Influencers to the Classroom: Teaching with Media Culture and Multimodal Humanities for Socially Engaged Education

In contemporary digital societies, popular media - social media, influencers, streaming platforms, video games, podcasts, memes, and AI-generated content - have become central spaces where people, especially young learners, construct identities, negotiate meanings, and engage with pressing social issues. A growing body of research has examined multimodal media and its role in education, documenting how digital and visual texts reshape literacy practices and classroom engagement. Building on this foundation, these multimodal environments shape cultural practices, language, values, and public discourse, yet they remain underused as pedagogical resources: much educational research still treats popular media as an object of critique rather than a tool for teaching, leaving a gap in evidence-based frameworks for integrating it into formal learning.This Research Topic explores how media culture and multimodal humanities can support innovative pedagogies that connect learners’ everyday media experiences with formal education. Unlike research topics that examine specific curricular subjects such as history or social studies education, this collection centers on everyday media culture itself - across humanities, language, and arts education broadly - as the pedagogical resource. Rather than viewing popular media as a distraction, we propose treating it as a resource for building critical thinking, creativity, ethical reflection, intercultural dialogue, historical consciousness, and active citizenship. Drawing on education, the humanities, applied linguistics, media studies, and digital learning, this collection advances research on how multimodal cultural texts can enrich teaching while addressing societal challenges such as misinformation, digital ethics, and inclusion.We welcome interdisciplinary contributions spanning humanities, language, literature, history, social science, arts, and media education. Priority themes include democratic citizenship, diversity and inclusion, sustainability, misinformation, hate speech, digital ethics, artificial intelligence, cultural heritage, historical memory, and human rights, approached through innovative pedagogy.We are especially interested in studies of multimodal learning, digital storytelling, visual culture, social media practices, game-based learning, fan communities, creative production, and emerging technologies in first, second, foreign, heritage, bilingual, and multilingual language education. Contributions from formal, non-formal, and informal settings - spanning early childhood through adult education - are all welcome.This Research Topic invites empirical studies, theoretical and conceptual papers, systematic reviews, design-based research, and case studies demonstrating how popular media and multimodal humanities can transform educational practice. The aim is a research agenda that positions contemporary media culture not merely as an object of analysis but as an actionable pedagogical resource - yielding practical frameworks, teaching models, or policy recommendations for inclusive, critical, and socially engaged education. Topic editors: Laura Triviño-Cabrera, Jorge Chauca García, Simona Frabotta Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/85027/influencers-to-the-classroom-teaching-with-media-culture-and-multimodal-humanities-for-socially-engaged-education