Tools, Processes, Participation: Social Media for Learning, Teaching, and Social Change

Abstract

<p>Despite attempted pedagogical shifts toward situated learning, social constructivism, and social practice theory, we find pedagogy for social media to remain primarily situated in behaviorist or cognitivist assumptions of learning. Moreover, in an attempt to craft our own participatory pedagogies of social media, we found ourselves returning to metaphors and language rooted in ontological assumptions of objectivism. That is to say, we continually referred to social media as a tool with affordances to be leveraged for learning. In this paper we examine three understandings of social media - as we see them - in literature, pedagogy, and practice. We categorize these understandings through the psychological perspectives of behaviorist, cognitivist, and sociocultural learning theories. In so doing, we imagine new ways of both using social media for teaching and learning as well as possible language to better reflect our own ontological and epistemological assumptions of social media.</p>