Educate, empower, advocate: Amplifying marginalized voices in a digital society
Citation
O’Byrne, W. Ian. (2019) Educate, empower, advocate: Amplifying marginalized voices in a digital society. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 19(4), 640–669.
Abstract
The Internet and other communication technologies can provide a powerful tool for social justice and civic action. These digital devices and social media have shown enormous potential by activists to mobilize the public, document their activities and the injustices they witness, and spread information to a wider audience. Individuals are often inspired to identify ways they can leverage digital technologies to work toward positive social change. The challenge is that youth are watching and learning from these events and texts as well. As youth utilize these digital, connected texts, educators need to know what makes their voices uniquely powerful. Perhaps more importantly, English language arts (ELA) educators need to consider ways in which they can bring these skills, practices, and texts into the classroom. This study examined how activists used digital, social technologies for the purposes of amplifying marginalized voices and enacting social change. Furthermore, the study explored how acts of digital activism can be leveraged to inform ELA teachers as they support inquiry, empathy, and connection in their classrooms. The findings identify opportunities for teachers to educate, empower, and advocate for youth as digitally literate citizens.
Notes
This is one of the papers I’m most personally invested in. It came out of Charleston — a city where the distance between historical injustice and present-day reality is not abstract. The paper opens with a quote from Muhiyidin d’Baha, a local activist who was murdered in 2018. He was talking about the importance of describing before prescribing: don’t offer solutions you can’t ground in first-person understanding. That principle shaped the whole study.
What I wanted to understand was how digital activism actually works — not the idealized version of hashtag movements leading to policy change, but the messy, local, sometimes effective, sometimes heartbreaking practice of people using their phones and accounts to document injustice and organize response. That understanding is what ELA teachers need, not a media literacy unit about evaluating sources.
The educate/empower/advocate frame came out of the data and has stayed with me. Educators have long thought about their role in terms of content knowledge and pedagogical skill. This paper argues for a third dimension: the civic responsibility to amplify voices that would otherwise go unheard, and to help students build the digital literacy to do the same.