Civic action on social media: fostering digital media literacy and epistemic cognition in the classroom

Abstract

Social media has become a dominant force in civic life amid widespread concerns about its role in political polarisation and in the spread of misinformation. To prepare citizens to take on these challenges, we need civic education that teaches youth to be capable and responsible consumers, conveyors and producers of online information. To do so, teachers must position students as epistemic agents, fostering the skills they need to engage with online information. In this article, we present the first iteration of a design-based research project on social media and civic action. The project prepares high school students in rural, urban and suburban settings located in Northern California (USA) to engage with issues that resonate with them, to critically examine information about these issues from online sources and to use social media as a vehicle to connect with, inform and mobilise the public. We present the basic design principles that teachers have used to support apt epistemic performance, focusing on the epistemic aims (creating knowledge products that inspire civic action), ideals (taking personal responsibility for the accuracy of information when posting) and reliable processes (sourcing, fact checking and correctly representing information) embedded in their units of instruction. Drawing on teacher interviews and curriculum, we explore the affordances of the curriculum to promote civic action by leveraging student engagement in social media, while also challenging them to critically examine how knowledge is produced and disseminated on social media. We conclude with a discussion of how this work intersects with the aims and methods of social pedagogy.