitter as part of their civics instruction. This chapter reviews the experiences of five high-school teachers who participated in this study, presenting each teacher as an individual case study. Each teacher used social media to teach civics. This chapter describes each teacher, their context, and their reasons for using social media to teach civics. Each vignette also discusses each teacher’s main objectives in teaching with social media.
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Keywords
This chapter shares the findings from the study by reviewing the experiences of the five high-school teachers who participated in this study. This chapter will describe each teacher, their context, and their reasons for using Twitter to teach civics.
Donna Crews: Women’s Active Civic Participation
Donna Crews was a white, female, married mother, and a high-school social studies teacher from rural Michigan. Donna had been teaching for 19 years and referred to herself as “almost the whole social studies department” at her school of 195 students in grades 9–12 (the English teacher in the school taught one social studies course). The school served a town with a population of 880; 843 of whom were white (2010 U.S. Census). Donna described the area as a rural farming community where many people lived throughout their lives.
Donna described herself as a “Twitter nerd” who began to use Twitter personally and with her classes following her training to become a teacher trainer through her state’s technology readiness initiative in 2013. Donna’s school was a pilot school for this initiative, which aimed to teach and encourage teachers to integrate technology and social media into their classrooms. She credited the person who trained her over a period of months through this initiative with “seeing how effective [Twitter] can be” in the classroom. Donna’s excitement in using Twitter was matched by the enthusiasm and creativity of the teacher who trained her in integrating technology and social media in the classroom, which in turn prompted Donna to begin to use Twitter in her classroom shortly after she had joined the platform herself.
Donna was a Madison Fellow, a prestigious program which trained one person from each state to become an exemplary teacher of the Constitution (James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation, 2019). She felt that she was better educated than most civics teachers in her area because of the Madison Fellowship, and that made her feel like she had a responsibility to teach students in ways that would make them see their own civic engagement as a necessity. She also took great delight in these documents and the connections and activities that can be made with and through them, which became important when she designed ways to use Twitter in class.
Donna’s primary motivation for teaching was hope. She believed that her students had great capacity, and she saw teaching history as a way of introducing students to possibilities for life beyond what they might be imagining for themselves. Donne’s teaching was informed by the remote location of the school, which created a barrier between the people from her town and the rest of the world. Because of its geographic isolation, Donna felt that her town was poorly represented in both local and state governments. One of her goals in teaching was to show her students they had every right to be heard and that they were equally part of this democracy that she loved so much. Part of the meaning of teaching for Donna was in convincing her students that they mattered, that their futures were not already set for them, and that they had the right and power to share their own opinions.
Donna saw Twitter as a way to mediate the geographic isolation of her students. However, not all of Donna’s students were initially enthusiastic about using Twitter in class. Donna described thinking initially that the kids were going to be excited about using Twitter in class, and she was surprised to find that this was not the case:
I thought they were going to think, “Oh, this is really cool, our teacher is trying to use social media. This will be awesome. We’ll jump right in,” and it really hasn’t been. I think they feel a bit like I’m trying to overstep my boundaries.
Donna perceived her students’ lack of interest in using Twitter for school purposes to their desire for their teacher not to encroach on what they view as their personal space.
Donna was also concerned about her students’ technological proficiency. When she began using Twitter in her classes, Donna found that about half of her students already had Twitter accounts and were Twitter users. Donna perceived that these students, and even those who had not yet used Twitter, would demonstrate great facility with technologies and social media. However, she found that this was not the case:
They’re really good at the things that they’re really good at. They’re really good at Snapchat, for example, but you go kind of further out into the world of technology beyond that and they’re just completely puzzled. So, you do have to walk them through. I think you do have to give them some background so that they know what they’re doing.
Donna had also seen instances where students’ lack of proficiency created the potential for them to be exploited. As an example, Donna shared the story of a particular student who was an active Twitter user even before he became a student in her civics class. This student, who was trying to build up a business, showed Donna a direct message he had been sent offering him a number of followers in exchange for following another account, which was a phishing scam. Donna used this story to illustrate how students need instruction in social media, even if it is often assumed that if students know all they need to know about technology. Donna thought most teachers think students are highly proficient with and easily adapt to new technologies:
I go to technology conferences where it’s like, “Oh, your students are so much more tech savvy than you are and you just throw something at them and it’ll stick.” And then I go back to my class and I throw something at them and they’re like, “We don’t get it.” And I thought, “You know, I don’t think they’re as tech savvy as we think they are.”
In response, Donna began her use of Twitter with her students by teaching them how to use the platform.
