When I was a student teacher, I was bursting at the mental seams with ideas for challenging the traditional classroom environment.  My only goal for the classroom – other than getting real-life experience teaching a room full of students instead of observing from the back of the room – was to engage students in their own learning.

From my experience in the classroom as a student, I became all too aware that the only reason I was engaged in a traditional classroom setting for English Language Arts was because I wanted to be.  I wanted to learn about iambic pentameter and master Shakespeare’s English.  I wanted to write kennings and boasts for Beowulf.  I had a passion for English, and I was enamored with learning it in the classroom.  The problem?  I was only one out of thirty students in a class that felt that.  One in potentially one hundred and twenty students a single teacher had.  Spanning that across the whole school and calculating how many students were genuinely engaged in their own learning…well, that’s a little too much for my English major brain to even wrap my head around.  But the results that I do understand are that the numbers are off the charts and that traditional teaching methodologies are doing a huge disservice to modern students.

Jumping back to my goal for student teaching, I had had this realization before I even started, and I knew that I wanted to challenge the classroom environment and give students a different classroom experience.  To say that I was roadblocked at nearly every opportunity would be a sentiment I think most educators can relate to.  Every painstakingly crafted lesson plan I had to incorporate technology, and thereby student engagement, was denied.  Whether due to access restrictions, unapproved media, or risking overestimating student maturity.  My cooperating teachers would prefer to stick to traditional means of instruction at all costs to avoid any interaction with new digital technologies or risk navigating a platform students understood better than them.  While it wasn’t easy to turn digital lessons into paper ones, I made do with what I could and will offer some of those alternatives too.  However, I want to call attention to the disservice being done to modern students by instructors not informing their teaching methodologies based on students’ digital knowledge and interaction.

One of the markings of our current time is the craze of social media.  These platforms create different niches through foundations of the specific platform and their categorization of content to be found, followed, and attached to a profile.  Profiles which, in effect, reconfigure users’ identities and participation in these networked publics.  The purpose of this project is to investigate the relationship between social media and identity representation, creation, and dissociation.  How people, namely adolescents, write themselves into being can be indicative of their participation in these networked publics and can be used to inform educators how to best engage students in learning and inform their own teaching practices.  This project serves as a call of encouragement for classrooms to shift perspectives: from telling students to put their phones away to telling them to take them out.  Encouraging the use of digital media and social media practices in the classroom, educators can better understand their students and modify instruction to challenge and transform a traditional classroom setting and increase student engagement in their own learning.

For the purpose of this study, the terms teenagers, adolescents, and students will be used interchangeably, as I am writing from the perspective of a certified secondary education teacher and will bring that experience to this research.  However, this does not limit the scope of the research to only teens.  As you will see when you read through the literacy sections of this archive, students begin developing their literacy practices from a young age, and today, more and more pre-adolescent children are gaining access to smartphones and social media.  They are beginning to engage in the same practices adolescents are, but from a much younger age (which is a whole research paper in and of itself considering they’re learning to read and write while already writing themselves into being online!).

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