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.
- Join the Online Focus Group! We're ready to see our work tested and implemented with teens. Our goal is for educators, like you!, to download and test our learning modules in your classroom or after-school program and provide us feedback from both you and your students. This feedback will help us improve our materials and provide us a basis for evaluating and understanding the impact of our work.
- Our first Teacher's Strategy Guide, Reading in a Participatory Culture, is a sample curriculum written to help students better understand the function of the new media literacy skill, appropriation. The guide provides a set of lesson plans for use in English and language arts classrooms using Herman Melville's Moby-Dick as the sample text and a theater adaptation by Ricardo Pitts-Wiley entitled Moby-Dick: Then and Now as an example of a contemporary adaptation. 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.
- Ethics Casebook (in collaboration with Howard Gardner's Good Play Project) is a set of curricular materials designed to help students sort through ethical dilemmas they face as communicators and give them the tools to work through the consequences of their own choices.