Donna also saw a connection between technology instruction and her students’ civic engagement. Being taken advantage of by someone online was a corollary to not having one’s voice heard politically, because in both cases, a lack of awareness would lead to a lack of agency. For Donna, a lack of technological proficiency included a lack of awareness about how people operate online. This lack of awareness put students in positions where they did not have the skills to make informed choices. Similarly, being well-informed about civic and political issues allowed people to be more civically effective, as they knew the issues and could respond to them. For Donna, technological proficiency, particularly on Twitter, was intricately tied to civic engagement and participation.
Donna felt overall that Twitter was “really effective” and “a really good learning tool” for the teaching of civics because it helped her students to meet the objectives that she had for them: (1) learning current events and how to stay informed; (2) seeing themselves as valuable, both to their local community and to governmental officials; (3) seeing the relevance of the founding documents of American history (e.g., the U.S. Constitution) as connected to the contemporary United States; and (4) seeing themselves as members of a community beyond their immediate context. Donna chose to use Twitter because she saw how its affordances could support her students in meeting these objectives.
To achieve these objectives, Donna used Twitter with her students in a variety of ways. Students posted to Twitter using a school hashtag so that other students and members of the community could see their opinions. Donna asked her students to follow news stories and current events through other hashtags. She mentioned that she asked students to compare Donald Trump’s tweets with previous presidents’ communications, such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats and Lincoln’s speeches. She would also ask students to
go back to a founding document or a piece of writing by one of the founders [of the United States] that is something that has a comparison. And then [asking], “Hey, how does this tweet from President Obama equate to this letter from George Washington?”
Each of these activities was intended to increase awareness of current events, connections to U.S. history, and student civic engagement, and perhaps most importantly to Donna, to show her students that they have important voices that can be used to contribute to U.S. society.
Another one of Donna’s primary objectives in using Twitter was for students to learn to communicate with government officials. Donna believed that if her students wanted to reach government officials, they needed to use social media platforms those officials were using. For instance, she commented that the real-time nature of Twitter made it more likely for Twitter users to impact political outcomes, given the fast-paced nature of how the legislative process can work. Donna spoke about how she teaches about the possibility of her students making a difference in the legislative process:
There’s not even time to send them a letter a lot of times, ’cause you hear about it, it’s like committee, boom, it’s on the floor, boom, it’s done. So with Twitter, at least you can get them, because they’ve all got their phones laying on their desks in the chamber. They might be reading your tweet, you don’t know what they’re looking at. If it pops up at just the right time, it might make them reconsider.
Both Donna’s purpose in showing her students how to interact with government officials and her invitation that they should interact with elected leaders were well served by using Twitter.
Donna’s hopes for her students’ civic education and engagement were well-founded. For her, the point of civics and civics education was not just to be informed, not just to be educated, not just to participate, but to be impactful. Donna wanted her students to know that being an engaged citizen matters, that their opinion on civic matters was valuable and worth adding to the conversation. In addition to learning about historical and current events, as well as interacting with government officials, Donna saw using Twitter as a way of teaching students to be active citizens while helping them learn how to be thoughtful and cautious as they used social media. Above all, Donna perceived that using Twitter has helped at least some of her students to become more active citizens and that makes it a worthwhile tool to use in her eyes.
Jed Stern: Racism and Homophobia
Jed Stern was a white, male, married father and had been a social studies teacher in one of the larger cities in Iowa for seven years. The district where Jed taught served nearly 11,000 students, of which 1700 students were served by two high schools. The student population in the high school in which Jed taught was predominantly white, with a significant population of English Language Learner (ELL) students from South America, Myanmar (Burma), and Malaysia. The student population in the other district high school was predominantly Black. Jed’s wife, Samantha, taught social studies in the other high school in the district, and Jed and Samantha taught some of the same classes and often discussed their lessons at home. Jed compared himself, his work, and his school to Samantha’s experiences frequently, and he perceived her work as his benchmark for inclusivity. These parallel yet very different lived experiences of teaching for Jed and Samantha resulted in Jed feeling like he was supportive of his white and immigrant students while maintaining a sense of guilt over the de facto segregation of the two high schools in the district.
In the early 1900s, Blacks were only allowed into the city as strikebreakers, and those who came were required to live in a cordoned off area of 20 square blocks (Bray, 2015); that geographic divide between the neighborhoods of white and Black families largely remains. The integration of the school system was met with protests and riots in the 1970s, and due to the residential segregation, and to district policies which did not alter school zones, the school district remains largely racially segregated.
Jed’s identity as a teacher and his pedagogical approaches were both informed by this history. Jed perceived that students who attended the predominantly Black high school in the district had a lesser experience than the students who attended the school where he worked. The district was trying to redraw the school district boundaries to desegregate the schools, though this had yet to happen.
