A Big and Difficult Question, indeed. It's one we'll work to answer as we pilot the guide next year with our collaborating educators. For now, I've been grappling with this question alongside my cohorts in crime, the inimitable Henry Jenkins and Wyn Kelley, and with the exquisitely talented Katie Clinton and Deb Lui, co-developers of the guide. If you'll permit me just a moment to gush: I couldn't ask to be surrounded by more intelligent and inquisitive colleagues. They're thrilled to wrestle with these questions, though so far we haven't produced answers so much as more questions:

• What do we mean when we talk about a "participatory model of reading"?
• What is the traditional model of reading, and how (and why) did that become the dominant model in classrooms?
• How has membership in a participatory culture shaped how kids read outside of the classroom?
• How can integrating those practices into the traditional classroom setting enhance or shift students' comprehension of a literary text?
• What is the value of this enhancement or shift, and why is it valuable?

These questions start to hint at a larger issue our project is working to address: The Participation Gap outlined in our White Paper. At its core, this guide is intended to provide some strategies for addressing that concern in a classroom setting, by encouraging students to engage, in an interdisciplinary and participatory manner, with a canonical text.

The questions we're asking aren't easy to answer, and the concerns we're trying to address aren't easy to resolve. If they were, of course, there wouldn't be much of a point to talking about them in the first place.