Critical pedagogy and language learning in the age of social media?

Résumé

This paper examines the possibilities of critical pedagogy in our era of social media. With the emergence of social media over the past 10 years, these online spaces have facilitated what has been called “public pedagogy” - the varied educational and learning activities occurring in public domains beyond traditional educational institutions. These sites and practices of public pedagogy “are just as crucial, if not more so, to our understanding of the formation of identities and social structures as the teaching that goes on within formal classrooms” (BURDICK & SANDLIN, 2010, p. 349) inasmuch as these “informal and everyday spaces and discourses themselves [are seen] as innately and pervasively pedagogical” (p. 350). For quite some time now, with the increase in digital devices with constant Internet access, many have been engaging in ‘digital literacies’, with frequent texting, posting, and commenting through various media sources. Without subscribing to a ‘moral panic’ over a sometimes non-stop Internet use among some youth, the learning spaces in which a digital disconnection is warranted also needs to be examined. In both of these online and offline spaces, how can critical pedagogy facilitate language learning through students’ encounters with the language and discourses used to construct hegemonic and naturalized societal representations they face in the classroom and online?