Responding to Cultural Crises Through Social Media Research and Student–Faculty Collaboration

Contributors: Sarah Riddick, with Stephanie Tam, Emily Stead, Nathaniel Shimkus, Drew Mulcare, Ngoga Julien Vainqueur Mugabo, Jorgo Gushi, Nathaniel Gamboa, Tian Yu Fan, Charles Dursin, and Ryan Crowley
Affiliation: Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Email: sriddick@wpi.edu
Published: Issue 29.1 (August 2024)
DOI: 10.7940/M329.1.PRAXISWIKI.RIDDICK

Introduction

Rhetoric and writing classrooms are culturally responsive sites. A contemporary example of this responsiveness is the attention that rhetoric and writing undergraduate courses pay to social media, particularly by having students write for and analyze social media (Kester & Vie, 2021; Mina, 2017). As we ask students to do this work, it is important to remember that social media is ever-changing, and so are its methodological approaches. Although researching social media in undergraduate classrooms offers students opportunities to explore timely topics of personal and professional interest, it also poses methodological challenges. We may be asking students to research and write about social media without first teaching them to reflect on and carefully select method/ologies that are suitable for this work.

In this webtext, we share the results of our effort to respond to this challenge as a faculty-and-undergraduate-student team. In early 2021, we collaborated for seven weeks on research, writing, and pedagogy in a capstone seminar called Writing About Social Media at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). Sarah Riddick designed and taught this seminar, and we collaboratively refined it each week to align with our research, writing, and learning goals.

Our project emerged, in part, as its own cultural response. In January 2021, a series of political events created unexpected exigence for the seminar, given the role that social media played in them. Every week that month, the United States seemed to move further into tumult, with social media at the epicenter, as the “Pathway to Project” graphic illustrates. 

Figure 1. Pathway to Project: January 2021

Sarah responded to this kairotic moment by creating a second design and set of materials for the seminar. During our first meeting, she presented both versions of the seminar as options for completing it. We chose the redesigned version, which centered student–faculty collaboration and open pedagogy; we discuss both in greater detail in the “Our Seminar in Situ” section. This webtext presents the results of our choice and the work we did together.

In addition to responding to cultural exigence, our project also addresses a pedagogical challenge regarding social media research in humanities coursework. To complete advanced undergraduate coursework about specialized topics, students are often expected to develop robust research projects about that topic area. This development might be straightforward work for some courses and seminars, but it is less so if the work involves social media—an emergent, fast-paced research area that involves public human communication. Sarah realized that students would likely not enter this seminar with the methodological foundation needed for researching and writing about social media rhetoric and writing, and she saw an opportunity to invite them into another scholarly avenue: developing social media method/ologies for digital humanities research.

Ultimately, this project demonstrates how student–faculty collaborations in the classroom can contribute to conversations beyond the classroom. Our collaboration explored two key questions that center on emergence and exigence:

1. How can rhetoric and writing classrooms provide space for students and faculty to develop method/ologies for emergent research areas (e.g., social media)?
2. How can open pedagogy help rhetoric and writing classrooms become more responsive to cultural exigence (e.g., events of cultural crisis)?

In the following sections, we share the outcomes of this two-month experiment. We begin with an overview of the seminar’s context and its connections to collaborative pedagogies and interdisciplinary research and writing. From there, we discuss our learning goals and research motivations. Next, we present a guide of our weekly individual and collaborative work; instructors can use this guide as a resource for developing and organizing similar projects with students. We conclude by offering recommendations for future work, which may help instructors anticipate and address potential challenges and constraints. We are proud of what we have achieved in our circumstances, and we hope our work encourages others to engage in similar, perhaps more sustained, collaborations in undergraduate rhetoric and writing classrooms.

Our Seminar in Situ: Scholarly Connections and Contributions

We recognize that we are certainly not the only group who researched and studied social media rhetoric and writing in the classroom during spring 2021. However, we believe our project offers several meaningful contributions:

• Responding to Exigence with Open Pedagogy. We build on recent research about 1) using open pedagogy in rhetoric and writing classrooms and 2) responding to exigence in course design and delivery.
• Interdisciplinary Collaboration in Digital Humanities Research. We work together as an interdisciplinary group to respond to current questions and concerns in the digital humanities (i.e., how to research social media).
• Student–Faculty Coauthorship as Interdisciplinary Writing Mentorship. We model how students can work towards multiple learning and professional writing goals in their rhetoric and writing coursework.

