Sparking Engagement: Translating and Integrating Social Media Into the Literacy Environment

Introduction

Now, more than ever, technology guides today’s students through their everyday world. Even more so, social media serves as a place for them to explore through a social lens when interacting, posting photos, and playing games. Educators could engage students with the skills they develop outside of the classroom in the digital world and apply those skills in lessons and tasks in the classroom environment. Using the connection of academic language and the “language” within the digital realm, teaching practices can be modified to improve the performance and engagement of students. Implementing social media in the classroom does not necessarily mean that an educator creates and uses a specific platform for communication or socialization with the students, but instead begins integrating the terms, features, and communication tasks within social media to teach traditional literacy skills in English Language Arts/English Language Arts and Reading (ELA/ELAR) classroom settings and lessons.

This chapter will seek to:

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  Promote and explain how popular culture has an impact on the literacy classroom.

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  Give educators new techniques to integrate social media and the teaching of literacy skills.

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  Encourage educators to promote a classroom culture that uses various modalities to engage their students.

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  Provide examples of how to engage and empower students in various grade levels with elements of social media and popular culture.

The main purpose and focus of this chapter is about recognizing that students are already exposed to language skills and literacy skills that are taught in their everyday lives when they interact with digital tools. It is about the language used and culture that is built in a classroom to reach students. It is about the connection of traditional learning and digital learning. This chapter is not about using social media and its associated apps in the classroom in isolation. This is not a “how to” on using social media to plan lessons. It is about integrating concepts and making connections to use as teaching strategies. This chapter does not exist simply to tell educators to use social media while teaching. It was written to demonstrate that social media’s frameworks, purpose, and missions, align with literacy skills that are taught in classrooms.

Background

Learning how to transform academic language into the language and culture of today’s students is needed in a society that is growing more dynamic and digitally and diverse. Interaction, engagement, and relevance are key in sparking the interest of students. Schools and educators may find that they cannot compete with technology—but may learn to embrace what their students bring culturally, by changing their language, actions, planning, and strategies. Social media is the medium that shapes and shares popular culture. This is such, because, at one point in time, storytelling, reading novels or books, and print materials, such as newspapers and magazines, were the only ways that culture and news within communities were shared. Whether it be politics, music, fashion, art, or sports, with social media, the world now has access to what other societies are doing—and in many cases, in real-time.

Social media has taken over the daily lives of a large population of young people across the globe. Communication is frequently done through messaging apps, formulating thoughts using 280 characters or less, updating status updates with thoughts and feelings, and uploading videos and photos with companioning captions. This has become the norm. These are creative ways of expression and use many of the literacy skills educators use to teach in classrooms every day. However, because social media and popular culture is often focused on in negative aspects, it can be a forgotten language and tool left out of classrooms. Students employ skills such as summarization, paraphrasing, comparing and contrasting, inference, classification, and a variety of traditional literacy skills with the touch of a smart phone or computer, on a daily basis. Due to a disconnect between the classroom and home life, it is necessary to transform and merge academic language with the language and culture of today's students.