Rethinking educational spaces: A review of literature on urban youth and social media

This paper serves as an exploration into the landscape of social media use in educational research as it relates to urban youth in the United States. Initially, a social and learning context is provided that situates the implications social media may have for urban youth within formal and informal educational spaces. The paper offers a discussion of social media and recent studies in educational research as they relate to formal and informal learning spaces followed by implications of social media for these environments. A case is presented to reconceptualize a teaching and learning process with that of a social media process thereby connecting the formal academic space with the informal emergent educational space afforded by social media. To this point we have attempted to establish a social context of education for urban youth.