You can read more about our work on this guide in this blogpost by Research Assistant Deb Lui and in this post by Henry Jenkins, ProjectNML's Principal Investigator, about why we chose to work with Moby-Dick as our sample text for this guide.

Fundamentally, our guide will ask students to tap into participatory practices--the innovative , imaginative, and production-oriented activities enabled by our digital culture--in order to engage creatively with a canonical literary text.

The goal of this emphasis on creativity is to help students to come to a deep and personal understanding of the text, as well as to develop a working understanding of what it means to both read and write in a participatory culture.

We're thinking hard about the practicalities of introducing a creative, project-based curriculum into the high school English classroom--including considerations of meeting state education standards and working with quantifiable final products for assessment purposes, as well as the intricacies of evaluating students' progress toward understanding the elements of literature. I'll be writing more about these aspects of our work in future posts. For now, I want to show you our most current visualization of the guide itself:


We're conceiving of a central unit, called "Reading in a Participatory Culture," as the element that lays out our overarching conceptual frameworks. Key points of this central unit include the following:

• In a participatory culture, reading and writing are not separate activities but heavily interrelated and linked together as a creative practice.
  
• Kids' immersion in digital media has made it more important than ever for them to find ways to navigate and interpret the various texts that surround them every day; they're learning this skill largely without guidance from a formal mentor.
  
• When we engage with a text, either online or offline, it's not always the case that we work to develop a thorough and deep and complete understanding of the text; we may work discontinuously with a text, or we may enter it with a much more limited or specific purpose in mind.
  
• Many of the tactics young people use when working with digital technologies can be applied to the reading of a canonical text--and these tactics may result in a new, possibly better, at least different, understanding of the text than a student may develop by more traditional methods of reading literature.
  
• Texts such as Moby-Dick lend themselves nicely to the practices outlined above, and Moby-Dick in particular is a digressive, dense, and layered text that encourages and requires active, participatory engagement.

Each of the five units surrounding the central theme emphasizes a more specific aspect of working with a literary text, and more information on these units will follow. For now, Deb Lui posted a terrific description of the unit called "Adaptations and Translations" here.