Social media in literacy education: Exploring social reading with pre-service teachers

Abstract

The rise of digital media affects literacy practices, notably how literary fiction is read and discussed in online environments. Traditional notions of literacy and interpretations of what it means to act as readers or literature teachers can be re-examined within this new configuration of literacy. Starting from a perspective of teachers-as-ethnographers, the authors of this article study how pre-service teachers describe their roles and opportunities to act in social media environments. They present a framework which charts an evolution toward an understanding of reading as social practice. The authors present an exploration of reading practices within the social reading environment Goodreads that was set up with 79 student-teachers. The participants collaboratively composed an autoethnographic document consisting of multiple discussion threads that detail their experiences and reflections on social reading practices. Content analysis revealed seven themes, divided into two clusters: social reading and the implementation of social media in literacy education.

Keywords

Digital ethnography literacy literature social media social reading teacher education

Introduction

The interactive and social nature of many digital media has raised questions about the prevailing image of traditional reading as a quiet and solitary practice. The opportunities to engage with content and people through digital media often seem to be in stark contrast with what print media have to offer. Digital media, particularly social media, allow users to fashion their own identities, to evoke instant public discussions, to publish their own adaptations, or to collaborate with content creators. As social media are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, many people will become accustomed to this kind of media engagement. This also means that new expectations are formed about what it means to be a writer, a reader, a critic, or even a literature teacher.

In fact, education is one of the cultural domains where the impact of new media is most far-reaching (Snyder, 2003). In relation to literature, the introduction of printed books had allowed larger groups within the population to gain access to literary works. As pointed out by literacy and reading research (Graff, 2007; Hagood, 2003; Price, 2004), the rise of mass literacy inspired debates about how educational curricula should be reformed and how we should define the activity of “literary reading.” More recently, digital media changed our understanding of reading from an exclusively print-based act to an engagement with hybrid forms of text, image, and sound (Collins, 2010). For some scholars, these changes are a prelude to the death of traditional reading (Birkets, 1996, 2013). This is often related to material changes, that is, to the transition from print books to digital carriers and to the transformation of reading strategies (Hillesund, 2010; Liu, 2009). Other scholars explore the opportunities such digital and multimedia advances afford for how we read fiction in education, for example, on digital reading platforms (Baron, 2013).

While there has been quite a lot of research on the recent transformation and multiplication of reading practices, there have been few studies on how this affects the distribution of roles within literary culture (Schmidt, 1997). Readers and cultural participants can now more easily alternate between being pleasure readers, cultural mediators and curators, critics, literary contributors, and, in some specialized cases, literature teachers (Hawisher et al., 2004). This complexity of roles in reading culture offers a striking contrast to how educational policy has come to define and restrict the roles teachers can play in standards-based reforms (Van de Ven and Doecke, 2011). Understanding how to navigate and balance these different roles may help us to redefine the agency of teachers within educational and social change (Gee, 2005). In this article, we focus on these changes exclusively from an educational perspective by exploring how pre-service teachers describe their own role(s) and opportunities to act within digital reading environments.

Digital media and literacy practices

New media inspire new practices which alter understandings of literacy. The traditional concept of literacy was based on the mastery of reading and writing of print-based media. The rise of a variety of new media contributed to the development of alternative practices for expression and communication. Considering these developments, scholars redefined literacy as “a set of instructions on how to act and talk so as to take on a particular role that others will recognize” (Gee, 1991: 1) within a specific media environment. These instructions cover a wide range of activities and conversations, like reading media texts and critically appraising works of art.

In reading research, the notion of literacy is often approached through either a psychological/cognitive analysis of reading or through readers’ self-interpretation of their own reading practices. The latter kind of research entails the activity of “explicating explications” of readers’ own understanding of what they are doing (Lang, 2010: 119) as can be found in marginalia, diaries, and discussions. It is attentive to contextually and historically determined attitudes and discourses surrounding reading, and the agency and roles of participants in these discourses.

