Pre-service teachers’ perceptions of social media data privacy policies

Matters of data privacy related to social media are increasingly relevant for educators as happenings such as the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal have attracted public attention. Many educators use social media for professional purposes, including with their students and should, therefore, be knowledgeable regarding data privacy issues that impact education. This research explores this issue from an interpretive paradigm based on a mixed-methods approach derived from survey data from an international sample of 148 pre-service teachers who were studying education courses at three universities. Data suggest that pre-service teachers see both educational and distracting potential in social media, but lack knowledge regarding relevant policies and regulations, which reflects trends in the broader population. Attitudes toward educational social media use were not correlated with awareness of data privacy policies. However, comfort with companies’ use of personal and student data and faith in governments’ capacity to regulate social media companies were correlated. We discuss our findings in relation to the use of social media and related data privacy considerations and the need for data literacy training in teacher education programs. We include recommendations in light of the findings.     

The Educational Journeys of Students of Color Across the Educational Pipeline: A Pedagogy of Storytelling or a Struggle for Freedom?

Social inequality as evident through poverty, racism, and irrelevant social and educational policies and practices have created consistent disparities on most educational achievement and attainment outcomes for historically marginalized students, and students of color specifically. These ongoing inequalities and injustices require policy, practical, and pedagogical changes across the educational pipeline. The work of the people on the ground needs to be intentional when exploring ways to creatively and courageously engage with students of color inside and outside the classroom. This paper describes, conceptualizes, and applies a pedagogical practice called Educational Journeys/Caminos Educativos, which is built on a grounded, context-specific, and culturally relevant set of processes that helps students, educators, leaders, policy makers, and other stakeholders to co-create a series of pedagogical approaches that facilitate opportunities for educators to heal, build, and thrive with historically marginalized students, particularly minoritized, immigrant, and undocumented youth. The goal of this paper is to propose pedagogical processes that allow these populations, and the educators who serve them, to imagine a new social condition for and with students of color across the educational pipeline as a gesture toward equity and social justice. The author suggests that the pedagogy of Educational Journeys is more than storytelling; it’s about a struggle for freedom—past, present, and future.     

Social media in higher education: A literature review of Facebook

The rapid adoption of social media technologies has resulted in a fundamental shift in the way communication and collaboration take place. As staff and students use social media technologies in their personal lives, it is important to explore how social media technologies are being used as an educational tool. The aim of this paper is to analyse the role of social media, in particular, Facebook, as an educational tool in higher education. Through a review of the literature, this paper explores the myriad ways in which Facebook is being used as an educational instrument for learning and teaching. Multiple benefits of Facebook usage for learning and teaching have been identified such as increased teacher-student and student-student interaction, improved performance, the convenience of learning and higher engagement. The paper also highlights the potential problems and limitations of Facebook usage ranging from educators’ dominance to privacy concerns. Finally, Facebook usage guidelines that can be adopted by educators to encourage social media adoption are proposed. As social media usage continues to grow in higher education, future empirical research is warranted.     

From tweeting to meeting: Expansive professional learning and the academic conference backchannel

As new technologies shape and are shaped by human practices, educators and researchers must consider the impact that participating in social media—to access, reflect upon, question, evaluate and disseminate scholarship—is having on their professional development and practices. This paper investigates how members of the educational research community use social media to advance professional learning and scholarship dissemination in online–offline networks. Specifically, we examine whether and how participating in the microblogging service, Twitter, as a conference backchannel, facilitated professional learning and participation in the annual meetings of American educational researchers in 2012 and 2016, respectively, and the nature of that participation. Insights from this paper will benefit educators of varying disciplines and experience levels interested in the changing nature of social media in education, scholarship, and professional learning ecologies.     

COLLABORATING WITH PEOPLE TO STUDY "THE POPULAR": IMPLEMENTING PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH STRATEGIES IN RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

This article seeks to describe the theoretical foundation upon which the author has pursued research into questions of how religious educators could and should interact with popular culture. The methodology employed is most often labelled "participatory action research," and is used in an attempt to bring together the various disciplines of theology, psychology, media studies, and religious education into one conversation that sheds light on the dilemmas facing religious educators in a mass-mediated context. In many ways the choice of which methodology to use to pursue these questions has its roots in the situatedness of the author's own educational journey. Locating herself in a particular context leads into a discussion of the distinctions between "method," "methodology," and "epistemology"; and from there into a very brief consideration of "standpoint" epistemology and its utility in the convergence of feminist practice and religious educational practice. From there her understanding of participatory action research, and how that methodology has worked to structure a collaboration with other religious educators around the use of media literacy within religious education is explicitly described.     

