Building Social Capital Through Social Networking

4.18.10 By Neema Avashia

There’s a big debate among teachers these days—to add, or not to add? Should current and former students be allowed to “friend” teachers on sites like Facebook? Or should the work and private realms be kept entirely separate?

It’s a complex question, and one that I think every teacher has to negotiate for him or herself. Obviously, if you decide to let kids friend you, it affects the type of content you put on your page, or the privacy settings that you apply. You also open yourself up to knowing a lot more about students’ social lives, and home lives, than you would know just through the classroom-based interactions that define most student-teacher relationships. Relationship-building is one of teaching’s core components, and yet I think that teachers are always walking a fine line in terms of maintaining professionalism while also being authentic, caring, and open in the way that you have to be to earn a young person’s trust.

That said, I’ve been thinking a lot about social capital lately. Back in grad school (waayyyy back in 2001) in Wisconsin, I had to read a lot of Pierre Bordieu, a theorist who argued that social networks have value, and that being a member of certain social networks affords power, while being excluded from those networks can also limit access to power. Bordieu theorized that there are some people in social networks who can share social capital with those outside, and serve as ‘bridges’—thus reducing inequality and diversifying power structures. Mind you, as I type all of this, I’m having nightmares about grad school classmates accusing each other of being ‘reductive’, so I apologize if any of you feel I’ve done either the theory, or the theorist, a disservice. I teach middle school; sometimes when it comes to teaching hard theories to kids, I admit that I reduce. Ask me how I teach Foucault sometime. ☺

More recently, people like Robert Putnam (author of Bowling Alone) have argued that with the decline of social institutions and community gatherings—things like Girl Scouts, Moose Lodge, block parties, etc., we’ve also seen a decline in social capital, and thus, an entrenching of existing power dynamics.

Unlike Putnam, I don’t think that we’ve lost our social institutions; I simply think that they are changing form and venue. In fact, I think that online social networking holds massive potential for building social capital, particularly within the teacher-student relationship. For example, when I post newspaper articles to my Facebook feed, if I think that they are important for youth to read, I’ll specifically comment on the post in a way that says, “Former students, check this out!” And even when I just post articles that I think are of interest to me, I often find that students (maybe out of boredom, maybe out of interest) are reading and commenting and asking questions about the content that I’m posting. Similarly, when I see job opportunities, summer programming, or events that I think are beneficial to kids, I can both post those on my page, and target individual students to encourage by posting to their individual pages.

The result? Kids have access to more information. The more information they have that comes from vetted sources (like teachers), the better equipped they are to make decisions that are going to position them for success. And they definitely don’t hesitate to take advantage of the opportunity to have me edit their papers, either! ☺

Lastly, we’ve seen a lot of coverage in the news lately about cyberbullying, and online behavior that falls far outside the realms of what we consider appropriate. Yet no one is pointing out that social networking websites are often not inter-generational, and therefore, don’t have the kinds of self-regulatory systems that interpersonal interactions do. If adults aren’t online, or aren’t in the same networks as kids, then how do kids learn right from wrong in that environment? We can’t build social capital, or social norms, if we aren’t even participating in the social network!

Building social capital is an aspect of teaching and learning that I don’t think we talk about enough. And while I don’t profess to have the answers to how we most effectively build it, I definitely wonder about the role that social networking can play in relation to the classroom, and would push you to think on it as well.