As Terry Eagleton (1985) explains, the ideology that long pervaded in pedagogy and popular imagination was modeled on the image of “the solitary reading subject in its existential encounter with the isolated text” (p. 102). Elizabeth Long (1993) points out that this focus on the solitary reader has obscured the entire infrastructure that supports reading: “the social and institutional determinants of what’s available to read, what is ‘worth reading’, and how to read it” (p. 194). In light of this, Jim Collins (2010) suggests that the introduction of digital media has transformed our understanding of reading from “a thoroughly private experience … [to] an exuberantly social activity, whether it be in the form of actual book clubs, television book clubs, Internet chat rooms” (p. 4). This includes changes of the spaces for reading, the systems of provision and knowledge transmission, and the expectations and reception of books (Collins, 2010). Tom Standage (2013) offers further support for the claim that digital media and social aspects of reading go hand in hand. He argues that our engagement with new technologies “build upon habits and conventions that date back centuries” (Standage, 2013: 5) like the sharing of letters and pamphlets. He suggests that while mass media (newspaper, television, radio) made public discourse seem one-directional, “the social nature of media has dramatically reasserted itself” (Standage, 2013: 4) due to the rise of various digital tools and social media.

Social reading

From a theoretical perspective, literary critic Wayne Booth argues for an understanding of reading as a social practice. Booth (1988) suggests that evaluating literature, as an essential part of reading, “must imply a communal enterprise rather than a private, ‘personal calculation’” (p. 72). He coined the term coduction to denote the process. He asserts that even in solitary contemplation we arrive at the value of our reading through comparing the work at hand with previous experiences. By moving toward a more “public” criticism, our initial intuitions can become explicit, compared to shared experiences (in the form of cultural norms and values) or related to standards of literary and cultural history. A reader’s coductions about a certain literary work are then always preliminary, as “the validity of our coductions must always be corrected in conversations about the coductions of others whom we trust” (p. 73). Booth’s concept of coduction thus reveals how we rely on a community of other readers, whether implicitly in a history of interpretations of the text or explicitly in conversations with other readers.

Booth’s concept of coduction directs our attention to practices where social interaction is part of reading, such as reading groups (Allington and Swann, 2009; Scharber, 2009). Research indicates that many of these practices are emphasized in social media environments focused on literature and literary reading, such as Goodreads or Copia (Kiili et al., 2012). Developers of these digital environments or platforms claim to offer tools that support and even improve these practices. They insist this will result in an enhanced form of reading, often described as “social reading” (Vlieghe and Rutten, 2013). In most cases, the social interaction is described by the developers as digital communication between “Friends.”¹ In the context of social media, the concept of “Friends” is generally used to refer to several different types of relationships among participants. As danah boyd (2006) argues, the process of identifying other participants as “Friends” enables the creation of an imagined community built around the individual. This allows participants to digitally “express who they are and locate themselves culturally” (para. 4). In social media environments, participants express their taste in culture (movies, books, etc.) as well as people. In other words, they situate themselves in a network of “others whom we trust” (Booth, 1988).

Passion, conflict and literacy education

On social media platforms, trust often relies on exhibited taste and experience, rather than institutional affiliation and acknowledgement. As sociolinguist and media scholar James Paul Gee (2005) points out, most digitally mediated social networks develop and evolve around a shared passion and support interest-driven learning activities. According to Gee, social media platforms thus create environments that can be described as affinity spaces. These are spaces where affiliation between people is based primarily on common interests and endeavors; where segregation between newcomers and masters is absent; where mentorship is flexible; where new content can be generated; where different forms of knowledge, both individual and distributed, are encouraged; where tacit knowledge is acknowledged; and where forms and routes to participation and status can vary greatly (Gee, 2005: 225–228). As the description of affinity spaces shows, this kind of environment thrives on diversity and flexibility. Hence, such social spaces are also very susceptible to controversy and disagreement.

Sadly, current policy and context of education leaves little room for fruitful disagreements (Graff, 2003). A broad study of language education in various national contexts indicates that standards-based reforms make it difficult for teachers to question the rigid definitions of cultural and critical literacy included in educational policy, and to reflect on the significance of literacy education (Van de Ven and Doecke, 2011). In relation to literature, this tendency toward standardization is reflected in the preference for national literary canons and fixed guidelines for evaluating literary texts. Similarly, classroom discussions are mostly used as a means to “fact-check” and rarely aim to promote discussion and interaction (Beach et al., 2006: 186). Teachers may feel that policy measures limit them both in dealing with the variety of literacy practices that exist in contemporary society, as well as in contributing to educational change.