Consequently, Jed’s experience of what it meant to be a teacher had been impacted by the segregation that occurred within his district. He believed that Samantha had more authority to create lessons that explored Black history and connected it to their students’ experiences because of her experience teaching in a school whose population was predominantly Black. (Samantha herself was white.) Jed spoke at length about teaching about Black history, particularly his attempts to connect events that happened in his city during the Civil Rights Movement. Jed felt that his students were isolated from the Black students in the same courses at Samantha’s high school: beyond attending different schools or even living in different sections of the city, they had different educational experiences and were isolated from Black history at large. Jed seemed to feel some guilt over this fact, not because of any particular actions on his part, but because he was a part of a system that has broadly excluded Black history from having a robust presence in school curricula.
As he began his teaching career, however, Jed found that the biggest advantage of using social media was to build and maintain connections with students. Jed was inspired to use Twitter in particular for this purpose by a colleague in the English department of his high school, a frequent Twitter user who had a great deal of success in building relationships with students using Twitter. Jed’s use of Twitter contrasted with Donna’s use of it. Where Donna found value in Twitter because of its content and access to governmental officials, Jed hoped using Twitter could bridge the racial divide between students in different high schools in his district. This hope remains unrealized, as Jed has neither heard from students nor seen on Twitter the ways in which they are connecting with their peers from the other district high school. Twitter seems to be another place where Jed’s idealism was paramount: Twitter could provide a means of breaking barriers and connecting students from the different high schools, and this possibility was what fueled Jed.
Jed hoped that his students’ use of Twitter would help to break down some of the barriers between Black and white students. As yet, this hope has not been realized, as Jed’s only experience of using Twitter for the purpose of discussing Black history had been to examine relationships between the #BlackLivesMatter movement with the race riots of 1968 by looking at tweets from that hashtag. The inclusion of Black history into the Anglo-centric curriculum had not fostered connections between students across the two high schools in the district. In the future, Jed wanted to bring his students to visit Samantha’s students who are taking the same course, hoping that if the students meet in person, they will continue and grow that connection via Twitter.
Jed also hoped Twitter could promote student connections to the wider community by showcasing student accomplishments. Jed used Twitter to post pictures of student work and to show his support for student accomplishments outside of the classroom, such as school sporting events. He shared that his students enjoyed seeing their activities posted on Twitter, which helped him to build relationships with students. Additionally, Jed thought that showing interest in students’ out-of-school activities and expressing that interest publicly on Twitter could have a significant impact on student-teacher relationships, as well as the climate of the classroom or school:
even if it’s like going to a volleyball game or a football game and just being like “hey, you won! Yay!” Just little things like that. I feel I can even build that relationship and improve that culture [of the classroom or school] and if [students] feel comfortable with it, eventually moving [Twitter] into the classroom.
Jed did this because it provided a way for students to be recognized for what they had done in ways that the students themselves could see and understand, and which was also shared by their parents, the district, and others in the community. Jed thought that this recognition built up the community and made students feel more included and valued. If his students felt supported and valued during extracurricular activities, Jed reasoned that they might feel the same about broader engagement in the community.
Another area in which Twitter had been a supportive tool for Jed and his students was in his work as the advisor for his school’s gay-straight alliance (GSA). Jed wanted to connect his students with other GSAs around the state and prompted the students in the GSA to use Twitter to connect both to other school-based GSAs in Iowa and “an umbrella [GSA] organization for the state.” Jed’s focus was on creating a supportive community that fostered student growth for students who were marginalized, and Twitter enabled the GSA at Jed’s school to connect with other GSAs genuinely in ways that it would have been unlikely able to do without it. From Jed’s perspective, participation in an organization like a gay-straight alliance was a way of being civically involved. Through their involvement in the GSA, the students were trying to change and improve society, whether on the local, school level, or throughout the state of Iowa and beyond. Jed used this example to explicitly make the connection that students’ civic engagement was supported through Twitter.
This understanding of civic involvement was woven throughout the ways in which Jed taught, interacted with students, and used Twitter, but it largely avoided the racial justice issues which seemed to drive Jed. Again, Jed’s understanding of civic involvement provided insight into his guilt: his focus on changing the racial dynamics of his community were a justice issue for him, which he, and others who were similarly complicit, must work to change. This is not to say that Jed neglected teaching about civic participation; on the contrary, it was a critical part of his classes. In contrast to how he saw his own civic orientation, Jed wanted to meet students where they were and focused on relationship-building for the benefit of the community. This occurred across several domains, whether through his support of organizations like the GSA that provided support to marginalized students, promoting student accomplishments for community awareness, or maintaining or improving connections between students of different races.
