Social Justice & Social Media: Raising Critical Awareness & Community Engagement Among Language Learners

This project uses social media and news outlets to deepen language learning through the lens of social justice. In Filipino, students analyze words like "freedom" across various media to build critical thinking and vocabulary. In Burmese, students study anti-coup memes and discuss hate speech, learning how language evolves with societal changes. 

Authors: Karen Llagas & Kenneth Wong, Lecturers in South & Southeast Asian Studies Department
Grant Type: Lecturer Teaching Fellows Program (LTF)
Project Details: Social Justice & Social Media: Raising Critical Awareness & Community Engagement Among Language Learners
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From the authors: "[This] project aims to explore the use of social media and news media outlets as resources for authentic and current materials in the Filipino language classroom, and to increase student engagement with different intersections of their communities. The project aims to explore ways to raise critical thinking in language classrooms that go beyond communicative goals. By examining how certain Filipino words (like “freedom,” “women,” “power”) appear in different contexts (FB posts & Twitter, academic journals, newspaper articles, memes, for instance), interactive and dynamic opportunities can be created to learn relevant vocabulary that is contextualized in real-time use, and can empower students to examine their sources more critically.

In 2018, Reuters published a story titled "Why Facebook is losing the war on hate speech in Myanmar," showing how hate speech on social media is posing a threat to the Rohingyas, a Muslim minority in western Burma. With the recent military coup in Burma, Facebook and other social media platforms play a different role, allowing the protesters to spread their pro-democracy messages with viral memes.

In Burmese 100B (Spring 2021), students study the puns and deliberate misspellings in the anti-coup memes, and interview native Burmese speakers in their social circles for the definition of hate speech. In doing so, students learn not only the target language but how recent events reshape language usage in a society."

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