In September 2022, worldwide media were fulfilled of news about the terrifying death of a young woman called Mahsa Amini. She died in a hospital after being arrested and beaten by the Morality Police and it caused thousands of protests not only in Iran, but all around the world. The revolution that started on Iranian women fighting for their rights was an historical event that brought all Iranian women and men, who were against the regimen, together to protest. These events were shown in different social media sites such as TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, etc. So, everyone could know what was happening. Late in 2023, The European Parliament awarded Sakharov Prize posthumously to Mahsa Amini and the 'Women, Life, and Freedom' movement so the authors have created a proposal to show at schools the importance of this historical event and how to inform themselves by using social networks.
TopIntroduction: The Murder Of Mahsa Amini—Problem Of Global Dimensions
Since September 16, 2022, the media has been closely watching the social changes unfolding in Iranian society. On that day, the young Iranian woman Mahsa Amini died in a hospital after being arrested and beaten by the Morality Police for not wearing the hijab correctly (Beatrix, 2022). Not only the press and newspapers reflected the changes experienced, but also the social networks which, as we will see through this paper, have become an essential tool for the dissemination and disclosure of the protests. Not only in Iran, but in the rest of the world because it is crucial to understand the world and how interconnected problems are, as stated by Boix-Mansilla & Gardner (2007). Our current society has undergone profound changes in the last decade with the arrival of social networks and their almost daily use by a large part of the population.
Throughout our most recent history, it has been possible to understand how society has evolved in response to different social changes by adapting to the needs that have arisen. One of these changes is the use of new communicative strategies and how social movements are essential in social transformation (Pleyers and Benavides, 2019). For this reason, we are going to investigate about how social networks are being used in the protests, to inform about what is happening and how the Iranian society tries to coexist and move forward despite the conflict; thus, analyzing the social transformation that Iranian society has undergone recently. With this information, it would be easier to obtain data to spread what is happening around the world trough a historical and sociological perspective which are crucial as explained by Gómez-Barreto et al., (2020) in their research about reflective learning through multicultural dimensions.
It is crucial to understand the development of this chapter as a teaching tool because, as it has been explained before, social media is used by children and teenagers from an early age. Young people are considered ‘digital natives’ but, even though this consideration is spread in society, they do not really know how to use or interpret all the information shown in their social media. Romero-López et al., (2022) explained the knowledge these new generations have regarding everything related to the internet and social media but also how unaware of all their dangers they are. For the reasons stated above, teachers must state in their methodologies the importance of globalization for interconnecting what is happening in the world to understand our current history and even the future events that might occur (Boix-Mansilla & Gardner, 2007) and how they can be critically informed by using social media.