Another one of Jed’s objectives for using Twitter was teaching students digital citizenship, a concept which has two operative definitions in the literature. The first conceptualizes digital citizenship as “the norms of behavior with regard to technology use” (Ribble et al., 2004, p. 7). Jed believed that students needed to be taught how to use and participate meaningfully, including boundaries for participation. When interacting with the school, the class, or Josh, students were expected to be respectful, polite, and to share only content which was appropriate. For Jed, teaching his students how to appropriately behave online was an aspect of digital citizenship and thus a necessary component of civic education.
Although teaching appropriate social media etiquette was a concern for Jed, it was his secondary focus on digital citizenship. Jed’s primary understanding of digital citizenship was more aligned with the understanding that digital citizenship “is the ability to participate in society online” (Mossberger et al., 2008, p. 1). Jed’s view of citizenship encompassed a wide range of civic actions, and he saw Twitter as one space in which students can participate in civic actions. Jed understood digital citizenship as participating in online society, which meant being an active member of the community in online spaces. For Jed, digital citizenship was a parallel to offline citizenship, each existing as spaces where people can practice their rights and responsibilities of citizenship.
Although Jed used Twitter less often with his students than he expected to or would have liked; however, the ways in which he used Twitter met his objectives of furthering his connections with students and the community. Jed believed that if students felt that they were included in and valued by the community, regardless of any factors which had marginalized them, they would become civically engaged. To further this goal, Jed used Twitter as a way of making connections between communities of students and of connecting students to current events and relating those events back to their town. These uses were in service of convincing students that they were valued. Jed believed that if he broke down the barriers that kept students from feeling fully part of the community, as well as teaching them the skills to be informed by current events, that they would eagerly participate in civic life on their own terms.
Charlie Stephens: Combating Fake News
Charlie Stephens was a male, married, father who taught middle- and high-school social studies in Iowa. He has been teaching for 25 years, and near the middle of his career was named Iowa’s Teacher of the Year. The community in which Charlie taught had slightly fewer than 2000 residents; 43 out of the 51 high-school seniors in the class of 2018 graduated from high school. Charlie was one of two social studies teachers in the district, and he taught grades 8–12, including an elective called The Big History Project, which was a year-long course which integrated science and social studies by exploring the development of Earth and its people from The Big Bang to Agriculture to The Future. Charlie said that “a lot of schools are using [the Big History Course] to replace their traditional world history class,” and he felt that The Big History Project provided a better way to teach world history than other curricula he had used.
Like other participants in this study, Charlie’s initial choice to use Twitter with his classes was sparked by his being introduced to the social media platform at an opportune time. Nine years ago, Charlie’s school began providing all students with laptop computers. At the same time, Charlie was engaged in discussions in his master’s program about using social media in the classroom. Knowing that his students would soon all have the ability to access the internet in class, in The Big History Project class, Charlie was teaching about “claim testers,” four methods by which students in the course were taught to critically evaluate assertions (Big History Project, 2019). These “claim testers”—intuition, empirical evidence, logic, and authority—were used throughout each unit to teach students critical-thinking skills (Big History Project, 2019). Charlie thought Twitter could be a space in which his students could “claim test” assertions:
Hopefully a student will see a tweet and they will have to think about it. Does it sound like it actually is true? Could it happen? Who’s telling me this information? Is there any evidence to back it up? So not believing everything that they see on Twitter as being true.
Charlie wanted to use Twitter as a way of asking his students to apply the skills that they were learning in their Big History Project class about evaluating the veracity of information to current events.
Charlie’s ability to connect his school’s adoption of technology for every student with some of the overarching themes of The Big History Project class showed a thoughtfulness and attention to student learning. Charlie valued The Big History Project because of its approach to teaching, and his choice to use Twitter showed that he was trying to connect what he valued for student learning with both contemporary issues and with the direction in which his school was moving technologically. Charlie also felt a sense of pride about using Twitter with his students. Initially, it seemed that Charlie was using Twitter as a novelty; however, upon further reflection, this proved to be untrue: Charlie’s use of Twitter for civic education was focused and aligned with the values and skills he wanted to instill in his students through The Big History Project course. For Charlie, the point of using Twitter was to provide a space where students could practice some of the skills that they were learning in The Big History Project course in ways which were more contemporary than some of their units of study and which might prove useful to them throughout life. As a result, Charlie was really happy with his use of Twitter: it helped his students to meet the objectives that he had for them.
