Making Social Policy Relevant Through Social Media

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on May 1, 2015

Dr. Casey Bohrman (@CaseyBohrman) is an assistant professor in the Department of Undergraduate Social Work at West Chester University. In this blog post, she writes about how she uses blogging tools such as Twitter and Tumblr in her social welfare policy courses to engage student in current events and practice advocacy skills.

During the winter of 2013, I frequently listened to Tell Me More, an NPR radio program focused on issues impacting people of color.  I noticed that many of the experts on the show came from the “blogosphere” or gained their standing through prolific tweeting.  Wanting my social policy class to be relevant to modern policy discussions, I decided to have students join Twitter as part of a class assignment in Spring 2014.

Because Twitter is limited to 140 characters, I also wanted students to have the opportunity to comment on social issues in a more comprehensive fashion.  Inspired by David Jaffee, a sociologist from the University of North Florida who blogs about his perspective on current socio-economic issues, I decided to have my students also create blogs. The first time I taught the class we used WordPress, as it was the site recommended to me by our librarian.  In future classes, I used Tumblr as it was more user-friendly and allowed for easier incorporation of audio-visual material.

I asked students create a Twitter account and a blog about a particular area of interest, such as mental health policy or how social policy might directly impact women.  I asked students to tweet several times per week and post a blog entry once a month about current issues in their policy area.  I also asked them to follow a range of accounts from traditional news outlets, advocacy organization, and people directly experiencing an issue.  One of the strengths of using Twitter to learn about policy is that it gives students a broader and more current perspective on an issue than they can get from a textbook.   It is particularly important for social workers to hear and learn from the perspectives of people who directly impacted by a social issue. For example, there are a number of users who identify with Black Twitter (such as @Feministajones, @Karnythia, and @TheBlackVoice) who provide important perspectives on racial issues.