Critical engagement with school media for Understanding the nature of connection: Reimagining school social media practice

It is common for Australian schools to have a presence on social media for the purpose of connecting with the school community and often the wider public. This practice involves the sharing of children’s data (e.g. images, text and location data), on their behalf, to generate curated narratives for connection and promotion. We discuss social media use within schools as one example of how children are datafied by default and raise key questions about how/can schools protect children’s data when shared publicly on social media platforms owned by commercial entities? And how are children’s bests interests assessed and considered in the development of procedures, policy or practice?  



We begin the presentation by conceptualising school social media as ‘schoolfeeds’ to promote a more critical engagement with this seemingly banal practice. We present data from an ongoing research project that explores schoolfeeds across Australian schools. The project examines policy and governance structures, sharing practices and ultimately the ways children and school communities are made (in)visible, (mis)represented and (mis)treated through schoolfeed data. Drawing on a data justice lens, we present findings from a hybrid forum that brought together stakeholder perspectives as a form of collective thought, learning, experimentation and reimagination of school policy and practice. We explore the (im)possibilites of such an approach for making visible the intersects of children’s digital rights, datafication and education policy and practice, together with implications for future research and practice.