How are campus students using social media to support their studies? An explorative interview study

Social media hype has created a lot of speculation among educators on how these media can be used to support learning, but there have been rather few studies so far. Our explorative interview study contributes by critically exploring how campus students perceive using social media to support their studies and the perceived benefits and limitations compared with other means. Although the vast majority of the respondents use social media frequently, a “digital dissonance” can be noted, because few of them feel that they use such media to support their studies. The interviewees mainly put forth e-mail and instant messaging, which are used among students to ask questions, coordinate group work and share files. Some of them mention using Wikipedia and YouTube for retrieving content and Facebook to initiate contact with course peers. Students regard social media as one of three key means of the educational experience, alongside face-to-face meetings and using the learning management systems, and are mainly used for brief questions and answers, and to coordinate group work. In conclusion, we argue that teaching strategy plays a key role in supporting students in moving from using social media to support coordination and information retrieval to also using such media for collaborative learning, when appropriate.     

A review of research on Facebook as an educational environment

The purpose of this study is to present a review of Facebook as an educational environment, as research on its use within education is relatively new. The study is categorized into six sections: Facebook users; reasons people use Facebook; harmful effects of Facebook; Facebook as an educational environment; Facebook??s effects on culture, language, and education; and the relationship between Facebook and subject variables. Additionally, the study compares Facebook usage in Turkey to its use on a global scale. To conclude, there has been a serious lack of research on Facebook??s use as an educational resource, as current literature reflects how Facebook might more readily be utilized as an educational environment. Finally, the study ends with practical recommendations for researchers and educators.     

Critical literacy,self-protection and delinquency: the challenges of participatory media for youths at-risk

While pedagogy is predominantly viewed from the perspective of classroom instruction, educators worldwide invariably play a critical pastoral role of shaping the personal development of their students and nurturing in them life skills. With the avid use of participatory media by young people in peer interaction, educators need to be aware of the attendant risks and opportunities so that they may offer counsel and render appropriate advice. To this end, through interviews with 36 Singaporean male juvenile delinquents and youths-at-risk, this study explores how these youths utilise participatory media in their peer interaction. The findings indicate that for this vulnerable youth population, participatory media such as social networking sites can become a platform through which they are unwittingly drawn into criminal behaviour and post-rehabilitation, participatory media may offer an insidious route to recidivism. Participatory media complicates peer interaction by presenting risk factors such as network transparency, negative peer modelling, network seepage and network persistence, all of which have implications for these youths sliding further into delinquency and criminal activity. This article concludes with recommendations on the strategies which youths-at-risk can employ to avoid the risks of participatory media.     

Preparing Teachers for Anti‐oppressive Education: International movements

While theories and recommendations continue to proliferate in the educational research literature on what it means to teach towards social justice and to prepare teachers for such teaching, so do concerns that these theories and recommendations fail to account for the ways that the contexts of teaching—cultural contexts, national contexts, political contexts—always affect teaching in idiosyncratic, unpredictable and even contradictory ways. Given that much educational research fails to trouble the US‐centric nature of prevailing conceptions of social justice and teacher education, it is important to learn about the unique as well as shared challenges facing teacher educators around the globe. In this article, teacher educators from Asia, Africa, North America and South America offer a sampling of initiatives in anti‐oppressive teacher education; that is, initiatives to prepare teachers to teach various subject matters to various age groups, addressing various forms of oppression in various cultural and community contexts.     