It is unsurprising, then, that Charlie spent almost all of our conversation framing his responses around his use of Twitter with his students. Charlie initially thought that the school’s transition to providing all students with laptop computers would facilitate his students’ use of Twitter for class purposes. However, Charlie said that initially the district blocked certain websites on these school-provided computers, and as a result, using Twitter was not “quite working out the way [he] wanted it to.” At the point at which it became clear that the school computers would not allow students to access Twitter, Charlie had already committed to using the platform with his students, and so in order to get around this, he asked students to use their smartphones to access Twitter. Charlie talked about his process of bypassing the school’s computers to access Twitter in this way:
The school policy was that our server would block that particular website [Twitter] on our schools’ one-to-one computers. So as far as me using it all the time, isn’t quite working out the way that I would like it to. But students that have their own cell phones with them, since basically everybody does and they can get onto Twitter using their data plan, and we use it that way.
It may seem from this quote that Charlie had little concern for the rules, but in other parts of our conversation, it became clear that he followed the spirit, if not the letter, of this rule. Charlie spoke about the boundaries that he had set up between himself and his students on Twitter. Charlie did not follow his students’ accounts. Although this meant that he did not see how they interacted with each other, or whether they responded to his prompts, Charlie believed that maintaining this boundary was important for his students’ safety and privacy. He wanted them to have the experience of using the platform because of what they can learn and experience through it, but he did not want them to be unsafe. Charlie perceived, based on conversations with his students, that most of them were active Twitter users, but as he did not follow them, he was not actually sure of how many were using Twitter.
Charlie used Twitter primarily in three ways: as a source of discussion starters; as a means of accessing current events; and as a medium to critique the accuracy of information. Charlie primarily used Twitter as an additional and contemporary space in which to teach students the skills of evaluation as outlined by his Big History Project class. Charlie used Twitter as a source of discussion prompts: he found posts on Twitter that he thought would spark discussion and then his students discussed them orally in class. Additionally, Charlie set up a class Twitter account, from which he posted questions on Twitter for students to answer on the same platform. Charlie said that the students who had Twitter accounts were responsive to this method of replying to questions, but those who did not have accounts were not asked to open one, and so they were left out of this activity entirely. However, Charlie gave considerably more time and attention to the other ways in which he used Twitter, making it seem as though his Twitter posts for student discussions on the platform were intended to be bonus ways in which students could interact with each other and the course’s content, rather than required coursework.
Charlie used Twitter as a place where students could access information which they could then analyze in class for veracity and bias. In particular, he wanted his students to be able to identify “fake news.” Charlie found that his students lacked awareness about current events, and he wanted to use Twitter to provide students with a way in which they could access and evaluate news quickly and remotely. Throughout each unit of The Big History Project, students were taught skills to evaluate claims and identify bias in the assertions that people made. These skills were repeatedly taught and practiced throughout the units of The Big History Project course. Charlie described the questions that frame his teaching of fact checking as learning to identify whether a claim could be true, the source of the information, if the source has any reason to misrepresent the truth, and if there is any reason beyond the one source to believe the claim.
Charlie’s objectives for his students were not solely for learning source evaluation or increasing news consumption; rather, Charlie saw both of these activities as directly related to civic engagement. Charlie believed being informed of current events was a crucial aspect of being an active member of society, and the emphasis he placed on students’ awareness of current events and the development of source evaluation skills were offered in support of his students becoming informed and active citizens. One of the reasons that Charlie chose to use Twitter with his students was so that they could see and practice the skills that they were learning in his class in a way and in a space which they could continue to use long after they have left his class. Being an active citizen was important to Charlie, which for him meant being well-informed; this was why he focused so much attention on current events and source evaluation.
Though his style of teaching with Twitter initially seemed rather laissez-faire, Charlie’s use of Twitter was thoughtful, and he spoke about his use of Twitter with interest and care. He wanted his students to use the platform for specific reasons related to civic engagement. For Charlie, Twitter provided a way in which students could access news, which combined with their learning of how to evaluate sources that would help his students to differentiate between fact and opinion. More than anything we discussed, Charlie saw being informed and having the ability to assess the veracity of information as imperative to civic engagement. Charlie’s use of Twitter was tightly focused on helping students pay attention to current events and learning how to assess information so that they could act appropriately based on real information. He saw this as important and tied to civic participation. Charlie believed that Twitter was helpful, useful, and beneficial to his students.
Will Devine: Preparing for Adulthood and Maintaining Privilege
Will Devine was a white, male, married, father who had been teaching for 24 years, the last 16 of which he had spent at a small public high school in a Westchester county suburb of New York City. The community where Will taught had about 8000 residents, the vast majority of whom were white and affluent. Will’s high school had 569 students, for whom there are high expectations: 100% of the 2018 class graduated and 99% attended college; in 2018, 228 (40%) of the students took 503 Advanced Placement exams across 26 subjects; 94% of them scored above a 3 (out of a possible 5 points). Will taught both social studies and special education, teaching both “mainstream” social studies classes and some special education social studies classes.
