Waking Students Up to Systemic Bias: Using Wikipedia From a Critical Pedagogy Perspective

Waking students up to injustice and systemic bias, which doesn’t necessarily impact them personally, is of concern to many within the higher education sector. Using a Freirean conceptual framework this paper demonstrates that using Wikipedia in a particular way can be effective in doing just that. Students in a first-year seminar module in Ireland learning about the social construction of knowledge were asked to explore topics on Wikipedia that they had a personal interest in and present back to the class on what they found. In reflective learning journals it was evident that the students became more aware of systemic bias, not just in Wikipedia but in other areas of their lives and beyond their lived experience. The authors present this as a potentially useful way to engage with privileged students to transform their understanding of systemic bias, develop empathy for others’ lived experience and develop critical thinking skills.