#GlobalChallenges: Social media, pedagogy and International Studies

Dr Louise Pears was awarded the BISA Learning and Teaching Small Grant. Her research project has investigated how social media can be brought into the International Studies classroom to improve teaching on the politics of global challenges. Focus groups with students have shown how students encounter global challenges through their social media feeds and how they would like to see the role and impact social media has brought in across their programmes, rather than siloed in media focused modules. So too this project has shown the need for, and appetite of, students to be empowered to apply the skills they learn as politics and international studies students to be able to critically engage with social media. It evidenced the necessity of incorporating social media into our teaching and emphasizes the potential for social media to provide more relevant, enlivening, and critical pedagogies. 

We cannot fully understand global challenges without understanding not only how they are represented online, but also how they are forged, challenged and enacted digitally. This is the first sustained research from within Politics and International Relation that considers social media, pedagogy and international studies together. Seven focus groups with 39 students held across two Higher Education Institutions have shown;

• That students encounter global challenges on social media in a range of ways as part of their day to day.
• They want social media to be incorporated into their degree programmes, rather than siloed to media focused modules and courses.
• Students feel like their degree has given them some critical awareness of misinformation and critical thinking skills but they would like there to be greater emphasis son how they translate this to their use of social media to be able to interact with social media with greater confidence.

We suggest that bringing social media into our teaching not only answers the demands of the students, but also can upskill them to more effectively engage with digitally mediated politics. Furthermore, we suggest that by opening space for social media in our curriculum we can let students bring in the content they know whilst we teach the skills they need to critically engage with this content. 

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