Will lived about 45 minutes away from the community in which he taught; he could not afford to live where he teaches. Unlike Donna and Jed, who lived in the communities in which they taught, and as a result, felt connected to the experiences of their students, Will’s orientation to teaching connected to his perceptions of his students’ privilege. Will thought that his students were largely unaware of the advantages they had, and therefore he saw his role as teaching them how to use some of that privilege for good. Will did not ask his students to reflect on their own privilege or to think about how to change the systems at play that contribute to that privilege. Will’s perception was that he was teaching his students to be active and responsible citizens by teaching them how to use that privilege responsibly.
Overall, Will deeply enjoyed being a teacher, because he was confident in his abilities and because he felt like he could teach students practical skills that would help them to become active citizens in adulthood. His primary motivation for teaching was this sense of vocation: his skills as a teacher met what his community needed, and because he was a capable teacher doing good work, he felt contented and even joyful that he was able to shape and prepare students well for adulthood, part of which was teaching his students how to be active and responsible citizens. Will remained optimistic that his students could make a difference in the world, even though the nature of that difference might be unclear. Where this connected with their privilege was in how both Will and his students saw active civic engagement: there were no barriers to student civic participation except in their not knowing how to participate. Unlike Donna’s students, who lived in a remote and rural area which brought a sense of isolation, or Jed’s students, who lived in a context of considerable racial tension, both of which created barriers to civic participation for some students, Will’s students, at least in his view, lacked only logistical knowledge of how to participate or an awareness of their own civic agency. Will believed that what they needed, and what he enjoyed providing for them, was the practice of learning how to use their privilege for the good of society.
The high school in which Will taught provided each student with a laptop computer, a decision with which he disagreed. He was not trying to limit technology in school mindlessly: he described himself as “pretty technologically advanced” and “not anti-technology.” Rather, Will “spoke out against giving every kid a laptop” because he saw that as a disservice “for the younger kids that are still sort of intellectually immature.” Will thought that having constant access to a computer presented “a very hard temptation” to avoid classwork which younger brains are developmentally unable to resist. However, Will found that when technology was used for particular purposes, he found it to be a valuable tool for use in the classroom. This value was dependent upon why the technology is being used: the ways in which Will used Twitter in class were also designed for specific purposes, as he used it to teach students how to contact governmental officials and to be well informed of current events. He also only used Twitter with his 11th- and 12th-grade students because he perceived that his younger students lacked maturity.
It was with all of this context that Will spoke about using Twitter with his classes. Will’s priority for his students was his need to prepare them to be adult members of society; for him, teaching students in ways that encouraged them to flourish in the world as adults was part of the essence of Will’s role as a teacher. Will was passionate about using Twitter in the teaching of civics because it represented how he believed students should be engaged with the wider world, and that they should advocate on their own behalf. Will’s primary purpose for using Twitter with his students was to teach them about reaching out to government officials. He described his intentions this way:
I don’t think at this point, if I were to ask a basic kid in the hallway right now, “How would you get in contact with a congressman?” I don’t think they would know how. But if I showed them [the elected official’s] Twitter account, I think it makes it a lot easier.
Will said that he could show his students that they have a “direct link” to government officials through Twitter, that is, “not snail mail, and it’s almost automatic…it gets done almost right away.”
However, when he began to use Twitter with his students, Will noticed that even the students who had their own Twitter accounts did not know how to use the platform well. Like Donna, Will was surprised that his students “were just very superficially aware” of how to use Twitter and what it could do. He found that in needing to teach about the basics of using the platform more than he had initially thought he would, Will was able to show his students “some of the cool features and the different people they can connect to.” Through his teaching of how to use Twitter, Will asked his students to follow news outlets to bring information into class. Will used the news that showed up in his students’ Twitter feeds informally, calling their attention to breaking news and history-making events. In this way, his students’ lack of knowledge about Twitter worked to Will’s advantage, as he was able to teach them more about how and why to use the platform.
Will saw 12th graders as having “one foot in adulthood,” and so they were “more civic minded, more so than [students in] any of the other grades.” Learning how to harness that civic mindedness in order to use it for good was one of the reasons that Will chose to use Twitter with his classes: he was able to show them how to connect with elected officials, organizations, companies, and other accounts in ways that are appropriate and responsible. Will’s students learned how to be civically involved because he asked them to be civically involved. In using Twitter in this fashion, and by requiring students to tweet to particular people, Will showed his students how to use Twitter to connect with people in power and also showing both the students and leaders that student voices should be heard and valued.
