In order to understand students to better engage them in their own learning in a secondary ELA classroom, it’s pivotal to understand students’ literacy backgrounds.  Before Millennials became “Millennials,” they were digital natives.  Being raised in a digital, media-saturated world is the new normal for students in the United States.  No longer are the days of hardcover Encyclopedic series or even dictionaries.  It’s Wikipedia and Dictionary.com at worst and JStor and Oxford-English at best.  The manner in which students gather information is mainly through digital media and technological devices.  With such a broad shift in social and learning culture, it is worrisome how the education system is slow to catch up.  While veteran educators and administrators are still defending the high school canon of conservative rich white men from the 1700s and earlier, students today have entered most assuredly into the context of the posthuman.

The use of social media is characterized by identity and participation.  Whenever a person dives into a new social media platform, they are greeted by standard profiling questions: email, username, password.  Sometimes, depending on the platform, users are asked for first name, last name, or gender.  From there, profiles are generated and @arivera9548 is no longer an empty domain name, but a person, or rather, an extension of a person, the creation on the posthuman.  Katherine Hayles clarifies, “even a biologically unaltered Homo sapiens counts as posthuman.  The defining characteristics involve the construction of subjectivity, not the presence of nonbiological components” (Hayles 4).  From the moment users create a social media profile, they have constructed an agent of themselves.  Through this profile, this extended subject can browse, navigate, and participate in the contexts and constructs on the platform.  Serving as an extension of the user, yet, dissociated from that same physical being. Creating a social media presence allows for teenagers and students to involve themselves in “the construction of subjectivity,” as Hayles highlights in the definition of posthuman.  When students create their profiles on social media accounts and write themselves into being, they are entering into a networked public and altering their definition of self.  From their given name to a chosen username, teens alter their subjectivity to be identifiable with a pattern of information displayed as their profile page.

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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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