Conference Agenda

An increasingly mediatized childhood (Drotner, 2005; Livingstone & Drotner, 2008) and coming of age can no longer be thought of outside of highly digitized social contexts (Green et al., 2021; Mascheroni & Siibak, 2021). Children and adolescents need digital and media skills to function autonomously in these contexts, which they acquire in different social spaces - most frequently and first and foremost at home, followed by peer groups, school, and extracurricular activities. Studies show that media use in leisure time is more advanced than use in school, making family and peers important spaces for acquiring "informal media skills" (Drotner, 2005, pp. 47-48). When it comes to the use of technologies and the different modalities of their use, the relationships of connections and disconnections of the mentioned spaces are also interesting, e.g., school and home. Since children's and young people's everyday practices of information, knowledge, and media use, and of course learning, reading, homework, seminar, and project work, as well as self-expression, socializing, playing, etc., are constructed alongside mass media or increasingly through social media, it is necessary to understand what role the sources mentioned above and spheres of activity play for children and adolescents in shaping both their diverse media repertoires and their subjectivities more generally.

Particular attention should also be paid here to the question of gendered digital and media practices. As we know from existing research, despite equality and gender mainstreaming, women and girls still have fewer opportunities to use ICT effectively, even though access to and availability of new technologies has increased significantly. Moreover, gender gaps in digital inclusion likely lead to gender inequalities in other areas, such as labour markets, fair-paying jobs, etc. (Mariscal et al. 2019).

If we are to achieve gender equality as proposed in objective five of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (United Nations, 2015), we must work to eliminate gender inequality, including the gaps in media and digital literacy (Buckingham, 2011; Livingstone and Bovill, 2013).

Regarding education, girls are, on average, more successful than boys. Data show that girls outperform boys at all levels of education. In recent decades, they have also advanced into prestigious disciplines such as medicine and law, which were historically male strongholds (Bourdieu, 2001). However, despite this success of girls and women in the educational field, a closer look at the available data shows that we are still witnessing gendered educational choices; i. e., young women show more interest in humanities, social sciences, education, nursing professions like social and health care, or administrative work; on the other side, young men choose computer science, mathematics, natural sciences, engineering, construction, and production and technologies) (Tašner & Rožman, 2015).

The reasons for this lie in the conventional images of masculinity and femininity (Bourdieu, 2001) that contribute to our expectations of boys and girls, which essentially also shape expectations of and perceptions of their parents, including their digital and media skills and abilities. The socialization of boys and girls is gendered not only because their parents' expectations of them are gendered but also because mothers and fathers have different skills and capitals or are perceived differently by their children. One of the contexts in which gender and generational differences appear to have a strong influence relates to digital and media literacy (Buckingham, 2003; Buckingham et al., 2005; Livingstone & Bovill, 2013). Our findings from a qualitative part of a Slovenian research project suggest that there appear to be gendered views of parental technology literacy among school children. Several gendered positions on parental use of technology and media emerge from semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted online with 67 primary and secondary school students across Slovenia.

In times of increased writing, social networks have become new forums for discussion in which current affairs are debated and opinions are disseminated. Twitter is one of the most popular networks, with more than 400 million users per day (Tankovska, 2022), which positions it among the first forums for the exchange of opinions, debate and discussion today. Many authors have criticized the role of social networks as media for the dissemination of ideas that promote inequality, leading to the perpetuation of traditional gender roles, racism or hate towards certain groups (Fox et al., 2015; Ging and Siapera, 2019). However, Twitter has also exercised a fundamental role in the social struggle with movements in favor of gender equality (Baer, 2016; Baker-Plummer and Baker-Plummer, 2017). The intentional use of inclusive language is one of the forms of feminist activism that, at times, must confront a conservative and academicist attitude that is promoted from linguistic institutions, perpetuating stereotypical gender roles (Iranzo-Cabrera and Gozálvez-Pérez 2021). It is amply demonstrated that inclusive language serves to force social change from a linguistic change and, therefore, the effectiveness of its use against discrimination is proven (Horvath et al., 2016; Koeser et al., 2015).

The language used in these new platforms to communicate is known as digitalk (Turner, 2010), a specific code for digital communications with characteristics that differ from the standard written norm. Within this new form of communication, textisms are common, i.e., contractions and different spellings to the standard that are used intentionally and have been developed to save time and space when writing (De Jonge and Kemp 2012,). Among them, the use of -@ or -x as an inclusive gender marker, which have a strong presence in digital communication in Spanish, especially among communities of learners, stand out (Salinas, 2020). In this situation between inclusive innovations and respect for the indications from the academies, teachers are a key element. Several investigations confirm that teachers have a privileged position to favor inclusion and that they are a model for their students (Sarrasin et al., 2012).

Considering its importance, many researchers have focused on the study of the promotion of inclusive language in physical teaching spaces (Mitton et al., 2021; Vervecken et al., 2015), however, there are few studies that examine the influence of the use of inclusive language by teachers when using new forms of digital communication. The role of social networks and their high capacity to disseminate ideas and content, turn spaces such as Twitter into a channel where teachers can collaborate, share experiences, train and establish new professional contacts (Xing and Gao, 2018), search for new ideas or procedures (Staudt Willet, 2019), acquire a sense of community (Carpenter and Krutka, 2014) or develop their teaching identity (Carpenter et al., 2016).

Once the background of the proposed study has been established, the research objectives are the following: First, how often do teachers use textisms as inclusive language procedures in their digital communications on Twitter? Secondly, what relationship exists between these textisms with inclusive value and their frequency of appearance in the corpus analyzed; thirdly and finally, what statistical significance (keyness) do the textisms used as inclusive language mechanisms present in the corpus under study, that is, what social relevance do these terms acquire, and consequently, the inclusive language mechanisms they use, among the community of speakers analyzed.