Will used Twitter in his classes with juniors and seniors for two reasons: the content areas of those classes (U.S. History and Participation in Government and Economics) were easier to connect to Twitter, and he felt that only upperclassmen were ready to handle that responsibility of both civic engagement and technology. Will started using Twitter with his 12th grade Participation in Government and Economics class because the curriculum for that class was “very project-based [with] a lot of independent learning.” In preparation for his students’ imminent entrance into the world as adults, Will tried to teach them ways to be active citizens. One of the ways Will used Twitter with his students was to encourage “them to use Twitter to contact government, senators, even local officials.” As a way of teaching his students how to use Twitter and how to reach out to people appropriately, Will created a class Twitter account to which each student had access. Will asked his students to use Twitter through the class account because he “didn’t want them going rogue.”
Whether it was because of the class Twitter handle or something else, Will’s classes received responses to their tweets. Will said that after his class watched a documentary by former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, the class “tweeted to him, and [Reich] tweeted us back.” Encouraged by having received a response, one of Will’s students tweeted to Reich and asked him to watch the movie with them in class, to which Reich again replied with regrets that he was unable to do so because he was traveling. Similarly, Will’s students connected over Twitter received responses from Harry Reid, former Senator from Nevada and Senate Majority Leader, and from two of President Obama’s speechwriters. Will reported that the class felt these experiences were “pretty cool,” though Will thought it was the very essence of how Twitter should work. According to Will, Twitter greatly reduced the barriers to his students’ initiating contact and also to people responding. Additionally, Will believed that elected officials were more likely to respond when his classes’ tweets: “a congressman is gonna respond to a high school kid.” For Will, this ease and potential effectiveness were some of the reasons why teaching students to use Twitter for civic purposes was worthwhile.
Leo Oliver: Community and Care
Leo Oliver was a white, male, married father from Chicago, Illinois, who had recently left teaching after more than 20 years to work for an educational consulting company. Throughout his career, Leo taught all grades from 9 to 12 and mainly taught elective classes. Leo began teaching at a Catholic junior high school in Chicago, but three years later took a position at a new high school that was just opening. Working at a new high school gave Leo the opportunity to help create the culture of the school, which he described in this way:
Because I opened the school, you had to create the values. You had to create the culture. Everything could be rethought. And I got used to being in that environment of “invent it, do it, and then it works.” You know, I look back now like what a unique experience that was.
For the remainder of his career, Leo took new positions which allowed him to co-create the culture of the school, including teaching at another new high school and departmental leadership roles. Leo saw his identity as a teacher as someone who was a change agent and defined himself as a person who had an effect on an entire school.
Leo started exploring Twitter after a friend of his had started using it in his classroom. Initially, Leo liked Twitter for personal use because he started to develop a strong professional learning network with social studies teachers throughout the country. This example illustrated how Leo understands teaching: constructivist at his core, he saw collaboration as making work better, and he wanted to provide students with as many ways to interact with other students as possible so that all students feel engaged in the process of learning. Leo’s personal use of Twitter and other technologies was reflective of his desire to be collaborative. He familiarized himself with as many different ways of interacting with and presenting material as possible so that his students could have as many options to connect with other students as possible.
An important part of Leo’s teaching was the inclusion of a range of voices in his classroom, which he believed taught students how to respect and to engage with those with whom they disagree. Leo created opportunities for his students, through many different strategies and technologies, to interact with people, including their parents, experts, and students in other schools. Leo described additional reasons for doing this as:
I wanted it to open up the playing field. I believe it’s easier when you’re totally transparent. Let everyone know what you’re doing. When that parent who’s upset about politics gets mad because you’re this or that or skewed one way or the other, you’re gonna want the community to be able to say, “No, that’s not true.”
Leo asked for the active participation of parents and other important adults in the community and in students’ lives, texting and tweeting with them to ask for their opinions. Students were required to contact “five adults who are not in this school” at the beginning of class to ask for their thoughts on the topics of the day. Students usually included parents as some of their five adults, and “all of a sudden, parents felt involved” in class. The responses were displayed (with permission) on a secure website to use as prompts for an in-class discussion. Leo also shared the website with parents, noting that including parents in this way created “an open and free space for conversation” allowing Leo and his students to comfortably discuss anything from any perspective.
