Introduction to the Project
NML has recently partnered with New Hampshire's
Department of Education to facilitate a year-long
professional development initiative using the new media literacies as a springboard for developing innovative curriculum. Educators are exploring the urgent challenges that 21st Century learners face by expanding their own learning experiences using a participatory, digital model of professional develmopment. In this context, educators are able to practice their own skills as teachers by creating, collaborating, connecting, and circulating with one another in an interactive, multi-media environment. Not only are they developing new materials for their own schools and districts, but also an 9-part webinar series focused on a comprehensive, practical understanding of the NML skills for the larger educational community. The last webinar will synthesize the group's collective understanding of the NML concepts through reflection in their own educational practices.
The project is focused on implementing a participatory teacher professional development model aligned with the New Hampshire Department of Education's intent to "support the professional development of teachers and administrators and the integration of technology into instruction, in order to advance student learning." The ultimate goal is "to support a statewide cadre of skilled, informed teacher leaders and principals who are empowered to support their colleagues in creating truly 21st century learning environments." (see EETT Grant Application 2009-10 at www.nheon.org/oet/nclb).
Project New Media Literacies' approach is to integrate the social skills and cultural competencies needed to be full participants in today's rich media landscape across curricula. This approach is informed by the belief that knowledge acquisition occurs within learning environments that foster the following concepts -- learning is emergent rather than pre-structured; transmedia rather than unified; situational rather than universal; and collaborative rather than hierarchical. The NH project is structured to identify and integrate into New Hampshire public schools the types of participatory practices that value creativity, resourcefulness, and collaborative problem-solving.
A Participatory Model of Professional Development
The exact ways in which the Early Adopters group would organize their
work and be supported by NML staff was not pre-determined in the grant
information and was a purposeful decision set by NML and NH's Department of
Education. The Early Adopters' project draws on the extensive work of
Henry Jenkins who uses participatory culture to describe practices much older
than the web and which have migrated onto new media tools and platforms because
of their affordances (Jenkins et all, 2009) and their ability to reach a wide
public. We inform our understanding of creating a participatory learning
environment through the detailed, large scale ethnographic study carried out by
the Digital Youth Project, and summarized in the book Hanging out,
Messing Around and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media.
This research argues that adults need to adopt and practice emerging literacy
skills in the same ways and in similar environments as youth in order to
facilitate new modes of learning.
These practices
support a more co-configured experience between teacher and student, where emerging participatory practices have given
rise to a new model of knowledge distribution in classrooms. Increasingly,
information and expertise are spread across a broad network of people and
tools. Widespread access to networked technologies means that, in theory at
least, the same information is available to everybody. In such a world, knowing
how to find, process, and exchange already-known knowledge (knowledge that is
the product of the expert paradigm) exists alongside knowing how to work
together, deliberate, debate, argue, and create new knowledge (knowledge that
is a product of the collective intelligence paradigm).
A model where
teachers and students learn from each other (distributed expertise) is intended
to contrast with the more traditional approach of teacher imparting knowledge
to students (expert paradigm). The expert paradigm assumes a static, bounded
body of knowledge (Walsh, Peter as cited in Jenkins Convergence Culture,
Chapter Two). In this model, expertise is hierarchical and generally brokered
by credentialed authorities. In contrast, the notion of distributed expertise
encourages collective intelligence and assumes that each person has something
to contribute.
