Category: Digital literacy

I was working on the revision of our textbook today and focused the cyberbullying content. This topic has been a favorite since a student with this interest got me into doing research in this area. There are some issues that make decisions as to how teachers should address this problem kind of interesting. First, cyberbullying very seldom happens when teachers have responsibility for monitoring student behavior. The bully and the victim know each other through school, but cyberbullying most often happens when students are not in school. This can make it a tough call to take action that involves reprimands as part of school because parents may take the position that such action oversteps the appropriate authority of the school. As I remember some of the legal positions that allow action, the school can argue that there are consequences that affect the victim’s behavior while at school. Of course, this has to be the case.

Today I encountered a second issue while trying to argue a second challenge. Victims can be targets of some form of bullying as a consequence of religion, sexual orientation, or politics. Educators probably recognize that these are issues that they can be expected to avoid or at least be very careful with in their classrooms.

The inclusion of politics on my list of topics to treat with care probably does not surprise educators, but how is this relevant to cyberbullying? I decided to include it in the comments I was adding to my material on cyberbullying after reading a study by Huang and colleagues. Here is the section I wrote.

Topics and differences of opinion that can trigger bullying may be difficult for educators to address without stepping over what others see as boundaries. Such topics would include religion, politics, and sexuality. For example, after the election of 2016, researchers published findings (Huang & Cornell, 2019) relating differences in teasing and bullying among adolescents to the favored candidate in the district within which students attended school. It is easy to imagine how students could be disappointed when their teachers seemed to ignore what the students perceived as hurtful taunts. Efforts at intervention, no matter how carefully expressed, could easily be misconstrued by others emotionally involved in a position. How would parents react if bullies claimed teachers were being critical of student use of the same behaviors everyone was witnessing on television? You are living in this same world and can imagine or have witnessed students picking up on the name-calling politicians employed. What to say when this language is used in your classroom and perhaps to mock students who have strong opinions?

Here is what I avoided saying. The study contrasted bullying behaviors following several elections as a function of the political party most commonly represented in school districts. The election of 2016 was unique for an increase in bullying behavior. Guess the political party affiliated with this differential increase in bullying.

I considered a heading for this section that read – The President is a Jerk. Don’t be like him. Despite his wife’s puzzling anti-bullying #bebest campaign which I admit really annoys me, I gave in to my professionalism and wrote something that was much more neutral. I keep trying to decide if this was the appropriate “educational” thing to do. The data are right there and aren’t we supposed to be scientifically accurate in how we educate? Maybe I will use a neutral title and report the party affiliation as identified by the researchers.

Huang, F. L., & Cornell, D. G. (2019). School teasing and bullying after the presidential election. Educational Researcher, 48(2), 69-83.

As I now remember the focus of Pariser’s “Filter bubble”, the author was concerned that by search services learning our priorities, the content appearing at the top of the hits returned to response to a search would tell us what we wanted to hear or feed our biases. Two individuals with different beliefs could conduct the same search and be told different things.

I admit that I tried various ways to demonstrate this potential bias and was unable to come up with a demonstration that worked. Pariser describes having two individuals he knew who had different political leanings conduct the same search and observing that the results were different. I attempted to conduct anonymous and self-identified searches (logged into my Google account) for the word “apple” assuming that by revealing who I was to the search service my results would be biased toward technology and the anonymous searches toward the fruit. Not luck.

Researchers using Facebook data have approached the “filter bubble” issue in a different way. They have identified users along a conservative/liberal continuum and then examined the links included in posts from these groups. In the aftermath of the election, they are providing related data graphically through what they describe as the blue feed/red feed. Assuming both sources of media bias a real, the arguments would be that we receive different slants on the facts through the history of who we are and who we friend. It seems possible these two forms of bias interact to compound the effect.