Teaching Using Twitter: A Tool for Grappling with Medieval and Early Modern Sources

Students often struggle to deal with medieval source materials. They are often composed in an unfamiliar language or accessed through dated translations. A key skill for students to learn when reading and notetaking, as well as for their own writing, is writing a thesis statement: a sentence summing up the argument of a text. This can often prove challenging, especially when synthesising complex ideas into a single, concise sentence. By using social media style activities in my classroom, I encourage students to summarize medieval and early modern texts in their own words and be creative while doing so. This has had a positive impact on participation, with students eager to explain the reasoning behind their tweets and memes in class. In this article, I present three case studies of using Twitterstyle assignments that I designed and taught at University College London (UCL) and King’s College London (KCL) in 2018–19 and 2019–20.