Educational leadership and social activism: a call for action

The purpose of this article is to argue for a social activist stance in educational leadership that fundamentally addresses social change and human emancipation. This call for social activism is framed within neoliberal, neoconservative, and authoritarian populist discourses in the USA, which to social justice educators and leaders had devastating effects on education. Empirical data from an activist high school principal, activist university professor, and activist priest reflects their development of political clarity, political capacity, political collaboration, and an ethic of risk. It is suggested that the work of socially active educational leaders needs to be broadened to include such things as public policy advocacy, networking, organising, community development, and scholarship. Finally, the article concludes with a variety of ways educational leaders can demonstrate their social, moral, and political activism as they challenge the status quo, fight for social justice, and come to understand the politicised notion of leadership.     

Urban Poetics: Poetry, Social Justice and Critical Pedagogy in Education

Posing an alternate view to high stakes educational models, the thoughts, opinions and practices of four poetry educators are used to provide critical insights as how to infuse creative outlets in the educational process. In gathering the motivations of these poetry educators, a goal of this project is to encapsulate their philosophies through researcher observation and participation. Engaging such work with social justice at the center creates a particular disposition. It can be subjective in the sense that an understanding of improvement requires an explicit commitment to the improvement of the lives of young people in education through a participatory process.David Stovall is an Assistant Professor of Policy Studies.     

高校思想政治教育生活化实效析论

高校思想政治教育生活化已经逐渐成为学界的共识,其成效受到教育对象、教育媒介、教育者等因素影响。提高高校思想政治教育生活化实效应把握“三结合”原则,通过创新教育方法、加强情商教育、丰富教育栽体、提升教育者综合素养等优化路径来实现。     

Twitter,cyber-violence,and the need for a critical social media literacy in teacher education: A review of the literature

Multiliteracies and new literacies pedagogies advocate for expanded ideas of literacy, which focus heavily on the use of digital technologies within the classroom. Yet there is little discussion within the discipline regarding the ethical implications of using social media in teacher education. This is of particular concern given the potential for online spaces to be unsafe. In particular, the social media site Twitter, used and promoted by many educators to collaborate within professional learning networks, is rife with misogyny and racial violence. Through a review of the current literature on social media use in teacher education, and a multi-disciplinary perspective on issues of cyber-violence, I will discuss the ethical implications for teacher educators who want to use Twitter as a pedagogical tool and offer strategies to develop critical social media literacy practices.     

Teacher feedback on the use of innovative social media simulations to enhance critical thinking in young people on radicalisation,extremism, sexual exploitation and grooming

ABSTRACT

Online grooming of young people for sexual exploitation and for radicalisation is a global issue. The importance of quality education that equips young people to develop their digital resilience and critical thinking skills is essential as a way to prepare them to use online technology safely and appropriately. In this article, we look at two innovative and creative social media simulations that were developed by the Centre of Child Protection for the training of professionals in child protection issues. Using social constructivist perspectives on learning the simulations focus on the role of social media to facilitate understanding and critical analysis of online environments. The simulations respond to the contemporary landscape of social media and the complexities of grooming, child sexual exploitation, extremism and radicalisation, issues that are often addressed in schools through pastoral care. We look at the relationship between creative engagement via the online social media simulations and their use in teaching these complex topics, and take an empirical view to evaluate this creative approach as a scaffold tool for teachers to help children and young people to think critically and respond positively to the navigation of complex lifeworlds. We surveyed trained professionals who had all undertaken CPD training with the Centre of Child Protection in either of the two simulations from March 2015-April 2017. Out of 308 responses, 146 identified themselves as educators, and it is their feedback that we discuss in this article.     

Teenagers in cyberspace: an investigation of language use and language change in internet chatrooms

This article reports on a small‐scale investigation into the use of Internet chatrooms by teenage girls. Based on interview and observational data, it illustrates how the use of popular electronic communication is resulting in linguistic innovation within new, virtual social networks in a way that reflects more wide‐reaching changes in the communication landscape. The paper suggests that teenagers and young people are in the vanguard of these processes of change as they fluently exploit the possibilities of digital technology, radically changing the face of literacy. The study looks at teenagers’ perceptions of chatroom encounters and their learning about new ways of social and linguistic interaction. Observations of teenagers online show how rapid written conversations which combine features of face‐to‐face talk with explorations in interactive writing and the exchange of additional digital information, such as image files and web addresses, are enabling these young people to develop sophisticated and marketable skills. These innovations are contrasted with recent media and educational criticism of the language use associated with new technology. This tension between change and conservatism is explored by applying Bourdieu’s concept of ‘linguistic capital’.     

