We believe that the New Media Literacies need to be integrated across the curriculum - not as an added-on subject, but as a paradigm shift in how we teach and think about traditional school content. Each discipline needs to take ownership of those skills which are central to doing research in their area: science may want to take up issues of visualization and simulation; literature issues of appropriation.
To offer a model for how these skills might be better integrated into the curriculum, we are developing a series of teacher strategy guides which we hope will inform and inspire teachers working in that field, sparking further experimentation and innovation.
Reading in a Participatory Culture
Our first Teachers' Strategy Guide: Reading in a Participatory Culture, offers strategies for integrating the tools, approaches, and methods of Comparative Media Studies into the English and Language Arts classroom. The guide is intended to demonstrate techniques which could be applied to the study of authorship in relation to a range of other literary works, pushing us to reflect more deeply on how authors build upon the materials of their culture and in turn inspire others who follow to see the world in new ways.
All the lesson plans and related materials are available for download below:
GENERAL MATERIALS
PDF of Introduction to the Reading Teachers' Strategy Guide
PDF of Full Expert Voices section
UNIT: MOTIVES FOR READING
UNIT: APPROPRIATION AND REMIXING
UNIT: NEGOTIATING CULTURAL SPACES
UNIT: CONTINUITIES AND SILENCES
Mapping in a Participatory Culture
This guide is very different than our first. This guide is related to mapping in a participatory culture. The framework provides the guidance and the strategies are illustrated through the resources, projects, ideas, and people profiled. It is not meant to be complete. It is meant to keep growing as technology and the needs of educators evolve. It is meant to be more aggregate than prescriptive.
Thus, the main results of our work on this project are:
- a model for using unconferences for generating ideas and for professional development
- a tumblog of resources, notes, and ideas contributed by unconference participants
- photographic and video documentation of the unconference
- a theoretical framework for organizing resources and ideas related to mapping and new media literacies
- two thematic modules of resources based on this framework, Boundaries and Layers
