How can we design social media to be inclusive?

Suitable for 14-19-year olds (secondary and high schools, and college), this article and accompanying activity sheet can be used in the classroom and at home.

This resource links to KS4 and KS5 linguistics.

It can also be used as a careers resource and links to Gatsby Benchmarks:
Gatsby Benchmark 2: Learning from career and labour market information
Gatsby Benchmark 4: Linking curriculum learning to careers

• This teaching resource explains the work of Professor Nelya Koteyko and Dr Martine van Driel, linguists at Queen Mary University of London in the UK. They are analysing autistic user experiences of online social networking to improve inclusivity of social media platforms.

• This resource also contains interviews with Nelya and Martine. If your students have questions for Nelya or Martine, they can send them to them online. All they need to do is to go to the article online (see the Futurum link below), scroll down to the end and type in the question(s). Nelya and Martine will reply!

• The activity sheet provides ‘talking points’ (based on Bloom’s Taxonomy) to prompt students to reflect on Nelya and Martine’s research and challenges them to discover how predictable their choice of language is through a game of applied linguistics bingo.

This resource was first published on Futurum Careers, a free online resource and magazine aimed at encouraging 14-19-year-olds worldwide to pursue careers in science, tech, engineering, maths, medicine (STEM) and social sciences, humanities and the arts for people and the economy (SHAPE).

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