Based on her work in comparative literature, Mary Louise Pratt (1991) argues that spaces for controversy and disagreement offer a number of interesting pedagogical opportunities (also Graff, 2003). Pratt (1991) suggests that conflicts allow educators and learners to exercise self-expression (i.e. creating an autoethnographic text); to identify with the ideas, interest, histories, and attitudes of others; to understand the process and impact of cultural mediation; and to establish “ground rules for communication … that go beyond politeness but maintain mutual respect” (p. 40). As social spaces where a wide variety of people from across the world can communicate freely, social media environments can be considered pedagogical instruments. They create a set of conditions for the evaluation and transformation of how we create meaning and assess the value of books and other people’s opinions.

Based on these theoretical suggestions regarding the social aspects of reading and literacy education, this article presents an exploration of reading practices within social media environments. The exploration focuses primarily on how teachers describe these reading practices, their own role(s) in the social media environments, and how they perceive their own opportunities to act within it.

Method

Field and data-collection

A study was set up with students enrolled in the teacher training program at Ghent University. The students were invited to participate in the activities of a social media environment from March until August 2012. Participation required the students to create a personal account and request access to the semi-public discussion group created for this study: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/66394-ugent—cultuur-media-educatie2012. The social media environment Goodreads was selected. Goodreads was founded in 2007 and is considered to be the largest platform for social reading with approximately 7,500,000 accounts and 270,000,000 books in its databases (Goodreads, 2012). Reports on website traffic indicate that Goodreads was visited more than 21 million times by close to 13.5 million unique users during the month prior to the beginning of the research project (Quantcast Corporation, 2013). As Nakamura (2013) argues, Goodreads is thus an exemplary place to analyze the kind of social interaction we find in our contemporary literary culture by focusing on reading “in the wild” (p. 241; also Heath and Street, 2008).

Users of Goodreads can engage in a number of different activities within this social media environment. According to the creators of Goodreads, Goodreads’ primary goal is to help people who are “deciding what to read next?” (Goodreads, 2012). In order to receive personalized recommendations, each user must add book titles to a virtual bookshelf (that constitutes a reader’s own reading history), indicate genre-based reading preferences (for books a user wants to read), and create a network of Friends. Based on the user’s preferences and reading history, the recommendation engine of Goodreads proposes book titles that might interest the user. This process of automated recommendations is very similar to the longtail on shopping websites like Amazon. Another form of recommendations is related to the activities performed by Friends within the Goodreads environment. These activities are represented in a news feed that resembles the activity streams found in other social media environments such as Facebook and Twitter. Besides updates of the activities of Friends, the news feed also includes a tab “discussions.” This tab allows users to join discussion groups and to add, rate, and review books. Other elements in the Goodreads environment include opportunities to search for books, people, discussion groups, and literary events; curate lists; record literary quotes; set up reading challenges; create and take trivia quizzes; enter contests; read author interviews; and share creative writing projects.

Participants and data-types

In total, 79 Flemish students participated in the study. The group consisted of 54 female and 25 male students within an age range of 23–46 years. An academic prerequisite for enrollment in the teacher training program at Ghent University is the completion of a master’s program at a European University or Technical Institute. Each of the participants thus holds a master’s degree in one of the following domains: Arts and Philosophy, Political and Social Sciences, Psychology and Educational Sciences, and so on. They will be teaching literacy skills that go beyond reading and writing, including higher level skills associated with cultural and digital literacy.

The study was set up as an exploration of social reading practices, starting from a perspective teachers-as-ethnographers (Heath, 1983). This exploration comprises three activities: (1) participation in the Goodreads environment, (2) observation of their own and other participants’ activities in that environment, and (3) reflection through writing and discussing with peers. During the discussions, students were free to reflect on and discuss any topic that struck them as interesting, odd, exciting, and so on. Together, the students composed an autoethnographic document relating their observations and experiences to social reading practices. The document consists of 120 messages and contains a total of 49,516 words.

