Cultivating Urban Students’ Online Public Voices
The use of digital tools to develop a public voice on social justice themes is becoming more and more critical for middle school teachers for two reasons. First, rather than seeking out diverse perspectives, when using social media adults seem to gravitate toward like-minded people. According to Hampton, Rainie, Lu, Dwyer, Shin, & Purcell, (2014), for example, when they surveyed adults about their willingness to discuss the Snowden-NSA story, 86% of respondents were amenable to discussing the surveillance program face-to-face but only 42% of Facebook or Twitter users were willing to do so on either platform. Respondents were much more likely to engage in both a face-to-face and online discussion if they realized that others agreed with them. While online forums provide people with multiple opportunities for ongoing deliberations about public policy matters, adults seemingly are reluctant to take advantage of them.
Second, a troubling effect of No Child Left Behind is the decline of instructional time for elementary social studies (Heafner, & Fitchett, 2012; Fitchett & Heafner, 2010; Boyle-Baise, M., Hsu, M. C., Johnson, S., Serriere, S. C., & Stewart, D., 2008; Center on Education Policy, 2008; Vogler, Lintner, Lipscomb, Knopf, Heafner, and Rock, 2007; and, Van Fossen, 2005)1. This situation is particularly acute for those in high poverty districts (Pace, 2008, 2011; Befiore, Auld & Lee, 2005; Roth, Brooks-Gunn, Linver, & Hoffereth, 2003)2, which means the students most in need of learning how to become civically engaged are the ones least likely to do so. Urban middle school teachers must discover and cultivate ways to use online social media to foster students’ “public voice” so as “to forge a bridge between media production and civic engagement” (Kahne, Lee, & Feezell, 2012, p. 3). One way to do so is for students to address social justice issues in an 8th grade U.S. history course as they interact with each other and with students from Midwestern rural and suburban districts via social media platforms, which requires an instructional support system for technology integration and a teacher capable of doing so.