Our Methods

We are living through a moment of media change, during which more and more, seemingly “average” people are becoming authors and publishing their work to wide, appreciative audiences. They are creating videos and circulating them on YouTube. They are writing fan fiction and exchanging it on the web. They are sampling and remixing music. They are writing blogs or recording their experiences in LiveJournal. And young people–the students in your class, sometimes even the students who are sitting in the back of your class and not saying anything–are at the cutting edge of this shift towards a more participatory culture (Jenkins, Expert Voices, p. 18).

 
The NML conceptual framework includes an understanding of (3) challenges, (12) new media literacies, and (4) participatory forms. This framework guides our thinking about how to provide adults and youth with the opportunity to develop the skills, knowledge, ethical framework, and self confidence needed to be full participants in the cultural changes which are taking place in response to the influx of new media technologies, and to explore the transformations and possibilities afforded by these technologies to reshape education.

An example of participatory culture that has long operated in Brazil is the Samba schools that Seymour Papert discusses at length in Mindstorms. These schools provide a social organization for learning created for the specific purpose of performing in Rio’s carnival.  Composed of a few thousand people of various ages, learners work together collaboratively to put together their performance. 

Today, many online communities operate according to similar principles of participation and mutual learning. This is what we call participatory culture. Digitally mediated practices make visible the negotiated and co-constructed nature of students’ learning ecologies. As Jenkins et al (2009) point out, a participatory culture is one with “relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing creations with others, some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices, members who believe that their contributions matter, and members who feel some degree of social connection with one another (at least, they care what other people think about what they have created)” (pp. 5-6).

STEP TWO: Address the Challenges of Participatory Culture

A growing body of scholarship suggests potential benefits of these forms of participatory culture, including opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, a changed attitude toward intellectual property, the diversification of cultural expression, the development of skills valued in the modern workplace, and a more empowered conception of citizenship. Access to this participatory culture functions as a new form of the hidden curriculum, shaping which youth will succeed and which will be left behind as they enter school and the workplace.

Some have argued that children and youth acquire these key skills and competencies on their own by interacting with popular culture. Three concerns, however, suggest the need for policy and pedagogical interventions:

The Participation Gap — the unequal access to the opportunities, experiences, skills, and knowledge that will prepare youth for full participation in the world of tomorrow.

The Transparency Problem — The challenges young people face in learning to see clearly the ways that media shape perceptions of the world.

The Ethics Challenge — The breakdown of traditional forms of professional training and socialization that might prepare young people for their increasingly public roles as media makers and community participants.

The Participation Gap
As described by Jenkins, “the participation gap pushes beyond a framing of the digital divide around issues of technical access and instead understands the challenge we confront in terms of access to cultural experiences and to the social skills which young people are acquiring through their informal participation in the online world” (2006). Our commitment to address the participation gap means leveraging digital technologies and resources for schooling, and providing opportunities for all students to learn these social and cultural ways of being. We can’t engage with digital forms of participatory culture without access to a networked computer (or a comparable mobile device.) We can’t meaningfully participate without familiarity with the habits of mind and the skills we call the New Media Literacies. While some youth are already quite fluent in these new media practices (social networking, writing blogs, being members of fan fiction sites, game modding, etc.), others have had little or no exposure to the “affinity spaces” (Gee, 2004) wherein these new social and cultural skills are being used, and, consequently, are at a disadvantage when it comes to knowing how to think and act in a networked society.

But it is not only youth that need to know how to think and act in a networked society.  A holistic approach to overcoming the participation gap is to look not only look at the youth who don’t have access but also to the adults who might have access but not the know-how as to what to do.  To an extent, this too is a participation gap, where through dialogue, the “teacher-student” and “students-teachers” (Freire, p. 80) teach each other. They co-mingle their experiences, co-configure their knowledge and skills, and co-construct the curriculum (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009).

The Transparency Problem
Although youth are becoming more adept at using media as resources (for creative expression, research, social life, etc.), they often are limited in their ability to examine the media themselves. The transparency problem ranges from the legacy of textbook publishing, where instructional materials did not encourage users to question their structuring or their interpretation of the data, to the tendency to “suspend our disbelief” in order to have a more immersive play experience.

