By Henry Jenkins on May 11, 2010 3:16 PM
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Jessica K. Parker's new book, Teaching Tech-Savvy Kids: Bringing Digital Media into the Classroom, Grades 5-12 manages to be visionary and pragmatic in equal measures. Drawing heavily on the work done by researchers affiliated with the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiatives, especially the Digital Youth Project, the book offers educators, especially classroom teachers, new ways of understanding young people's online lives and how the resources of new media and participatory culture can be effectively integrated into their pedagogical practices. The book brings together smart people -- researchers, classroom teachers alike -- to talk through the implications of our present moment of media changes on the kinds of learning which are taking place in school. The authors move deftly from considering the big picture to explaining specific activities which might be deployed in the classroom. I was proud to see some discussion of the work we've been doing through Project New Media Literacies sprinkled throughout the book and not simply because our Research Director, Erin Reilly, has contributed an essay on learning through remixing.
I am using the release of the book this week as an excuse to bring together several key contributors to the volume, including Reilly and the book's editor Parker, for a conversation about the ways that this new research is challenging some of the assumptions that govern how teachers and administrators often respond to the potentials of new media and learning. And while you are at it, check out this rich website developed to provide teachers with resources around the book.
Can you give me a sense of your goals for this book? In some ways, it is translating or popularizing insights from the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning research for an audience of teachers. What do you see as the value of this research for impacting the decisions which teachers make everyday in the classroom, given, as you note, the primary focus of this research was on informal learning outside the classroom?
Jessica:
With this book, I wanted to invite educators, specifically classroom teachers, into this larger discussion of digital media and learning (DML). I felt that if I wrote a book for teachers my invitation needed to connote, "I trust you. Here is something that I want to share with you. I value your opinion and your insights." In the DML community, there is a sense that this current moment is a defining one. It is a profound moment. And I don't think my collective academic community has reached out enough to classroom teachers to say, "Join us in this moment." Join us--even though we may exist as researchers, educators, and mentors in different learning environments--join us as we analyze these important educational concepts and discuss how learning, literacy and knowledge creation and sharing are changing. Changing the culture of learning within schools starts with teachers.
I wanted to share this research with classroom teachers and listen to their responses. And yet, I realize that the book that I created with 28 collaborators will force educators to shift their perspective of learning by going beyond a normative understanding of formal education. I don't think this discussion will be an easy one: in fact, this book might take readers out of their comfort zones. And that is why it was important for me to "invite" teachers into this discussion. We desperately need this kind of philosophical discussion. In order to do this, I followed in the footsteps of the MacArthur Foundation and wrote a book that focuses on "learning" rather than "education" or "schooling." We must take a different angle on learning in order to see beyond the constraints of our own educational system.