Data-analysis

The content of the document was analyzed through a process of open coding using NVivo10. Themes were extracted from the participants’ writings at sentence and paragraph level. The process resulted in an extensive coding scheme (+300 themes and subthemes). In this article, only the most prominent themes are discussed based on their coverage and frequency. The themes have been divided into two major clusters: a cluster relating to social reading activities and a cluster relating to literacy education and the implementation of social media in education. During the discussion of the results, data extracts are used as representative examples. These data extracts have been translated from Dutch, but otherwise remain unaltered in order to accurately represent the voice of the participants. In accordance with the informed consent signed by the participants, pseudonyms are used to ensure their privacy.

Results

Social reading

Four dominant themes emerge from our analysis of the participants’ descriptions and reflections on social reading activity. (1) The first theme focuses on the use of Goodreads’ Virtual Bookshelf as a personal archive and organizer. (2) The second theme centers on the production and quality of content on Goodreads. (3) The third theme elaborates on the public sharing of personal information as a means for identity construction and value assessment. (4) Finally, the fourth theme addresses the issue of trust in digital social networks.

Theme 1: constructing a virtual bookshelf

Many participants consider the Virtual Bookshelf to be one of the biggest attributes of Goodreads and other social reading environments with a similar feature (e.g. Library Thing, or BookIdo). The participants believe this type of function is particularly appealing for people who are passionate about literature and reading because it enables those readers to create archives. These features help them to keep track of their personal reading history, as well as their preferences and the books that they would like to read. This corresponds with Jim Collins’ (2010) observation that “Given the seemingly endless number of titles … title selection has become one of the most pressing concerns within the popular literary culture” (p. 80):

If you like to read, it is a handy site to keep an overview of your own preferences and to make lists. This, to me, seems to be the strength of Goodreads, the individual aspect. (Adam)

A few participants note that the Virtual Bookshelf function is especially interesting for readers who often borrow books from libraries or friends and thus do not have a physical copy on their bookshelf:

Because I am a frequent library visitor, I have a lot of material merely on loan. It is sometimes difficult to keep an overview of what I have already read and what I still hope to accomplish. A virtual inventory in such a case comes in handy. (Marsha)

Marsha and other participants do, however, express doubts and discomfort about functions such as reading challenges and updates on reading progress that highlight personal achievements. These functions are viewed as only marginally related and thus distracting to the activity of reading. The participants also voice similar concerns about functions that enable the exploration of books and active discussions (e.g. the discussion feed, the group forums, the Goodreads database, and its book-info pages). According to them, the amount of available information complicates exploration and inhibits active participation in ongoing discussions:

The selection is, like in a library, too large to read a short summary and some reviews of all of the books. Goodreads’ recommendations are a good start, but as a way to broaden your horizons, it quickly turns into a long and arduous search. (Leonie)

If there are … a lot of active discussions, you have to invest a lot of time in keeping up with all the changes and then I’m only talking about one group. My impression is that this slows down the discussions. (Adam)

Other participants counter these concerns by arguing that social reading activity has had a positive effect on their reading behavior. They explain that by participating in a social reading environment, they have become more attentive while reading, rediscovered forgotten books, or reattempted books that were set aside:

The books I have read since becoming a member of this website, I have read much more attentively, because I wanted to give an accurate rating. (Nadine)

Besides, it is also a way to rediscover a previously read book … because of the positive reading experience of a friend, I can revisit a book I once started, but gave up on midway the reading, like Franz Kafka’s The Trial. (Melvin)

Theme 2: evaluating content & comments

Generally, the users of social media environments are responsible for most, if not all, of the content produced within these environments (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010). Developers pride themselves on having created open and egalitarian spaces, where users are empowered to freely share content with limited top-down intervention (Vlieghe and Rutten, 2013). Social media environments can be considered open but empty containers. In this study, quite a few participants regard the content of the container (i.e. reviews, ratings, background information, etc.) as incomplete, superficial, questionable, irrelevant, or unstructured. They suggest that the lack of focus and control reduces the overall quality of the information on Goodreads. This in turn affects the credibility of user ratings and reviews and their power to convince people to read a particular book. So in contrast to developers’ intentions, participants experience the input of users in a different manner:

