Where does your audience hang out?
What exactly must they do?
Students will investigate digital activism as a form of civic participation and political power, examining how social media and online tools have enabled new forms of resistance, solidarity, and community organising. This unit connects to Māori traditions of protest, hīkoi, and political action in the digital age.
Scaffold support: Provide campaign planning templates and analysis frameworks for entry-level learners. Offer extension tasks requiring students to critically evaluate a real activist campaign's digital strategy and propose evidence-based improvements.
ELL / ESOL: Pre-teach political and digital literacy vocabulary. Leverage students' knowledge of activism in their home countries as a comparative lens. Allow discussions in home language to process complex political ideas before English writing tasks.
Inclusion: Use multimodal texts — videos, images, social media posts — to make political concepts accessible. Neurodiverse learners benefit from structured analysis frameworks and choice in how they engage with potentially charged political content. Create a safe classroom environment where diverse political perspectives are respected.
Mātauranga Māori lens: Situate digital activism in the long whakapapa of Māori political resistance — from the Kotahitanga movement to the 1975 Māori land march, to contemporary digital campaigns for Te Tiriti justice. Explore how hui, karanga, and whaikōrero function as forms of community organising that preceded digital networks, and how Māori activists have strategically adopted digital tools while maintaining cultural grounding. Discuss tino rangatiratanga as the ultimate goal of political participation.
Prior knowledge: Best used after foundational social studies and civics concepts. Benefits from prior exposure to media literacy.