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Negotiating Student-Instructor Relationships on Facebook

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All young instructors know it: that dreaded moment when a student, former or current, adds you as a "friend" on Facebook. We encourage students to call us by our first names, and cultivate a sense of informal comfort in the classroom. As young people closer in age to our students than our advisors, we also realize that Facebook has become a near-universal social networking outlet, filled not only with friends but cousins, colleagues, and (gulp) parents.

Theorizing Social Media in Pop Culture Contexts

Screenshot from class blog

Social media has long stood out to me as something rhetoric instructors should discuss in the classroom. Aside from email, it is perhaps the most commonly used technology by our students and ourselves. Increasingly, it’s the medium through which we access news stories and forms of information and promotion. Yet, because it raises questions about the overlap between public and private and what’s acceptable or desired in terms of pedagogy, I’ve often hesitated to use it.

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