Reimagining youth agency and social media platforms with middle school girls and nonbinary youth
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- In an effort to engender a greater will and capacity among students to act on the world (Ahearn, 2002; Giddens, 1984), this Youth Participatory Design Research (YPDR) study engaged 42 middle-school girls and nonbinary youth enrolled in an American private school in the design, building, and implementing of a social media platform for young people. Analysis of pre- and post-surveys, using a validated tool for assessing agency (Vaughn et al., 2020b), indicated that agency among participants increased by a small but significant margin during the YPDR process. Youth felt an increased sense of intentionality and choice in what they learned in school, and to a lesser degree, increased self-identification as coders. In addition, qualitative analysis of their design and platform artifacts, presentation videos, interviews, and think-alouds reveals that these student designers re-imagined social media platforms to provide themselves and other youth with opportunities for agency development through making choices safely online. Youth designed novel platform features to assist users in comfortably sharing their voices by lowering the stakes of sharing, offering novel choices around anonymity, audience selection, feedback management, and using digital spaces as a bridge between in- and out-of-school work. A self-starting after-school club then spent two academic years bringing their peers' designs to life through building and implementing a social media platform in their school. They subsequently designed their own pedagogical research projects to further test and iterate on their platform, demonstrating the extent to which agency came into play in unexpected ways. Taken together, this study's results suggest that youth may simultaneously develop agency and build agency-promoting technologies for and in schools. Pedagogical approaches that have as their purpose supporting agency development and providing students with opportunities to re-design technologies that otherwise harm them, can help, while also offering teachers a framework for repurposing their classrooms as critical hubs of change.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2023; ©2023 |
| Publication date | 2023; 2023 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Southerton, Emily Rose |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Levine, Sarah (Sarah R.) |
| Thesis advisor | Levine, Sarah (Sarah R.) |
| Thesis advisor | Garcia, Antero |
| Thesis advisor | Willinsky, John, 1950- |
| Degree committee member | Garcia, Antero |
| Degree committee member | Willinsky, John, 1950- |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Graduate School of Education |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Emily Southerton. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Graduate School of Education. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2023. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/hj133bb1874 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2023 by Emily Rose Southerton
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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