I wouldn’t consider Goodreads a complete source of information. I see Goodreads more as an empty box into which avid readers can put information and subsequently can share it with each other. Goodreads is as rich as the input of its members. The personnel of Goodreads acts more as a moderator and barely adds anything. (Lizzy)

The online recommendations or reactions, which I found on the site, are fairly superficial and sometimes even “questionable.” I am thus not convinced that I will avoid the “bad reads” with Goodreads. (Beth)

The comments and discussion groups to my opinion also lack a clear overview, an evident structure is missing, and some form of control. They often also deviate from the original topic: books and literature. Because of this, the site loses credibility, as a result a lot of visitors (such as myself) will quickly drop out. (Linda)

Participants fear that due to its easy accessibility, Goodreads admits users who lack knowledge and experience in the field of literature. They point out that this leads to overly subjective ratings and reviews. Many participants also feel that the inexperience of readers affects their contributions and reputation, and by extension lowers the status of Goodreads as a quality platform for sharing a passion for literature. In contrast to Gee’s theory of affinity spaces, participants often view contributions of other less experienced readers with skepticism:

I think that this reduction of barriers whereby everyone can put their opinion online without effort about every book he ever read too often leads to superficial and deficient perspectives. People will often participate in the debate on the basis of what they heard about the work without having read it themselves. (Quentin)

Somewhat paradoxically, the participants praise the ideal of encouraging and acknowledging input from non-professional readers while expressing distrust of inexperienced contributors. Many participants appreciate the open nature of social reading platforms. They feel that this non-restrictive quality allows for greater diversity, thus increasing the democratic potential of these environments. The idea of social reading is said to counteract an elitist approach to literary culture by allowing competing opinions, whether they are grounded in expert knowledge or not:

This [Goodreads’ rating system, authors’ clarification] creates an original mix between what the “experts” put forth as “the classics,” and the necessary democratic adjustments of the differing voting behavior of the common reader. (Pete)

It is remarkable … that most of the comments display strong opinions and contrarian judgments. Members of Goodreads will want to respond more quickly if they find that their favorite was done an injustice. (Andreas)

Theme 3: sharing and contributing

Within this new configuration of social reading, it has become common practice to share your reading and thoughts as a “visible demonstration of [your own] personal taste, at that moment” (Collins, 2010: 80). Participants in this study point out that sharing is often associated with the practice of comparing oneself with others, competing or seeking confirmation. They wonder,

Why do we have to “compare” everything these days? (Beth)

Some participants point out that publicly sharing one’s personal reading history and preferences helps users of social media to construct and exhibit identity:

Reading is viewed as an isolated, lonely activity … Thanks to Goodreads, reading becomes more tangible and defined, it gets a shape. You are reading book x or y, got stuck on a certain page, give the book an interim evaluation. … Reading is an utterance of identity, and a means to construct an identity. You are what you read, and you do want to show who you are, right? (Marsha)

While some participants remain suspicious of public sharing, others argue that displaying identity through previous reading experiences and preferences is actually helpful in trying to assess the value of others’ opinions. Thus, value assessment also involves questions of identity and identification. Indeed, rhetorical theory argues that besides convincing arguments (logos) and passionate delivery (pathos), a speaker also needs to persuade his audience through personal authority and honesty (ethos) (Herrick, 2012):

Goodreads supports us in the possibility to compare the taste of Friends with our own: the books that we both read and the ratings that we gave appear side by side. In this way, we can gauge how high a 5-star rating of this person should be assessed. (Melvin)

Much like other social media environments, Goodreads offers its users opportunities for self-fashioning. Users can use pseudonyms, create multiple accounts, and selectively share information to create a desired persona. While users can thus express themselves freely, a few participants in our study caution for the persistence of mechanisms such as stereotypes and peer pressure:

The goal of reading books shouldn’t be to display your cultural capital. I understand that the books that you read … can be seen as an external marker for your identity and that you can profile yourselves to the outside world by the books that you read. However, bragging about a certain classic or the number of books you have read exacerbates the elitist culture with which books are associated. I was confronted with a number of stereotypes regarding certain genres of books and its readers and I caught myself that I actively selected which books I shared with others and which I kept “secret” to avoid such prejudices. (Nadine)

