Shaiju Vadakkemury is currently pursuing his PhD in the field of social media literacy at the University of Westminster, London. He completed Media Managment, MA from the same University. Prior to this, he served as the founding director of St Pauls Institute of Communication Education (SPICE), an upcoming media school in Mumbai for five years. While in office, he successfully launched new courses, handled the business development and entered partnership with reputed national and international institutes. He is an industry certified professional in Public Relations and Media Management from the Press Club of Mumbai.

Social media literacy for empowering children with new literacy skills for reading, writing and interacting in the networked digital setting: An Action Research Study of teenage students in Mumbai

As social media are increasingly embedded in children’s daily life, the challenge is to empower them with media literacy that suits today’s networked media environment. This study has two dimensions. On the one hand, the study aims to develop a robust social media literacy toolkit for the classrooms in India. The research will examine the result and the impact of social media literacy in Mumbai Schools. It will try to understand how social media literacy can enhance “participatory culture”, self-representation, and empowerment among children in the Indian context. Based on the study, the research will propose a social media literacy toolkit for implementation in high schools in India and invite support from policymakers, governments, media organizations, and NGOs. The second dimension of this study is to draw out critical reflection on this contribution and how it fits into the wider perspective of media literacy. Based on the process of developing and implementing social media literacy, I aim to develop reflective and conceptive material on media literacy