We explain these contributions in more detail below.

Responding to Exigence with Open Pedagogy

Our project is inspired by and builds on a recent Kairos webtext called "'Stronger Together': Open Pedagogy, Digital Scholarship, and Hillary Clinton’s Rhetorical Appeal," by Julia Canzoneri et al. (2020). In fall 2016—amidst the 2016 U.S. Presidential election—Wendy Hayden offered a course at Hunter College called Democratic Rhetoric: Hillary Clinton and Beyond, which Hayden and her students cocreated. As a group, we wanted to build on Canzoneri et al.'s approach to learning together in a college course, and we wanted to explore new directions for this kind of collaboration.

Projects like Canzoneri et al.'s (2020) underscore the value of student–faculty collaboration in the undergraduate classroom, including in curriculum design. This kind of approach is often described as "open pedagogy," which builds on the principles of Open Educational Resources (OER), namely open collaboration and "free and unfettered access to education materials, with the purpose of improving teaching and learning" (Hilton et al., 2019, p. 276).

We share Canzoneri et al.'s (2020) enthusiasm not only for open pedagogy but also for including undergraduate students in this process. In a similar vein, our approach to cocreating the seminar is informed by Bronwyn Hegarty’s (2015) influential work on open pedagogy. In the "Our Weekly Work" section below, we show how our project engages with Hegarty's "eight attributes of open pedagogy": "participatory technologies"; "people, openness, trust"; "innovation & creativity"; "sharing ideas & resources"; "connected community"; "learner generated"; "reflective practice"; and "peer review" (p. 5). Granted, in some cases, the connections to these attributes are looser than others, given the focus and scale of our project. Nevertheless, we find Hegarty's phrasing useful for signaling the work we did as a student–faculty collaboration team and the values that shaped such work. For instance, to research and write with "participatory technologies" (i.e., social media), we experimented with "innovation & creativity" and "sharing ideas & resources" (p. 5).  To refine this work, we incorporated attributes like "people, openness, trust," "reflective practice," and "peer review" (p. 5). 

Interdisciplinary Collaboration in Digital Humanities Research

“At its core,” Matthew Kirschenbaum (2012) argued in Debates in the Digital Humanities, “digital humanities is more akin to a common methodological outlook than an investment in any one specific set of texts or even technologies" (p. 4). Along these lines, we frame this project as a digital humanities project based on our approaches, not our results. We took an experimental, varied approach to method/ology, including the invitation throughout the project to engage digitals tools and technologies in our research.

Our project’s methodologies and aims were also informed by digital rhetoric. In their chapter, "Digital Humanities Scholarship and Electronic Publication," Douglas Eyman and Cheryl Ball (2015) noted the strong connection between the digital humanities and digital rhetoric when they

take up the relation between DH and screen-based scholarship as a form of digital rhetoric practice. One of the ways in which we can further the study of Web texts is to develop scholarly approaches that partake of the same digital rhetoric methods and practices as the works we study. To that end, we argue that DH scholarship that takes advantage of digital, networked media and platforms serves as an enactment of digital rhetoric practice. (p. 66)

We explored these connections in our research and writing. One of our initial goals was to create digital humanities scholarship, which took many forms before arriving at the present one (e.g., an online portfolio; a digital, interactive annotated timeline).

The digital humanities illustrates the importance of collaborative work, including interdisciplinary collaborations (Klein, 2015; Ridolfo & Hart-Davidson, 2015). Scholarship about collaboration often features work from researchers in similar disciplines and/or with similar levels of training (e.g., faculty collaborations; humanities collaborations). We believe a particular point of interest for our project is the composition of our group.

Our group was composed of ten STEM undergraduate students at a polytechnic institute who were working with a rhetoric and writing professor to research social media and to cocreate a course about social media. In their study of STEM-focused writing pedagogies, John R. Gallagher et al. (2020) summarized well the potential value of our collaborative, interdisciplinary work: "Close sustained collaboration can help to make implicit assumptions explicit; humanities and STEM researchers can better address their latent assumptions about one another with sustained collaboration" (p. 423). In context—and in general—this call for interdisciplinary collaboration focuses on work amongst colleagues (e.g., "humanities and STEM researchers" and faculty). Continuing in this direction, we advocate for the value of collaborative, interdisciplinary research and writing work between faculty and undergraduate students.

