My interest increased upon reading the Jenkins' et al (2006) White Paper, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21^st Century.  It underscored the fact that not only has the nature of media changed dramatically in the last few years, shifting us from consumers of media to participants, but also that the essential new media literacies are all social skills. They include: play, performance, simulation, visualization, appropriation, multitasking, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation, networking, and negotiation. 

Reading this it dawned on me that all the hands-on play, storytelling, drama, music, art, dance, movement, handwork, face-to-face interaction and negotiation that Waldorf kids do was actually laying down a strong foundation for the social skills that are essential to new media literacy. But the question still remained: how to teach these children to extend these behavioral skills into cyberspace at a developmentally appropriate time?

That's when I turned to the "digital citizenship" curriculum offered by Common Sense Media, inspired by the GoodPlay Project in collaboration with New Media Literacies. The curriculum is broken into five units based upon the ethical "fault lines" identified by the digital ethics research of Dr. Howard Gardner and his colleagues at Harvard University School of Education's GoodPlay team:  Identity, Privacy, Ownership & Authorship, Credibility, and Participation (James, 2009). Additionally, the whole curriculum can be taught without using technological tools at all... something that would go over well at a Waldorf school!

Ethical thinking, it turns out, is a recurring concern of almost everyone who is writing about media literacy these days. Ethical thinking is also something that the Waldorf people take seriously; in fact research (Hether, 2001) indicates that Waldorf-educated kids score unusually high in moral reasoning. So considering that these students might have a running start in this area of thinking, Common Sense Media's curriculum seemed like a perfect fit.

I'm very fortunate that Journey School's far-sighted administrator and my daughter's open-minded 6^th grade teacher have allowed me to turn their weekly "civics" class into "cyber civics". This is a pilot program for what we hope will be a three-year, comprehensive new media literacy curriculum. Before diving into the Common Sense materials that starts with a unit on "Participation" (or what they call "Digital Life") by asking students to inventory their media usage (a great approach for kids who actually use media!), I turned instead to another resource.

Jason Ohler's new book, Digital Community; Digital Citizen (2010) advocates for a "whole school approach to behavior that sets the entirety of being digitally active within an overall ethical and behavioral context" (p. 145). This too seemed like a good fit for a Waldorf-inspired school, so for our first few lessons together the class and I did something Ohler's book suggests, we became "De-Tech-Tives". We pondered the positive and negative impacts of different technologies... from the television to eyeglasses, the printing press to hair dryers. The students broke into small working groups to discuss these impacts, imagined ways in which they would have improved the technology had they invented it themselves, and finally presented their "findings" to the entire class. Their homework was to interview a parent or grandparent and ask what life was like before the mobile phone and how it has impacted their lives, for better and for worse. They brought those stories back to class and we discussed how technology both connects and disconnects us.

We've since moved on to Common Sense Media's "Privacy" unit, exploring the impact of a "Digital Footprint". To teach this concept we adapted the lesson to make it particularly relevant to these sixth graders. This class, as part of a recent Business Math block, started what has turned out to be a very successful pie-making/selling business called "Sweetie Pies" (they made and sold hundreds of pies over the holidays). We told the class that "Sweetie Pies" needed to hire a national spokesperson, and as owners/managers of the company it was their job to consider two applicants, Jason and Linda, and as part of the process they were going to look at each candidate's "digital footprint".

Digital Footprint 1 from Diana Graber on Vimeo.

After the digital background check, the students broke into small groups to consider which candidate they would like to hire based upon the following: who was more honest and who worked well with others? Most of the students came to the conclusion that neither of the candidates met the criteria (only a couple of the students considered the possibility that the digital information may not be 100% accurate). So we presented them with some additional digital food-for-thought.

Digital Footprint 3 from Diana Graber on Vimeo.

You could actually hear wheels turning inside the heads of these 11- and 12-year olds (it's a beautiful sound btw) as they pondered the fine line that exists between the digital information about ourselves that we can control and that which we can't. 

Since starting this project I've learned that Waldorf schools are not alone in their vigilance about shielding students from technology. But whereas the Waldorf folk do it primarily for what I consider reasonable developmental concerns, traditional public schools shield students from technology because of online safety and privacy concerns. I believe that for these schools too, taking the "digital citizenship" on-ramp towards new media literacy is a smart approach, particularly in a climate where  "stranger danger" is taught more readily than digital preparedness. Perhaps if we arm students with the skills necessary to navigate the ethical decisions that loom in cyberspace, adults will have more confidence in their ability to make wise digital choices and maybe even encourage digital media usage for education! That's why I love the curriculum that Common Sense Media offers. It's a pre-emptive approach.

I like to tell people that teaching new media literacy is sort of like teaching Driver's Ed. What makes me really excited is thinking about how, once students learn to drive safely, we can put them in the driver's seat and let them show us what tools work best to practice the new media literacy skills the Jenkins et al (2006) write about.

That's an educational environment I hope to see while my children are still young.

References

Common Sense Media (n.d.). Common sense media education programs. Retrieved from http://www.commonsensemedia.org/educators

Hether, C. A. (2001).  The moral reasoning of high school seniors from diverse educational settings (Ph.D. dissertation, Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center). Retrieved November 10, 2010, from Dissertations & Theses: Full Text (Publication No. AAT 3044032).

James, C. (2009). Young people, ethics, and the new digital media: A synthesis from the GoodPlay project. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Jenkins, H., Purushotma, R., Clinton, K., Weigel, M., & Robinson, A. J. (2006). Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Retrieved September 12, 2010 from http://newmedialiteracies.org/.  

Ohler, J.B. (2010). Digital community, digital citizen. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.