Poster #23 - “It’s like an opening door”: Immigrant-Origin Youth Harnessing Social Media for Civic Education

• In Event: Poster Session 20

Abstract

Immigrant-origin (I-O) youth are a large and growing segment of the U.S. population. As I-O youth engage in critical civic issues within and beyond the U.S., they may use social media to educate themselves, and their community. While classroom-based civics education struggles with a perennial lack of resources and recently, attacks on content (e.g., against “Critical Race Theory” in schools), social media remains a youth-driven and resource rich space (Mirra & Garcia, 2017). Especially for I-O youth, who may draw upon a transnational sense of belonging and experiences resisting xenophobic rhetoric and policy (Suarez-Orozco et al., 2018), social media may be key to furthering civic education and driving sociopolitical action.

Using a multi-method qualitative approach, we drew from Twitter and interview data from a racially/ethnically diverse cohort of 37 I-O youth (ages 18-24) in the U.S. who posted about political and social issues between January and November of 2020. Participants represented 25 countries of origin and data included over 2,200 Twitter posts. Participants were 65% female, 32% male, and >1% gender diverse (n=1). First or second generation I-O status was confirmed by 14 participants. Other participants’ I-O status was inferred by their Twitter profile bios (i.e., use of one or more non-American flags or self-labeling like “Nigerian”). We used interviews with 11 participants to contextualize Twitter data. Interviewees (64% female) represented East Asian, African, Middle Eastern, South Asian, and Central American countries of origin. Analysis of tweets and interviews were conducted using thematic analysis (Braun & Clark, 2018).

We identified two domains of civic education. First, we identified a domain of civic content wherein I-O youth educated their peers on current events (domestic and international), civic history, and systems analysis. Next, we identified three themes within a domain of civic competencies: I-O youth worked with and for their peers to 1) build a justice-orientation, 2) encourage perspective taking, and 3) foster civic digital literacy. Interview data added depth to these domains; we identified cross-cutting themes on educational processes as youth explained how they experienced social media-based teaching and learning processes.

Our findings expand a growing understanding that social media plays a central role in civic education for today’s I-O youth. First, I-O youth are harnessing the power of social media to propel their own civic education. Youth discussed ways in which they used their peers’ posts as launching points for further research, and were able to explore elements of their identities and heritage through learning from others online. Second, we identified ways in which I-O youth offered a rigorous and thoughtful civic education to their peers. They provided historical and contemporary information and interpretation, and were able to humanize their own experiences facing marginalizing systems. Third, youth discussed how online civic education manifested in “real world” action, such as changing their family and peers’ political opinions. Importantly, youth shared that the online/offline “divide” is permeable, and scholarship can further consider social media as a key developmental context for civic education and development broadly.

Authors

• Elena Maker Castro, University of California - Los Angeles
  Presenting Author

• Sara Wilf, University of California - Los Angeles

• Jaime Garcia Guzman, California State University, Long Beach

• Laura Wray-Lake, University of California - Los Angeles