ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the place of social media within a 21st-century literacy discourse in Australian classrooms. It draws data from a larger research project and a phenomenological methodology to interpret a series of narratives from three teachers, to better understand an event involving the use of social media within a group of Year 7 students, which occurred in a school in Victoria, Australia, in 2015. In Australia, children are more commonly being equipped with powerful technological tools for communication and learning. Laptops, tablets and smart phones are only tools, but the power they possess, and the influence they can create within social groups and communities, is vast. U. Beck and E. Gernsheim argue that a "social change over the past thirty years involves identity be constantly performed and enacted anew and that individuals are required to stage manage their own biographies".