Theme 4: building networks (of friends)

Similar to constructing a virtual bookshelf, Goodreads allows users to construct “a publicly visible, personally curated list of contacts” (Ellison and boyd, 2013: 155). As Nicole Ellison and danah boyd (2013) suggest, such networks are composed of both friends encountered elsewhere (e.g. offline) and new acquaintances with shared interests. Many participants in our study clearly state that they prefer to confide in friends rather than new contacts on Goodreads because the former’s opinions and suggestions are easier to judge and compare to one’s own. This concurs with findings from previous research (boyd and Ellison, 2007; Ellison et al., 2011). Indeed, some participants indicate that the presence of familiar contacts stimulate the further participation and engagement in a social reading platform:

Indeed, you just have no clue who places these comments online. Personally, that is why I still attach more importance to a literary reviewer’s or a friend’s opinion than to 500 visitors of Goodreads. (Linda)

I invited a lot of my friends—including my grandma—to create a profile. My choice of books heavily depends on friends’ recommendations, more so than on the reviews of strangers. The fact that you are familiar with their personality ensures that you already have more confidence in the book. (Nadine)

While issues of familiarity and trust influence user engagement, not all participants consider the presence of “strangers” as unhelpful or problematic. They suggest that the expansion of existing peer networks can offer inspiration and support. Related to their background as pre-service teachers, some participants, however, expressed uncertainty about how to create a specific interest group that shares book and recommendations for literacy education:

I feel that discussion groups for teachers of Dutch, German or French are missing. I looked for such groups, but found nothing interesting. The dominance of English on Goodreads to me signals a shortcoming. I could have, of course, started such a group myself, but then I don’t know how I could reach other teachers in my discipline. (Margo)

Literacy education

Following the discussion of how they view general aspects of the social reading platform Goodreads, participants also addressed themes focused on literacy education and the implementation of social media. These themes largely align with three pillars of pedagogical practice in literacy education related to literary culture: (1) selecting books for students, (2) participating in the cultural conversation, and (3) acting as mediators for, even protectors of adolescent students in this conversation.

Theme 1: selecting books

In their overview of Flemish and Dutch state-mandated curricula and educational goals, Nicolaas and Vanhooren (2008) note that the introduction of pupils to the field of literature by guiding and familiarizing them with different genres, styles, and authors is a key component of the teacher’s task. The participants in our study recognize that such initiation also involves encouraging, engaging, and helping disinterested students to find pleasure in reading (also see Scharber, 2009: 433). In light of this, some participants feel that Goodreads creates interesting opportunities by how it approaches “book recommendations”:

Through its “Recommendations” a website such as Goodreads creates some order in a multitude of books, which can overwhelm a beginning reader. I view the website through a teacher’s perspective. … I see the role of the teacher as a cultural intermediary, who must introduce students to the complex world of culture, must guide and help them in their first steps in the enormous storehouse of culture which nowadays dominates the market. (Charles)

Participants see advantages in using social reading environments as a way to motivate pupils to read more often and to explore different genres. Indeed, Smith and Wilhelm (2002) note that increased choice and ownership of the selected texts increases students’ motivation. Other participants found that Goodreads seemed better at affirming than at changing reading behavior: the amount of freedom and personalization might inhibit pupils’ desire to engage with other forms and genres of literature. In this respect, the participants describe these environments as practical tools rather than rivals to the literacy teacher, who has to counteract pupils’ facile or habituated reading preferences:

Students can use this site to find out which books suit their “taste.” I find that this statement jumps to conclusions. Students must “taste” different genres, authors, and art forms. (Britt)

If you start from the assumption that youngsters need to get more insight into the literary canon of our European literary history … Goodreads will not prove to be the ideal means. The teachers will still need to actively contribute their part. (Quentin)

