ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how young people's proactive ecological identity can be constructed and supported via their interaction in and with social media as currently one of the first social engagement platforms for youth. To make their voices strong and heard in the future, it's vital to equip young people with deep knowledge and up-to-date digital tools. The suggested integrated pedagogical approach to constructing proactive ecological identity encompasses three stages:
Facilitating the profound comprehension of ecological information in media.
Using social media as a tool for analyzing ecological information within the global communication framework.
Setting local ecological agenda using social media as an interaction platform.
The proactive ecological identity is viewed here as a person's relation to their social world, which leads to an engagement in ecological community concerns.
This chapter will elaborate on a cascade activation model of communication flows that help us understand the role of social media in contemporary hierarchies of environmental information. It applies Bloom's Digital Taxonomy to examine students’ progress through the educational and actional levels, building on what they have been learning and using their skills as the foundation for the active engagement in ecological hazards of their communities. Tools for social media inclusion encompass the analysis of production and reception formats, linguistic devices, multimedia resources, and content potential through phrasal connections and hashtags. Finally, this chapter describes case studies of the European projects to illustrate the outcomes and potential of youth's proactive engagement in the endangered global ecological landscape.
