Education and Social Media: Bite-Sized PD for the 21st Century Professional


          

While this exchange does not look like a discourse on education, it very much is. When thinking about the South and how we view the Civil War, one thing that has always been prevalent is the fact that the South preserves these monuments. From the Daughters of the Confederacy to the conservation of statues to Civil War icons, Alabama has been no exception to the "rebranding" of the history of the Civil War. This article, "State of Denial", states that in Alabama law, there is a provision to keep house museums like the White House of the Confederacy, up and running through the use of taxpayer funds. 
   
 How do we as teachers and Southerners wrestle with this conundrum? On the academic hand, preserving historical sites for future generations is a valid argument to keep places like this running.
On the political hand, how does this happen in today's world? The article goes on to mention that, during the visit to the White House of the Confederacy and interviewing the museum curators, the staff felt that it was a preservation of their heritage and was honoring their forefathers. 

I believe that Michael Harriot put it very well when he wrote about how black (and white) taxpayers are funding, essentially, a whitewashed lie. On the same note, the Alabama Board of Education voted to outlaw CRT. I don't believe that Alabama can preserve it's legacy and history. Leaders must choose to preserve all of the history or none of the history, it is impossible to leave out so many different points of view and voices. Likewise as educators, we must also choose how we want the history of our state to be presented and preserved for generations to come. 


kwhitmire@al.com, K. W. |. (2022, November 3). Alabama's Confederate Mansions get state funding, Distort our history. al.com. Retrieved November 6, 2022, from https://www.al.com/news/2022/11/alabamas-confederate-mansions-get-state-funding-distort-our-history.html




Comments

  1. AnonymousNovember 9, 2022 at 7:56 AM

    Hi Jennifer - great job on your blog post! I agree that while the interchange you wrote about initially does not seem like it is relevant to education, it absolutely is - maybe even more so than our traditional content standards. Teaching our students how to be good consumers of media is an essential practice. The article that I read after reading Amy C.'s blog also applies here, because it talks about the negative impact "doomscrolling" can have on your mental health. For me, this became abundantly clear when I would watch people who had raised me say very ugly and hateful things on social media. Not only do I want to model better behavior for my students, I also want to make sure that they know that what they say online is who they are, not a different version of who they are. This, ultimately, is at the heart of what Turner and Hicks (2017) are writing about throughout their text. Crafting digital arguments does not mean being hateful!

    Price, M., Legrand, A. C., Brier, Z. M. F., van Stolk-Cooke, K., Peck, K., Dodds, P. S., Danforth, C. M., & Adams, Z. W. (2022). Doomscrolling during COVID-19: The negative association between daily social and traditional media consumption and mental health symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 14(8), 1338–1346. https://doi-org.ezproxy.montevallo.edu/10.1037/tra0001202

    Turner, K.H., & Hicks, T. (2017). Teaching adolescents to read and write digital texts: Argument in the real world. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

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