This paper serves as an exploration into the landscape of social media use in educational research as it relates to urban youth in the United States. Initially, a social and learning context is provided that situates the implications social media may have for urban youth within formal and informal educational spaces. The paper offers a discussion of social media and recent studies in educational research as they relate to formal and informal learning spaces followed by implications of social media for these environments. A case is presented to reconceptualize a teaching and learning process with that of a social media process thereby connecting both the formal academic space with the informal emergent educational space afforded by social media. To this point we have attempted to establish a social context of education for urban youth.