Centering Student Experiences With TikTok in a Critical Media Literacy Course

• In Event: Transformative Digital Spaces: Disrupting Traditional Notions of Learning and Reimagining Educational Possibilities Through Social Media

Abstract

Objective

When viewing media as a key component of the infrastructure of contemporary society (Silverstone, 2013), it becomes imperative to create space within our educational institutions for students to develop the discourse, critical capacity, and reflective praxis to engage with new media technologies. This includes social media applications like TikTok, which boasts more than 80 million users in the United States, of whom 60% fall under the age of 30 (Wallaroo Media, 2023). This study evaluates how students examined the role of social media in society and in their lives through the creation of TikTok videos, collaboration with their peers, and weekly reflections on their own social media usage in an undergraduate course.

Theoretical Framework

To heighten awareness of the way media shapes and is shaped by society, media literacy instruction requires students both critically consume and produce media messages in order to analyze the complex relationships between platforms, content, audiences, and power (Morrell, Duenas, Garcia, & Lopez, 2012; Hobbs & Jensen, 2009; Kellner & Share, 2007). Moreover, when students give voice to their own experiences in conjunction with opportunities to name oppression or harm in the development and deployment of new technologies, classrooms can also become sites of both intellectual engagement and personal healing (Kersch, & Lesley, 2019; Baker-Bell, Stanbrough, & Everett, 2017). The study analyzes student artifacts from an undergraduate course that drew from critical media literacy pedagogies in its content, design, structure, and activities.

Data and Methods

Twenty undergraduates were enrolled in the course over a period of eight weeks which met in person bi-weekly for a total of six hours. Data sources included 32 collaboratively created TikTok videos, several in-class assignments completed via Google documents and slides, 140 individually submitted weekly journal reflections, and 20 end-of-term exploratory research projects. Student pedagogical data was qualitatively analyzed through open ended and inductive coding (Bogdan & Biklen, 1997).

Findings

Students exhibited nuanced and conflicting perspectives on their use of TikTok and its global popularity which they attempted to resolve through collaboration and self-reflection. By connecting personal experiences with topics covered in the class, students found ways to reconcile opposing perspectives which they believed paved the way for more mindful and agentic experiences on TikTok. Additionally, students lacked trust in social media companies and governments and saw education as crucial for empowering users. As such, they pointed to classrooms as potential and important sites for engendering the knowledge and skills for critically creating and consuming content on TikTok and other platforms.

Significance

Critical media pedagogies advocate for acknowledging and valuing students' online experiences and then placing them at the core of broader conversations about the interplay between culture, technology, and society. This course demonstrated the potential of this method by enabling students to engage with their own social media use in a creative, reflective and analytical manner and underscored the importance of providing media literacy instruction in institutions of learning.

Author

• Megan Marie Everett, University of California - Berkeley