In a foreword to Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Richard Shaull writes, “There is no such thing as a neutral educational process. Education either functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes ‘the practice of freedom,’ the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world (p. 34).

As an example of transformative work using new media, Kurt Squire (2004) sought to integrate the commercial game, Civilization III, into world history classes. He found that students were adept at formulating “what if” hypotheses, which they tested through their game play. Yet, they lacked a vocabulary to critique how the game itself constructed history, and they had difficulty imagining how other games might represent the same historical processes in different terms. Conversations about games expose biases in games’ construction, which may also lead to questions about their governing assumptions. Subsequent games have, in fact, allowed players to reprogram the core models. One might argue, however, that there is a difference between trying to master the rules of the game and recognizing the ways those rules structure our perception of reality. It may be much easier to see what is in the game than to recognize what the game leaves out.

Games are good examples of transforming education and relates to Paolo Freire’s notion of a problem-posing education. The point of departure for a problem-posing education is in the “here and now.” And, the method of a problem-posing education is dialogic action, whereby “subjects meet in cooperation in order to transform the world” (Freire, p. 167). Having a deepened consciousness of their situation leads people to apprehend that situation as an historical reality susceptible of transformation” (Freire, p. 85). To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it. The term conscientizacau refers to learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against oppressive elements of reality (p.35, Friere).

The Ethics Challenge
In a world in which the line between consumers and producers is blurring, young people are finding themselves in situations that no one would have anticipated a decade or two ago. Their writing is much more open to the public and can have more far-reaching consequences. The young people are creating new modes of expression that are poorly understood by adults, and as a result they receive little to no guidance or supervision. The ethical implications of these emerging practices are fuzzy and ill-defined. Young people are discovering that information they put online to share with their friends can bring unwelcome attention from strangers.

In professional contexts, professional organizations are the watchdog of ethical norms. Yet in more casual settings, there is seldom a watchdog. No established set of ethical guidelines shapes the actions of bloggers and podcasters, for example. How should teens decide what they should or should not post about themselves or their friends on Live Journal or MySpace? Different online communities have their own norms about what information should remain within the group and what can be circulated more broadly, and many sites depend on self-disclosure to police whether the participants are children or adults. Yet, many young people seem willing to lie to access those communities.

It is too easy to talk about “media effects,” as if young people are simply victims of these new technologies, or to identify risks without recognizing the many potential benefits of teens’ online lives. In the U.S, as a society, we have spent too much time focused on what media are doing to young people and not enough time asking what young people are doing with media. Rather, we need to embrace an approach based on media ethics, one that empowers young people to take greater responsibility for their own actions and holds them accountable for the choices they make as media producers or as members of online communities.

One important goal of media education should be to encourage young people to become more reflective about the ethical choices they make as participants and communicators and the impact they have on others. We may, in the short run, have to accept that cyberspace’s ethical norms are in flux: we are taking part in a prolonged experiment in what happens when one lowers the barriers of entry into a communication landscape. For the present moment, asking and working through questions of ethical practices may be more valuable than the answers produced because the process will help everyone to recognize and articulate the different assumptions that guide their behavior.

STEP THREE: Explore, Learn, Practice & Reflect on the New Media Literacies

One possible hypothesis is that the educational system has not caught up with the shifting landscape of ‘participatory culture’ (Jenkins et al., 2009) where there are new ways to read, write and compute numbers.

In discussing a shift from old times (the old capitalism) to new times (the new capitalism), a key idea James Paul Gee addresses are changes in the values defining our societies gate-keeping strategies.  According to Gee, the old capitalism left a good deal of space for someone to enter the new middle class, for academic literacies–what Gee calls “old literacies–served as the most significant gate to economic success and sociopolitical power.  In contrast, in the new global capitalism academic language and its attendant modern consciousness is important, but not sufficient for success. 