Theme 2: participating in cultural conversations via social media

Edelsky et al. (2002) recommend modeling the practices in the literature classroom to those of a literary book club: students are then socialized and invited to participate in a highly engaged conversation on literature. Much of this talk about books currently takes place online, especially through social media. If literacy educators want to continue to prepare young people for successful participation in social and cultural life, the participants advocate the embrace of social media:

I read some doubts in a number of comments in relation to the implementation of social network sites in class. I am still a proponent of the direct contact with students and class discussions. But seeing as social networks have become a part of our lives—and this holds even more for our students—it seems better to me to embrace and include it in our classes than to reject it. (Gwynne)

A number of participants point out that social media have an extra affordance of promoting and creating cultural access for young people. Social media allow pupils to participate in a socially meaningful context beyond the walls of the school. The participants suggest that this can increase pupils’ sense of ownership. Indeed, other research suggests that online discussions offer students an authentic audience for their writings, which heightens its social purpose and the pupils’ motivation (Beach et al., 2006: 204):

A big advantage is that literature classes and the possible assignments or reading reports the students make take place in a social context, in a real discussion. As such, the feeling that students just have to fulfill assignments to get marks disappears, and the students’ products can really contribute to a discussion. It is even possible to talk to some of the authors themselves. … The students’ contribution becomes meaningful when they can direct their questions or remarks to the author him/herself. (Charles)

Theme 3: protecting students against bad influences

Using online discussions may help self-conscious students to overcome discomfort experienced in face-to-face discussions and participate in conversation on literature (Beach et al., 2006). However, many participants in our study feel that participation in social media environments warrants caution. When social media become part of classroom practice, participants argue that it is the task of the teacher to take control in order to protect pupils from negative experiences and feelings, such as the difficulty of use, confusion, demotivation, and so on:

However, I also think that it will be necessary to support students in this task. Goodreads is not that easy to work with. I would only use it in the highest grades of secondary education. (Marianne)

We run the risk of our students getting lost in the labyrinth of literature. Unless we ourselves draw up a guide in the shape of a reading list, this can seem confusing to many. (Gwynne)

Similarly to using closed questions that increase the control of teachers on students’ input (Beach et al., 2006; Showalter, 2009), many participants advocate the use of semi-public or closed discussion groups as the best way to assume control and protect the pupils. By creating a closed space within the social reading environment, teachers can closely monitor and guide the activity of their pupils. As such, participants believe teachers can ensure that pupils only come in contact with content that meets the proper quality standards. Pratt (1991) acknowledges that this impulse for teacher control is understandable, even more so given the tendency toward standardization within educational policy, but it is rather untenable in our heterogeneous society:

Because of the subjectivity of the comments, I think that it is dangerous to use this in an educational context. You could maybe scare away youngsters from reading certain books? If you want to use it, you might want to create a closed and controlled group within which you work with students, just as we did. … Maybe I am just too old-fashioned. (Tony)

I note the concerns of many fellow-students about the reviews’ quality and their impact on pupils. On the internet, everyone’s opinion is worth as much as anyone else’s, no matter how superficial. That is why I think that it is safer in an educational context to create a separate group where there can be a discussion about a specific topic, with the input of students and under the supervision and editorship of the teacher. (Marsha)

Discussion

In general, this article explored how reading and its infrastructure are changing toward social interaction on digital environments and how this might affect our understanding of literacy and education. Based on the participants’ collective autoethnographic text, we found that dedicated environments like Goodreads mostly attract people with a passion for reading. The affordances of Goodreads for passionate readers, such as increased motivation and attention, are weighed against the downsides for novice or occasional readers, like the excess of reading material and the lack of content quality control. We also showed how discussions about the infrastructure of Goodreads and the practices of its users inspired the pre-service teachers in our study to reflect on engagement, trust, and value assessment. This included reflections on the importance of encouraging and acknowledging the exhibiting of reading experiences and the expression of taste and value by “common” readers. Finally, we indicated how the participants related these observations and reflections to their views on education and the role of the teacher. According to the participants, it is the teacher’s task to introduce pupils to literary culture and to facilitate their access to this conversation about literature. This task involves motivating pupils to read and to discuss books, but also to counteract and broaden their reading preferences and knowledge of books. In addition, the participants feel that a certain level of control and expertise by the teacher is required to reach these educational goals.

