The subject English as a foreign language and the use of literary texts within this context is often said to promote general learning aims beyond international communication, especially those that have to do with social awareness and social change. There has been little discussion so far of what particular social issues need to be addressed in local language classrooms, and how exactly literature can help. We therefore see a need to ask the experts who are expected to put these ideas into practice: the teachers.
We will report from a survey with English language teachers from Viennese secondary schools (13 - 19-yo) that asks what they perceive as burning social issues that their students face and the agency they see in their own role to help students deal with them. We will then report from the focus group interviews following this survey, in which participants discuss the survey results and debate what possible roles literary texts (understood in a broad sense to include a variety of media) can play in a particular classroom setting in order to broaden learners' awareness of social issues and enable social engagement in their communities.
With this as a starting point, we will then discuss two examples of literature in the digital sphere, gaming and fan activism, as particularly innovative ways of engaging learners in social awareness and change.
Digital games have become a prominent medium in the classroom within the last decade – not just through students' media preferences but increasingly as a pedagogical tool, i.e. digital game-based learning (DGBL). As games reflect different ideologies, cultural norms, or human biases in their realization (Flanagan 2009), students' faculties for reflection need to be engaged. Yet, Mekler et al. (2018) suggest that unguided, leisurely play outside of school rarely results in moments of higher-level transformative and critical reflection, which is why critical video game literacy could be honed through the instructions of educators in formal settings (Jones 2018, Rüth & Kaspar 2021).
Fan activism is a phenomenon for social change with a unique approach to educating and mobilising people, youth in particular, towards civic engagement by tapping into popular culture content and the affective ties, practices and networks of fannish engagement formed around it. Central to this phenomenon and its success is a process of "mapping" between content world and real world, a "conscious rhetorical strategy" (Jenkins 2012), in which elements of a narrative (most frequently a fantasy text) are put in relation to complex issues of social justice and sustainability. The most prominent fan activist organisation, Fandom Forward, has been organising fan activist campaigns and creating youth-oriented toolkits for over 15 years for a wide range of different causes, tapping an equally wide range of popular content worlds.
Case studies from both areas will be used to point out the potential of how these narratives can engender students' awareness of social issues in the context of the English language classroom, and how this awareness can be translated into actual engagement.
