By Vanessa Vartabedian on December 5, 2011 2:35 PM
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Our team has just finished wrapping-up our
PLAY! (participatory learning and you) professional development pilot with LAUSD educators and is about to embark on making sense of the rich data we have acquired these past few months. At first glance, what teachers seem to be embracing most strongly from this experience are the practices of participation - or
the 4 Cs (connecting, collaborating, creating and circulating). It seems that not only students, as we discovered in our after-school pilot last spring, but teachers find them the most accessible entry-point to the new media literacies.
At the onset of the pilot, we framed the PD as an exploration of the
5 characteristics of participatory learning that NML had begun to identify last year. This approach - to explore what the culture of the classroom requires in order to allow participatory practices in - was a divergence from the ways we had previously worked with teachers in schools. In prior collaborations we helped address learning goals for students by applying the new media literacies to traditional content, hence increasing and deepening levels of student engagement with it. An example was the
Moby Dick project. The complex and often intimidating novel, was dynamically transformed into a musical performance where students remixed relevant themes and cultural references with an old text. This produced a teachers' strategy guide called
Reading in a Participatory Culture (and is a forthcoming book!). We hoped other teachers would use this model and adapt it suitably for their own classrooms. But without support and collaboration, this was an undertaking most teachers argued they did not have adequate time to explore.