We understand that our group's composition initially could seem like a point of weakness and a possible deterrent from pursuing a project like ours. However, we assert that our group's composition was one of our strengths, as it facilitated a broader range of perspectives and approaches from which we all learned in different ways. We faced various challenges (e.g., different disciplines, different levels of formal training, brief project timeline, a pandemic), but we also felt motivated by how we could build upon our prior knowledge (e.g., interdisciplinary perspectives; different identities and lived experiences; different multimodal literacies) to make contributions to multiple research areas (i.e., writing pedagogy; open pedagogy; social media research methods; digital rhetoric and writing; digital humanities). Most notably, our seminar's open-pedagogy structure enabled us to adjust one of our primary research questions and goals to better align with our interests and to address a current need in digital humanities research: developing method/ologies for researching emergent media and technology. We explain our reasons for the project’s reframing in the section called "Our Learning Goals."

Student–Faculty Collaboration as Interdisciplinary Writing Mentorship

Compared with other forms of undergraduate coursework, student–faculty collaboration and coauthorship in the classroom is relatively infrequent but not altogether new. As Cynthia J. Reed et al. (2002) explained, “Coauthorship creates a forum for participatory problem solving, reflection, and action,” and incorporating coauthorship in the college classroom can enhance these learning outcomes (p. 22). Moreover, collaboration and coauthorship between undergraduate students and faculty can expand students' opportunities to receive personalized writing mentorship, which benefits their future work in industry and/or academia. Effective writing skills are among the most desirable skills across disciplines, yet prospective employers and supervisors are often dissatisfied with their applicants' or employees' approaches to writing (Anderson et al., 2017).

Collaborative writing opportunities with writing faculty at the undergraduate level may better prepare students for the writing work they'll be expected to do in their future workplaces, including projects in collaboration with their supervisors. For undergraduate STEM students like those in this project, these learning outcomes may be especially appealing, given the research and writing expectations that STEM graduate students encounter (Zimmer et al., 2022). Although expectations for STEM writing are high in both industry and academia, the writing support that STEM students receive tends to be relatively low (Druschke et al., 2018), which may contribute to STEM mentors' and mentees' misaligned perceptions of the quality of graduate research and writing work (Feldon et al., 2015).

More generally, writing classrooms provide invaluable support for (inter)disciplinary writing, as illustrated by Writing Across the Disciplines (WAC) and Writing in the Disciplines (WID) pedagogies (e.g., Kramer et al., 2019; Segall & Smart, 2005). Along with consulting faculty and writers from different disciplines to develop writing pedagogies (Gallagher et al., 2020), research in this area should also incorporate students' perspectives about their writing coursework. Doing so can contribute to broader efforts of collaborating with students on pedagogy. As Sarah Jane Blithe and Brian Fidelibus (2022) noted, "Collaboration is clearly considered important in many aspects of university practice and curriculum, yet students are not usually considered as participatory stakeholders, but rather as the recipients of collaborative efforts" (p. 239). In their study of a collaboration team comprised of one instructor and seven undergraduate students, Blithe and Fidelibus found that collaborating with students on a course's design increased student engagement and learning outcomes, with students enrolled in the course reporting "significant personal growth" (p. 242); similarly, the students on the collaboration team "developed ownership in their . . . leadership qualities, course design and pedagogy skills, research skills," and more (p. 242).

As we discuss in the following section, our project further demonstrates the benefits of interdisciplinary collaboration and co-authorship between students and faculty in relation to research, writing, and pedagogy. We believe this approach can help "create engaged, inclusive classrooms" (Blithe & Fidelibus, 2022, p. 238), as well as proactively and creatively respond to the contexts surrounding classrooms. In our project, we found that an open-pedagogy, interdisciplinary approach to the rhetoric and writing classroom helped us better understand and draw from each other's areas of specialization to responsively address timely concerns at multiple scales. 

