Extending Pedagogy through Social Media

Social media can be used as an intervention in potentially exclusionary classrooms to practice "extending pedagogy": a co-learning experience that extends beyond some of the limitations of a university-level course, including structural assumptions about who is an expert, who is a learner, and how knowledge can be created. Our case studies relate the experiences of connecting two college classrooms with Zapotec community members on Twitter in a discussion centered on Zapotec-language texts from the Mexican colonial period. As social media is being used globally by Indigenous, marginalized, and/or minoritized communities, the extending pedagogy project interrogates the intersection of social media, pedagogy, Indigenous activism, and digital-language activism. We demonstrate that the extending pedagogy through social media as a way of partnering with Native stakeholders results in multiple layers of benefits. It centers Indigenous language and knowledge in nonlanguage classrooms and highlights Indigenous intellectual culture. It also disabuses students (and others) of the notion that Indigenous languages, cultures, and peoples are only of the past. Our "extending pedagogy" also recognizes expertise outside of academia by creating porous educational spaces. The virtual spaces created by this pedagogical practice have the potential of continued educational and social impact beyond the duration of the course

Indigenous · Indigenous language · Pedagogy · Political science · Social media · Sociology · E-Learning and Knowledge Management · Indigenous Cultures and Socio-Education