Teaching using Instagram: Insights from the #InstaPoetry project in Montreal

Teaching using Instagram: Insights from the #InstaPoetry project in Montreal

Dr. Amélie Lemieux, University of Montreal, Faculty of Education

Nov 15, 2024 at 10:30am-12:00 (EST)

McGill Education Building; Room #133

Young people engage daily with various social media platforms to communicate with one another across the globe. Adolescents not only share text, but also use images and sound to express themselves on platforms such as Instagram and TikTok to provide access to user-created content. The recent emergence of InstaPoetry—poetry with images on Instagram—has been part of such communication and provides an entry point into adolescents’ engagement with literature and the arts. Limited research exists, however, on how this literacy practice, paired with virtual and in-person museum visits, influences young people’s self-expression. In addition, there is little known about how teachers can incorporate these literacy practices in the classroom. This international project (Montreal, Edmonton, Brisbane), funded by a SSHRC IDG grant, investigates this phenomenon. The presentation reports on qualitative results from the Montreal-based research site of the #InstaPoetry project.

About the speaker

Amélie Lemieux, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor at the University of Montreal’s Faculty of Education. Her research interests include: reading research, literature teaching, and multimodality, all informed by critical social justice epistemologies and posthumanist perspectives. A bronze Lieutenant-Governor’s Medal Recipient of Quebec, she received SSHRC and FRQSC funding to investigate adolescents’ digital literacy practices and meaning-making processes. Her work has been published in such journals as Reading Research Quarterly, Professional Development in Education, Discourse, Language Arts, and British Journal of Educational Technology.