Local Social Media Policies Governing Teachers’ Professionally Oriented Participation Online: a Content Analysis

In light of recent scholarship about teachers leveraging social media to support their continuing professional development, this article documents an investigation of school board policies governing teachers’ use of social media. Focusing on 30 traditional public school systems within a 10-county region in the Midwestern United States, the author collected social media policies and conducted an ethnographic content analysis to build an understanding of the policies that stand to guide teachers’ professionally oriented participation online. Of the 30 public school districts included in the study, 19 districts published policies specific to teachers’ use of social media. Reporting the study’s findings, the author addresses the districts’ efforts to craft policies that define social media, reiterate relevant pre-existing policies and support educational uses of social media. Implications for teachers, teacher educators and policymakers are included.     

How and why are educators using Instagram?

Social media are commonplace in many educators’ lives, but their Instagram activities have received no prior attention in the empirical literature. We therefore created and disseminated a survey regarding educators’ Instagram use. Analyses of 841 responses suggested participants were generally intensive users of Instagram who engaged in the exchange of both professional knowledge and wisdom, as well as affective support. In addition to identifying benefits to Instagram use, some participants offered critiques of Instagram’s professional utility. We discuss the implications of these findings for educators’ work in a digital era and the future of research on educators’ social media activities.     

Out of Asia: learning re-examined,teacher education re-configured

The impetus for this argumentative paper is anecdotal evidence overheard in West Australian educational settings indicating that there continues to be “othering” of learners from Asian backgrounds. Exploring prevailing Western social, theoretical and educational discourses associated with Asia, the author argues that teacher education in Western Australia be reconceptualized in three main ways. Firstly, levels of meta-cultural sensitivity in pre-service and in-service educators should be ascertained. Secondly, there needs to be a more rigorous theoretical and conceptual framework for pre-service/in-service teacher education informed by cross-cultural, historical knowledge and awareness of the social and personal constructions of reality – views of the “other” and “self”. Thirdly, teacher education courses must offer opportunities to examine current developments in educational research which encourage reconceptualization and replacement of traditional East/West dichotomies. The paper aims to review literature related to theoretical Thirdness as an ontological, educational principle and to contribute to Thirdness discourse by situating the argument in a particular context in Western Australia. It is hoped that papers such as this may lead to more informed and symmetrical dialogue between educators in the Asia Pacific region.     

Environmental education in television narratives: a Brazilian case study

Abstract

This article discusses recent Brazilian research on the relationship between environmental education and cultural studies. Television narratives about the environment and/or sustainability in our everyday lives are used to pose some initial questions about this relation. First, culture is discussed briefly showing how it potentially relates to teaching and informs our role as environmental educators. We argue that culturalist perspectives on research in environmental education politicise teaching practices, even though they are in a context that strays from prerogatives that envisage a future world marked by sustainable development and a green economy. We investigate the impacts of television narratives and images on our everyday lives wherein we are consistently taught particular written and visual messages about how to plan for our future. Examples are draw from the teaching effects of a Brazilian television programme called Repórter Eco, broadcast on a public television network, including the sustainable management of the baru (a typical tree from the Brazilia Cerrado). We argue the educational aspects of television programmes should receive critique, as the relationships established between people and various media artifacts produce particular meanings and ways of seeing the world. This presents a challenge for teachers as examining these subjective ways carefully requires critical examination, not only in terms of education for sustainability or environmental preservation, but also teaching using media.     

Knowledge and Politics of Social Change: The implication of anti-racism

This article is a reflection on educational change in Euro-American contexts, undertaken as I conclude two extensive empirical studies on minority student disengagement and strategies of inclusive schooling in the Ontario public education system. Specifically, the discussion explores the implications of race, difference and power for schooling and educational change in North America. It is argued that contemporary education needs to take into account how social difference and questions of identity implicate schooling. The search for genuine educational options must be reframed in the pursuit of anti-racism praxis so that students can engage critical knowledge as a way to rupture the social order of things. In conclusion, the article suggests ways for critical educators to work collectively to ensure that learning and teaching about ourselves is transformative.