Two major insights can be derived from these findings. First, while dominant discourses and ideologies tend to obscure the public and social features of reading, participants in our research point out that social media like Goodreads allows for the display of literary experiences. As such, reading practices become an integral part of a reader’s identity as a literate individual. Moreover, the study indicates that a social conception of reading is supported by the identity created through a virtual bookshelf and the trust that is built within a network of Friends. Second, in relation to social media and education, a clear paradox arises from the students’ comments. The participants recognized that one of the roles of the teacher is to facilitate pupils’ access to socially and culturally meaningful contexts. Platform such as Goodreads can be characterized by their openness to conversation, diversity, and conflict, as well as their lack of top-down control. Closely resembling affinity spaces, these environments are said to create interesting opportunities for developing literacy driven by interest and passion. However, the participants also feel that a strong case can be made for a planned and structured approach to literacy development involving a careful selection of books and quality assessment of reviews and comments. It is clear from the participants’ reflections that a tension exists between the lack of explicit learning goals within environments like Goodreads, and the clear and planned educational objectives of formal education.

Recommendations for practice and future research

This exploratory study indicates how teachers handle the changing practices and roles associated with the introduction of new technologies, such as social reading platforms. While this article deals with pre-service teachers, future research can focus on the influence of social media on avid readers’ practices and in-service literacy teaching. Based on the results from this present study, the authors propose a number of adjustments to the theoretical conceptions of literacy and reading, as well as our understanding of teacher roles. First, James Paul Gee’s “affinity spaces” proves to be a valuable concept to research the introduction of new technologies of reading. The case study also points out, however, that the role of community, authority, and trust should be further explored within these spaces. This is especially interesting within hybrid spaces, such as social reading platforms, that combine the “old” practices of print media and “new” digital technologies. These spaces are prime examples of multiliterate or transliterate spaces that “go across and beyond literacy” as a single and monolithic entity (Thomas et al., 2007: para. 2; also see Jenkins, 2009; New London Group, 1996); they combine traditional bookishness with the ability to interact across a range of different media.

Second, this adjusted understanding might show how such digital spaces can foster and allow cultural conversation where conflict, passion, flexible authority, and both individual and community knowledge can be fruitful parts of learning. Exploring and experimenting with these digital media spaces can prove insightful for teachers to view classroom discussion about books as a way to reassess their beliefs and pedagogy of literature: questions about the selection of books, the importance of cultural access, and the evaluation of literary quality. As Agee (2000) states, teachers who are more open to feedback and productive discussion with students are more likely to question their own pedagogy, helping them to develop more flexible and student-centered teaching practices (also see Beach et al., 2006; Pratt, 1991). With these recommendations, we hope to inspire further research on social media practices. We believe that research of and engagement with social media in general, and digital reading platforms in particular, will both help us understand changing reading practices and enhance teacher’s awareness of their own literacy and agency within new digital developments.

Footnotes

Funding

The research presented in this article is part of the interdisciplinary research project User Empowerment in a Social Media Culture (EMSOC) funded by the Agency for Innovation by Science and Technology (IWT).

Notes

Author biographies

Joachim Vlieghe is a Research Fellow at the Department of Educational Studies (Ghent University) and is currently completing his PhD with the title “Literacy in a social media culture. An ethnographic study of literary communication practices.” His interests in scholarship include the phenomenon of social reading and its effects on literary culture and literacy education.

Geert Vandermeersche is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Ghent University. He completed his PhD with the title “Literature Teaching: The Narrative Construction of a Discipline” at the Department of Educational Studies in 2013. His work focused primarily on studying the intersections of educational and narrative theory. In the fall of 2014, he will transfer to the Department of Literary Studies where he will research the functions of literature and reading in the cultural field. [email: Geert.Vandermeersche@UGent.be]

Ronald Soetaert is a Professor at the Department of Educational Studies (Ghent University). His fields of interest include the study of rhetoric, media, literacy, and culture. In addition to numerous articles in Flemish and English, he also published various books and book chapters, including “De cultuur van het lezen” (2006) (The Culture of Reading). [email: Ronald.Soetaert@UGent.be]

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