For Leo, learning had to be connected to life in meaningful ways. He “truly believe[d] with all of my heart that very little of the work that we do in school has anything to do with actual life. And that’s my fundamental problem.” Further, Leo felt that the type of work that students often were asked to do in schools communicated that their work lacked value; as Leo put it, “what’s the point of all this work if you get a worksheet and you throw it in the garbage when you walk out? What's the life expectancy of your work?” He believed that treating student work as meaningful and important would lead to students taking it seriously. To support this, student work was tweeted to lawmakers and industry leaders; parents and other community members were asked to weigh in on student debates; and students shared their work on Twitter for comment from others around the world.
To foster learning that was meaningful and valued, Leo began to reframe how he saw his teaching:
So as far as the way that work connected them or changed them in my classes is that I gave them a chance to pursue their passion. I stopped trying to say, “How should I have them prove this to me?” And I just said, “What would qualify as evidence of learning?” And gave them the option to say show me evidence that [they] learned. And then I don’t care what it is. But why not say yes? I was so busy saying no. Why not say yes to something different that they’re going to be excited about?
Leo was always willing to learn and use new pedagogical approaches in support of student learning. Leo said that “75%–80%” of his students were Twitter users, a greater percentage than other participants in this study observed. Leo thought his students would be more “comfortable” if they were given the choice of using Twitter rather than requiring it of them, in contrast to other teachers in this study and to the literature on the use of Twitter in classrooms, which suggests that it is more effective when students are required to use the platform (Gao et al., 2012; Junco et al., 2011; Junco & Cotton, 2013). Those who wanted to try Twitter but who did not want to create an account were encouraged to work with a partner who was a Twitter user. In teaching with Twitter this way, Leo felt that he was reaching students where they were: those who already had Twitter accounts could learn how to use them for civic purposes and those who did not could still learn how to use Twitter without feeling like they were being required to use the platform beyond class.
Leo was clear about their need to incorporate evidence of their learning of history topics and content in their work. Over time, students were better able to show their understanding through creative projects than through papers or tests. Leo also found that student choice in assignments increased student engagement, and students who were more engaged were also willing and often excited to share their work, often via Twitter. This allowed students to get feedback as well as validation that their work was valuable and worthy of their time because others had taken the time to watch or listen to it. Leo understood the connections between student engagement and external validation of student work in this way:
If you give them options and show them the possibility that’s out there, the first time you have a kid who gets a thousand views of their video, that class goes nuts. And all they want to do is make something that people want to see and consume.
When students were given choices about how they demonstrated their learning, their engagement with that work increased; sharing their work online further increased that engagement because it validated their work as meaningful beyond their classroom.
The considerable freedom Leo’s students had allowed them to construct their learning in ways that made sense to them, which he felt increased their civic participation. An example Leo offered in support of this was when a student who had always struggled in Leo’s class asked if he could write a song instead of writing a paper about the Industrial Revolution. The student made the argument that “the chorus of a song is like the thesis statement of a paper,” and the result was “the first A [the student] ever got in a history class.” For Leo, this was a moment when “I know he learned everything”; allowing the student freedom of expression helped him to construct his learning in a way that made sense to him and which provided him with a way of demonstrating his learning effectively.
Sharing these creative projects online had a greater reach than any paper likely would have and was a means of participating in the civic discourse. For instance, the student who wrote and sang the Industrial Revolution song posted it in various places online, where it now has thousands of hits. Leo argued that people outside of the class were more likely to want to interact with his students’ work if they showed what they have learned in ways that people were going to want to read, watch, or hear. As he said:
You always have the option to write a paper. Some of you will choose it ’cause it’s where you’re comfortable. But Tweet it out. When was the last time you read a four-page essay on Twitter? When was the last time you watched a four-minute video? You’ll watch a four-minute video. You’re not reading a four-page essay.
Beyond thinking that a more creative approach would be more accessible, Leo believed that a video or other creative project could be just as, if not more, effective at meeting the goals of civic education than an essay.
Each of these approaches related to Leo’s understanding of citizenship. Leo’s teaching focused on preparing students to be informed, engaged, and civil members of society. An important aspect of Leo’s understanding of citizenship was that the incorporation of the phrase “digital citizenship” into the lexicon has been a disservice to the overall way in which people understand citizenship. As he said,
We make a mistake by declaring digital citizenship when really we’re just talking about citizenship. So much of citizenship is digital. Stop making the distinction. Call it citizenship. And realize that we can’t look at traditional citizenship versus online citizenship.
Leo saw no distinction between online and offline citizenship, and this framed his teaching because he wanted his students to see ways of participating in society both online and offline.
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Chapman, A.L. (2023). #CivicEd: Teachers’ Stories of Connection, Civics, and Social Media. In: Social Media for Civic Education. Palgrave Studies in Educational Media. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10865-5_5
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