‘Affinity spaces’ conceptualize the crucial role played by networks and identities in achieving success in an emergent brand of global capitalism.  In affinity spaces, participants can learn on their own terms, at their own pace, and only the materials they choose.  User feedback further informs  and redefines the space itself;  the space is not a “top down” imperative dictating what people must learn, but instead lets people add to and re-shape the content which defines the space.  Learning in these spaces is characterized as a personal and unique trajectory through a complex space of opportunities, which contrasts with having to assume  a “fictionalized” identity in the old literacies.

Gee warns that children whose families lack the sufficient resources for broad portfolio-building activities will increasingly fall behind their more affluent counterparts.   For underprivileged children to have equal life chances, schools need to go beyond teaching “the basics,” and must also provide settings that enable all students to have experiences involving creativity, deep thinking, and long-term projects.

Project New Media Literacies began with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Initiative. This movement begins by asking questions about how reading, writing, and learning have shifted as a result of new communication and information technologies, and it is concerned with identifying and creating educational practices that will prepare students to become full and active participants in the new digital culture.

The Digital Youth Project’s extensive ethnographic study further explores youth living and learning in new media. Their key finding distinguishes different kinds of youth new media practices was the difference between what they call “friendship-driven” and “interest-driven” participation. Friendship-driven participation is what most youth are doing online, and involve the familiar practices of hanging out, flirting, and working out status issues on sites like MySpace and Facebook. Interest-driven participation has to do with more of the geeks and creative types of practices, where youth will connect with others online around specializes interests, such as media fandom, gaming, or creative production.

They also identified three genres of participation and learning – hanging out, messing around and geeking out. Hanging out is when kids are using technologies like IM, Facebook or MySpace to hang out socially with their friends. Messing around is when they are looking around online for information, or tinkering with media in relatively casual and experimental ways. Geeking out is when they really dive deep into a specialized area of knowledge or interest. What is important about this framework is that it’s not about categorizing kids as having a single identity or set of activities, but identifying different ways that kids can participate in media culture, and this can be quite fluid.

Working from the assumption that traditional literacy practices are necessary, but no longer sufficient for full social participation in the new digital culture, NML strategy is create activities that begin with core literary terms and practices and “extend” or “expand” them in ways that integrate new media “moves” and “moods” into new domains of knowledge.

The media-literacy movement has effectively taken the lead in this regard by teaching students to analyze the media they consume and to view themselves as both consumers and producers of media. However, this learning often is relegated to electives or to after-school programs rather than being integrated across curricula. The new media literacies allow us to think in very new ways about the processes of learning, because they acknowledge a shift from a top-down model of learning to one that invokes all voices and all means of thinking and creating new knowledge.

Part of New Media Literacies’ methodology encourages a need for adults and young people alike to both make and reflect upon media and in the process, acquire important skills in teamwork, leadership, problem solving, collaboration, brainstorming, communications, and creating projects. Working against the grain of the traditional conception of the teacher/students relationship, where students are the passive recipient of the teacher’s knowledge (what Freire calls a banking concept of education), we move from the assumption that: “the teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach” (Freire, p.61). From this view, the classroom is envisioned as a site where new knowledge, grounded in the experiences of students and teachers alike, is produced through meaningful dialogue (Freire’s dialogical method).

Though educators see first-hand that their students are immersed in new media, and educators are eager to make it an integral part of their classrooms, this paradigm shift brings its own set of challenges. Middle-aged educators’ immediate reaction to such a push would be to worry about the decreased emphasis on “book learning”, at a time when they are being pushed to increase text literacy. Standardized tests neither track nor reward such efforts and educators who are not fluent themselves in new media need a lot of help developing skills and tools to integrate new media in their classrooms.

To understand and embrace the importance of “new media” within the education system, a holistic approach needs to be facilitated.  Not only does their need to be extensive community outreach for stakeholders outside the school walls, such as parents and community leaders who sit on school boards, to have buy in but new modes of professional development need to be introduced to teachers.  New modes of professional development need to be implemented; ones that do not focus entirely on technology training but focus on a shift in mindset, new forms of assessment and a deeper understanding in the shifting landscape of literacy.