Sociable Media: Literature Studies and Facebook

As a secondary English teacher, a significant portion of my curriculum time is spent on characterization. Whether it is understanding the development (or lack thereof) of a character in poetry, non-fiction prose or literature, I attempt to use the analysis of character as a means by which students think about, discuss and develop their own understanding of self, through their understandings of another and his/her actions. In this way, this task in my English curriculum parallels the position of Weber & Mitchell (2008) who argue that "young people’s interactive uses of new-technologies can serve as a model for identity processes"  (27). Yet, where Weber and Mitchell see new technology as a means to assist in an understanding of self, most commonly, I stick to traditional and often canonical verse to accomplish the same outcome.

However, as the proliferation of and accessibility to technology in the classroom continues to accelerate, I find myself slightly more able to intersect, our parallel lines. For instance, most recently, students in my 11U English class were reading Shakespeare's Macbeth and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby simultaneously. Although comfortable in their reading of Gatsby, they often struggled with the language of Macbeth and so their comprehension of the content was at times shaky, preventing them from relating to the texts in the ways that I was hoping for. To assist students with their difficulty, I asked students, in groups, to each create a Facebook page for the main characters of the text, and in-character, focus on "their" profile, wall tweets, and e-mails to and between each other. By asking the students to alter their identity for a few moments and embody an other, they were able to reflect on the events of the text and think about the emotions, thoughts and contexts that drove the behaviours of the characters’, slowly (hopefully) realizing not so different to their own; they were able to access Lady Macbeth and see her relationship to Daisy in ways different to how they related previously. Students took “Facebook Breaks” while reading to reflect on the events of a scene and then “tweet” on their walls about what was happening. Some choose to write an e-mail across texts to ask questions about actions or thoughts and others posted (drew) pictures of events including captions and “tags” to explore critical or high points in a scene.

In this way, the ability to use a medium they are comfortable with to explore a medium somewhat foreign to them, gave students the ability to actively note the ways in which technology helps shapes their understanding of literature, the world around them, human behaviours and most importantly, their own place within and amongst these changes. 

Weber, S & Mitchell, C. (2008). Imaging, Keyboarding and Posting Identities: Young People and New Media Technologies In Youth, Identity & Digital Media (David Buckingham, Ed.). Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.