This summer, Diego Guerrero ’18 has a Gibbons grant to help a Bowdoin education professor study how teachers across the country are using social media to create networks and to learn from one another.

“We’re looking at what ideas and issues they’re talking about and how they are using Twitter to help each other,” Guerrero said.

The project #TeacherTweets, overseen by Associate Professor of Education Doris Santoro, is following 507 accounts of K-12 teachers. TeacherTweets has, since 2014, searched more than 550,000 tweets to see which words come up the most and the least. In addition, part of the project involves taking a closer look at the words associated with morality, such as need, love, know, and good.

The project website explains that the goal is to not only understand how teachers use Twitter as a mode of professional learning, but also how they’re making moral claims on the site, and what their tweeting practices reveal about their beliefs on what constitutes good work.

Guerrero is making data visualizations to see which teacher accounts are more closely linked—in that they share or retweet or reply to one another’s postings—and how that might reveal the teachers’ beliefs about teaching.

A computer science and math major, Guerrero said he’s interested in education and is considering a career teaching math.