Experiences with Educational Subreddits Part 1

         Last week we were tasked to begin looking into educators’ use of social media platforms; Bret Staudt Willet, a Ph.D candidate in Educational Psychology and Educational Technology at Michigan State University, kicked off our assignment with a easily digestible and engaging presentation on his work in relation to this very topic. In preparation for Willet’s presentation we read an article that he co-wrote on identifying learning spaces within a teacher-focused Twitter hashtag. I was certainly surprised to learn how Twitter was repurposed as a community for educators. I was even more surprised, however, when Willet told my class that he has since started researching educators on the social media platform, Reddit. 

          While I had never used Reddit, I certainly knew of the site in the same way that you know of that one person who everyone tells you not to get involved with because they’re bad news. Yet from Willet’s experience, I learned that even though there are pockets on the site that you should avoid, it was easy to do so by only following and interacting with specific subreddits, or subcommunities, on Reddit. Moreover, one of the reasons that Reddit can be such a dumpster fire is the same reason that allows educators to freely post their true opinions: anonymity. No one who might care what you post about online can connect what you say on Reddit to your other social media accounts, thereby enabling an honesty that Willet felt as a breath of fresh air in comparison to Twitter which does use your real name and face.

Given my complete lack of knowledge about Reddit for anything other than borderline offensive posts/jokes, I quickly decided to dive headfirst into educational subreddits. I’m only being slightly figurative when I say, “dive headfirst,” for I ended up following every general education themed subreddit I saw as well as all the ELA specific ones. These subreddits are: r/edtech, r/education, r/teaching, r/Teachers, r/englishteachers, r/ELAteachers, and r/teachingresources. In my ever-present genius, I decided to follow a couple non-education related subreddits too because they seemed cool haha. As one might have guessed based on the sarcasm of the last sentence, having the posts of all of these subreddits appear on my home page (or as I like to think of it, my dashboard) was quite overwhelming. I could only go on Reddit for about 30 minutes a day before I started feeling an information overload—although this was perhaps because I knew that I was doing this for a class and was trying too hard to analytically assess all of the educational subreddits.

To help combat this sense of “oh-fudge-how-do-I-collate-all-of-this-information-into-a-coherent-blog-post,” I read James Paul Gee’s much reference article entitled “Semiotic Social Spaces and Affinity Spaces,” which defines both of the titular spaces, and the article entitled “Lifelong Learning Ecologies: Linking Formal and Informal Contexts of Learning in the Digital Era” in the British Journal of Educational Technology. Gee’s explanations helped me move away from using the word “community” when referencing online interactions—although I know he suggests using this terminology for in person classrooms too—because it is often neither an effective, nor particularly fruitful, framework through which we can categorize and analyze different online interactions. By utilizing different language, such as Semiotic Social Spaces (SSS) and Affinity Spaces, I have a better understanding of how communicative competence manifests itself in a digital landscape. The article on learning ecologies also gave me a new perspective to view the relationships between “formal, non-formal and informal learning experiences” (1615). Both of these changed the way I viewed online learning experiences overall, they didn’t necessarily help me order my thoughts on my Reddit experience. That was eventually solved by talking (virtually of course) to my professor and Willet himself!

From those conversations, I realized that I was assuming we had to make more decisive conclusions than this first post called for and that I was perhaps following too many subreddits. Or rather, it would be more beneficial for the purposes of this assignment, to focus in on two subreddits rather than the seven I had amassed. Going forward, I plan on focusing on two larger subreddits, r/Teachers and r/teaching, as well as one smaller discipline specific subreddit, r/ELAteachers, because it doesn’t post daily.

Having said all of that, I think I was able to get a basic sense of teachers’ use of educational subreddits. I regularly saw posts that were labeled as “vent” or even “resignation,” which meant that the content of the posts centered around a frustrating experience that the teacher needed to vent about or around why the teacher posting decided to resign from their job as an educator; this stood out to my classmate Brooke who also notes this slightly irksome occurrence in her post on Reddit. What teachers were venting about often had to do with parents who were complaining about distance learning and/or expecting teachers to be perfect in every way 24/7. When I asked Willet if he had seen an increase in this content due to the COVID-19 pandemic, he remarked that he focuses on the r/Teachers subreddit and while the vent content posts have increased the interactions between users are still positive, as in positive interactions around negative experiences. This description really helped me reframe my thoughts and critically recall the observations I was witnessing. From my observations over this past week, I found that the interactions between users were both negative and positive. On the one hand, users would validate the original poster’s (OP) frustration and/or other emotions which I count as a positive interaction around negative experiences. On the other hand, they would often do so by citing their own personal negative experiences with the topic OP discussed which I found to be a negative interaction because it recreated and amplified the negativity of the post writ large.

An aspect of the subreddits I enjoyed was seeing someone post a general question or observation from their own classrooms that then spawned a discussion thread. There was one discussion which is linked here, that discussed how, for some, teaching is just a job rather than a lifestyle, meaning that some just did what they had to do and nothing more (as in, no clubs, no real working on the weekends, etc). I didn’t agree with half of the commenters, but it was interesting to see those different perspectives. Another discussion which I have linked here and is pictured below, is asking for advice on how to teach students to use social media responsibly—an interesting and relevant topic. The answers seemed to be helpful, but I haven’t looked too deeply into the recommended sites. 

A second discussion that I read about today involved grading and how one teacher’s class looked when she broke the students into different categories. I’m not sure I can explain it better than that so I linked it here and have a picture of both the original post as well as a particularly interesting response below.

Lastly, another discussion I found today was really cool because it was a teacher who started in 1976 that got recommended to Reddit and offered advice for anyone who wants it. Here’s the link and the picture’s below.

I acknowledge that this post is quite long, but I have one more short point to discuss: my own interactions with users! I didn’t think I was going to actively respond to anyone, but I answered two questions on r/ELAteachers and have gotten some upvotes and nice responses.

The questions and my responses (I’m Education4Liberation because Paulo Freire is awesome) as well as how other users reacted to me are pictured below.

One Last Note: I’m a little shocked at myself that I didn’t put, or need, any footnotes for this post. I kind of miss them haha.