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Social media has become a dominant force in civic life amid widespread concerns about its role in political polarisation and in the spread of misinformation. To prepare citizens to take on these challenges, we need civic education that teaches youth to be capable and responsible consumers, conveyors and producers of online information. To do so, teachers must position students as epistemic agents, fostering the skills they need to engage with online information. In this article, we present the first iteration of a design-based research project on social media and civic action. The project prepares high school students in rural, urban and suburban settings located in Northern California (USA) to engage with issues that resonate with them, to critically examine information about these issues from online sources and to use social media as a vehicle to connect with, inform and mobilise the public. We present the basic design principles that teachers have used to support apt epistemic performance, focusing on the epistemic aims (creating knowledge products that inspire civic action), ideals (taking personal responsibility for the accuracy of information when posting) and reliable processes (sourcing, fact checking and correctly representing information) embedded in their units of instruction. Drawing on teacher interviews and curriculum, we explore the affordances of the curriculum to promote civic action by leveraging student engagement in social media, while also challenging them to critically examine how knowledge is produced and disseminated on social media. We conclude with a discussion of how this work intersects with the aims and methods of social pedagogy.

Many urgent problems that societies currently face—from climate change to a global pandemic—require citizens to engage with scientific information as members of democratic societies as well as to solve problems in their personal lives. Most often, to solve their epistemic aims (aims directed at achieving knowledge and understanding) regarding such socio-scientific issues, individuals search for information online, where there exists a multitude of possibly relevant and highly interconnected sources of different perspectives, sometimes providing conflicting information. The paper provides a review of the literature aimed at identifying (a) constraints and affordances that scientific knowledge and the online information environment entail and (b) individuals' cognitive and motivational processes that have been found to hinder, or conversely, support practices of engagement (such as critical information evaluation or two-sided dialogue). Doing this, a conceptual framework for understanding and fostering what we call online engagement with scientific information is introduced, which is conceived as consisting of individual engagement (engaging on one's own in the search, selection, evaluation, and integration of information) and dialogic engagement (engaging in discourse with others to interpret, articulate and critically examine scientific information). In turn, this paper identifies individual and contextual conditions for individuals' goal-directed and effortful online engagement with scientific information. ; Peer Reviewed