Preparing Our Students for Activist Discourses Online
Tara Jensen
University of Delaware
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Are students prepared?
Are teacher candidates prepared?
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Black Discourse
“Denied a space in public discourse, African American communities form enclaves to create ‘discursive strategies’ and ‘gather oppositional resources’”
“Enclaves hide counter hegemonic ideas from the dominant group for protection and survival. Within an enclave, lively debate exists for the community but does not move beyond that space”
“...blackness is centralized and blogging communities address issues of importance within the affordances and constraints of the platform.”
Catherine Knight Steele, University of Maryland
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Black Twitter
Black barber shops, churches and bookstores → digital blog spaces and social media
“... some of the same technologies of surveillance used to criminalize Blackness are being repurposed by Black citizens, particularly Black youth, to resist the criminalizing techniques of State power… thereby holding the State and its apparatuses accountable for practices of anti-Black violence and other forms of social injustice.”
Marc Lamont Hill, Temple University
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Activist Discourse
“... online feminist of color enclaves serve as spaces for internal discourse production and identity construction. Circulating hashtags can help racial justice issues become more visible to publics who may not be aware or exposed to racial inequities”
“racial justice activist hashtags enable a shared understanding of a problematic social condition and mobilize through the circulation of discourse. Hashtags offer discursive frame processes in articulating and circulating observed events and experiences.”
Rachel Kuo, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill
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Are students equipped?
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Activist Discourse Online
Hashtag movement
Cancel culture
Dissemination of police brutality evidence
#BlackoutTuesday
Performative Activism
Complicity through silence
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Stanford University
Students' Civic Online Reasoning: A National Portrait
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What can we do?
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Teaching Practices
Adrienne Dixson, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Provide contextual teachings of historical texts
Reconsider our multicultural education
Consider teaching a matter of social justice
Milagros Castillo-Montoya, University of Connecticut
Centralize issues of inequality and race in the classroom (raise critical consciousness)
Focus on emotions and relationships
Emphasize Intersectionality
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Teacher Candidates
Learning how to arm our future students
Todd Cherner (Portland State University)
Kristal Curry (Coastal Carolina University)
Step 2: Raise our own critical media literacy
Step 1: Learn about culturally responsive teaching practices
Step 3: Practice creating and teaching lessons using critical media literacy
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Looking Forward