As students enter their freshman year of college, chances are that they will enroll in a first-year composition (FYC) course of some kind. These students will likely enter their classes with a number of students from a number of different backgrounds. As instructors prepare lessons for these students to help them master course content, they are likely to have students whose experiences with technology are just as diverse as the students themselves. More than likely, these students have encountered a number of digital and social media in their lives and are at least familiar with it. However, the extent to which they have been educated about it and with it might not necessarily be consistent.
In their most recent update to standards in 2014, the WPA Outcomes Statement did make several mentions of incorporating technology into the FYC classroom. These outcomes include:
While these outcomes provide a basis for what students should expect to learn about and demonstrate understanding of in a FYC course, these outcomes alone do not provide pedagogical tools or strategies in order to help students reach these outcomes. Moreover, interpretation of these outcomes (and similarly, outcomes provided by the college in which instructors teach) may be variable.
Importantly too, what is missing from these outcomes is mention of the digital media that FYC students are probably most engaged with: social media.
The aim of this project is to provide FYC instructors with a research-basis for utilizing social media in the FYC classroom, but also provide resources for the implementation of social media into the FYC class. The incorporation of social media in the classroom can help engage students and build community, practice written communication, and also provide them with necessary literacy skills for their academic and professional career.
At the university and college level, technology in the FYC classroom is a given. Students have access to computers either because they own one, they can access many of what they could through a computer on their phones, or they can access computers through school and public libraries. Most colleges use a learning platform such as Canvas, Blackboard, or Google Classroom to organize lessons, documents, and assignments for lessons, whether the class be in-person, online, or a hybrid class. However, such learning platforms are merely this: platforms. Ultimately, instructors choose how to implement this technology into their classroom and can turn off and on several features, meaning that such inclusion of learning platforms is not automatically equivalent to the integration of digital or social media (or literacy of such media) into the classroom--though it can be.
Researcher Valerie Arms describes her successful incorporation of technology into first-year writing programs through a program entitled “English Alive.” She argues that “the learning style of millennials is very different from that of twentieth-century learners” and that though students are “non-stop communicators” that they oftentimes fail to connect their communication to the “skills they learn in ‘English’” (195).
The WPA Outcomes Statement also suggests a number of ways that students are expected to utilize technology in the classroom. These outcomes focus on utilizing technology in order to do research, understanding how technology can be used for rhetorical purposes, and also how students can create writing and projects utilizing technology for rhetorical purposes. However, using technology can also help students achieve other outcomes listed by the WPA, which include improved communication skills for "various rhetorical contexts" and utilizing social processes to improve writing (2).