Abstract:

Citizen participation has become a core dimension for the improvement of democracy so education for participation is a central issue. Previous studies have underlined that, despite the numerous programmes of education for citizen participation, educative practices show significant difficulties, so different authors have highlighted the need for the school to contribute, through the design of the curriculum and classroom activities, to enhance the competence of participation. This paper analyses a teaching innovation project conducted with 80 students of the Degree in Primary Education, at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. The goal of the project was to develop a practice of participation through the appropriation of social media by the students, articulating the debates on three aspects: education, participation and communication. Specifically, students were asked to discuss –through a group created on Facebook for this purpose– about two topics: 1) the appropriation of social media for citizen participation, and 2) the challenges faced by the school as scenario of processes of education for participation. Following a critical discourse analysis, the debates were analysed both in their contents and form, in order to evaluate the appropriations (uses and associations of senses) of social media as a resource of education for participation. There is a generalised dual perspective of social media, which are considered tools that can be used in a positive or negative way, so the attitude of the people using them must be taken into account. Social media are associated, in the one hand, to the improvement of citizen participation but, on the other hand, discourses underline that main uses of social media in everyday life are focused on leisure and enjoyment, considering that it may be excessive and quite banal and identifying risks on their uses such as misinformation or fake news. Consequently, there are both sceptical views on the real impact of social media in the transformation of politics and optimistic points of view that consider social media as sources of power that can promote citizen participation. Regarding the challenges faced by the school as scenario of education for participation, it can be stated that they are one of the main institutions in charge of the promotion of critical thinking and the training of new generations in citizen participation. In this sense, social media are seen as a method to transmit culture in an updated and attractive way and some students consider that, nowadays, educational centres are getting more involved to adapt to social media and use them as a learning method. However, despite these positions, the uses of social media developed by the students as part of the practice, tended to be limited and quite formal: for example, in general, they did not use Facebook's resources such as the “Likes” or emojis and limited themselves to making long comments, without actually generating a real exchange of opinions between the participants. Instead of a dialogue, the result was a series of monologues with almost no interaction. We conclude that, although students have a complex perspective of social media and recognise their importance as a source for improving a culture of participation within educational spaces, the use they do of these ICTs' resources are significantly mediated by the formality of the educative scenario and its evaluation dynamics, as well as their lack of a culture of participation.

Keywords:

Citizen participation, social media, discourse analysis, students, higher education.