Our Learning Goals: Reasons for Researching and Writing Together

 Our project aimed to address three broad rhetoric and writing categories in which we were collectively invested:

• Personal and Professional: Writing pedagogy and practice (i.e., the writing process; writing style; writing genres; writing for publication)
• Research: Methods and methodologies (i.e., social media research)
• Culture: Current cultural events and influences (i.e., the 2020 U.S. Presidential election; political rhetoric; social media rhetorics and writing; dis/misinformation; digital publics)

As an interdisciplinary student–faculty team, we built upon our lived experiences and training to creatively explore not only the many forms of rhetoric and writing that circulate on social media but also how to research and write about them. Most immediately, we were invested in the Personal and Professional category, and we believed this seminar's highly customizable approach to writing would help us engage with writing more meaningfully (Eodice et al., 2016). Yet, we were also invested in the Research and Culture categories, and we were excited to use this seminar as an opportunity to better understand and respond to the circumstances in which we were living.

Our overall Research focus shifted soon after our research began. Although our seminar and our project weren't originally designed to focus on research method/ologies, we quickly realized that this focus was better suited and more motivating to us. Inspired by the interdisciplinary need for social media research method/ologies, we decided to use our individual research and writing projects to experiment with approaches that might contribute to this work. To do so, we spent time as a group discussing the current challenges facing social media research. As Sarah has argued elsewhere, social media is emergent media with emergent uses and influences. Thus, researchers need to carefully consider the method/ologies they apply to social media research, which may require developing new methods designed for this kind of research (Riddick, 2019, 2024). Moreover, established methodological approaches support some researchers and stakeholders more than others. As Joseph T. Yun et al. (2020) pointed out, "There is no shortage of social media analytics tools and environments across both industry and academia, but most of these tools and environments are built in a way that favors usage by companies (as opposed to academia)" (p. 819). In other words, there are multiple barriers to access for those interested in researching social media, including digital humanities faculty and students.

In this way, we felt motivated as a group to join this conversation. Our university's mission illustrates this motivation well: "WPI transforms lives, turns knowledge into action to confront global challenges, and revolutionizes STEM through distinctive and inclusive education, projects, and research" (Mission & Values, n.d.). Our university highly values collaborative, interdisciplinary approaches to science and technology, as evidenced by our curriculum's series of team-based, interdisciplinary research projects. We value this kind of work, too, and we are excited to contribute to social media studies as an interdisciplinary group (i.e., undergraduate STEM students and a humanities professor).

We believe our work is important in this area because it comes not only from a group with different disciplines and training but also from different levels of training, different multimodal literacies, and different lived experiences. Educators are increasingly incorporating social media into their classes, including asking students to study and use it. Rhetoric and writing classes feature this pedagogical work well. Indeed, rhetoric and writing scholars understand the importance of training students to communicate persuasively with digital media and technology. Thus, their courses often offer opportunities for students to further develop and refine their approaches to social-media rhetoric and writing (Bowdon, 2014; McGregor, 2021, Verzosa Hurley & Kimme Hea, 2014). Moreover, as journals like Kairos exemplify, rhetoric and writing scholars prioritize pedagogical research that supports such efforts. This scholarship carefully considers best practices for incorporating social media into coursework, for supporting students' needs in these assignments, for minimizing risks that students face on social media, and for acknowledging students' existing rhetorical capacities (Brock Carlson, 2018; Buck, 2015; Daer & Potts, 2014; Vie, 2017).

Building on this last point, we are interested in students contributing more directly to the scholarly conversations that inform social-media coursework and perhaps work beyond it. As danah boyd (2014) observed, "So many people talk about youth engagement with social media, but very few of them are willing to take the time to listen to teens, to hear them, or to pay attention to what they have to say about their lives, online and off" (pp. x–xi). We appreciate that rhetoric and writing research includes youth and student voices through methodological approaches like interviews and ethnographic study (e.g., Amicucci, 2017; Buck, 2015), as well as advocates for the importance of recognizing and valuing students’ multimodal literacies (Selfe, 2004). In our case, we felt inspired to speak similarly to the students in the "Stronger Together" project (Canzoneri et al., 2020)—that is, not as participants, but as researchers. Although our group does not have as much formal training and research experience with certain areas as Sarah (i.e., digital humanities; rhetoric and writing; social media), we have considerable firsthand experience with navigating social media rhetoric and writing (i.e., years of personal social media use), and we have varied experience with working on research teams (i.e., WPI's curriculum).

Thus, for seven weeks, we collaborated as a learning and research team. Sarah led the project, providing mentorship and instruction along the way, while also working with us to customize the seminar and our collaborative project. In the next section, we showcase this process in detail.

Our Weekly Work: An Assignment Guide

Figure 2. Project Timeline: Weeks 1–7