Abstract

Although the use of Twitter has been studied in higher education settings, research on its use in K-12 settings is nascent. Further, the use of social media in education is currently undertheorized. Finally, although research on civic education generally has experienced a renaissance in the last decade, there has been little research on the use of social media in civic education. As a step toward addressing this gap in the research base, this brief paper presents a phenomenological case study which explored the experiences of five high school social studies teachers who used the social networking site, Twitter, with students to teach civics. The study documents how participating teachers used Twitter to amplify student voice and foster student agency. These findings contribute to a theoretical understanding of the use of social media in K-12 education and to the use of social media in civic education. In addition, this research has implications for teacher education, especially for similar teachers and teacher educators who seek to understand how to meaningfully integrate social media into K-12 and civics classrooms.

Citation

Chapman, A. & Greenhow, C. (2020). Twitter in Youth Civic Education. In D. Schmidt-Crawford (Ed.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference (pp. 1464-1470). Online: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). Retrieved November 29, 2023 from https://www.learntechlib.org/primary/p/215912/.

© 2020 Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE)