Social media literacy: Sociocultural instruction and community college students

Abstract

During the summer of 2021, we taught a series of lessons on social media literacy during a 6-week summer bridge program designed to prepare students for their first year of community college. Community college students represent nearly 40% of all U.S. undergraduates (AACC, 2022), with nearly 50% of all first-generation college students attending community college (Cataldi et al., 2018). However, community college students are rarely participants in research studies on media or information literacy (Latham et al., 2022), including in this journal. We also specifically focused on social media literacy, a topic not typically addressed in schools (Higdon, 2022), even though young adults are regularly engaging with social media, including as a source for news and information about the world (Anderson & Jiang, 2018; Robb, 2017). This study was designed in part to fill these gaps.