Henry Jenkins

In a traditional English class, a teacher might assign Herman Melville’s famous novel Moby Dick in small chunks. Students might complete their reading (or not), discuss major themes and perhaps write an essay at the end of the unit. But if a student never gets past the first few pages, the rest of that unit is lost.

It’s become a common refrain that traditional education isn’t serving a generation of students whose lives outside of school are completely disconnected from what happens inside. But there are plenty of teachers working hard to make reading material relevant to students, including a team of researchers from University of Southern California Annenberg’s Innovation Lab that includes Henry Jenkins and Erin Reilly. They’ve created a model of what they call participatory learning that engages students with materials on a personal level, often by incorporating different types of media into the classroom and offering varying points of entry to a text. Most recently, the team has put together a teacher’s strategy guide, Reading in a Participatory Culture: Remixing Moby-Dick in the English, Classroom and an interactive digital book, Flows of Reading, to provide models of their approach.

Moby Dick is a notoriously difficult book. “This book defeated me as an Advanced Placement kid,” Henry Jenkins said. He remembers hating the book, gritting his teeth to get through it and writing the worst essay of his high school career. That’s why he was so impressed by the work of the playwright Ricardo Pitts-Wiley who was teaching Moby Dick to incarcerated youth in Rhode Island, many of whom read below grade level.

Pitts-Wiley asked his students to reinterpret the novel in the context of their own lives. In their retelling Captain Ahab became a powerful drug dealer trying to avenge the death of his loved ones. His drug crew is forced to decide how far they’ll go for their charismatic leader. Together with his students Pitts-Wiley turned their re-interpretation into a play: Moby Dick: Then and Now. The students understood the themes when placed into familiar context and related to the character’s struggles when the story was no longer placed in an era and industry unfamiliar to them.

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Pitts-Wiley’s work correlates strongly to the research Jenkins has been doing on weaving more varieties of media into the classroom in order to make the learning experience more participatory, creative, multidisciplinary, and therefore meaningful to students. He teamed up with Wyn Kelley a Melville scholar from MIT, and a team of educational experts to design a curriculum around Moby Dick that would build in remixing, reinterpretation, and multimedia elements. They tested their new curriculum in six different schools.

“We want to raise a generation of kids who have a mouse in one hand and a book in the other,” said Jenkins. To do that the curriculum focuses on Melville as a master mash-up artist of 19th century culture; his book includes Shakespeare plays, the Bible, whaling culture and more. From there, the door is open for classes to discuss how remixed elements are allusions and what happens to a text when an author incorporates the work of others.

“Culture matters, history matters, the goal is to foster old fashioned close reading,” Jenkins said. A typical assignment might ask students to take one page of Moby Dick, highlight words they don’t know, define terms, draw pictures and share with one another. The idea is to focus closely in order to incite curiosity about the whole. And to let students creatively express their opinions and thoughts about the book, hopefully with a better understanding of what their own remixing might add to the broader cultural body of work around Moby Dick.

If this sounds a little messy and confusing – it is. That was the feedback teachers gave Jenkins’ team when they piloted these participatory learning strategies in the classroom. Teacher’s felt uncertain whether learning was taking place in this non-linear style. One teacher came to realize that if a student could get a purchase on the text anywhere, they understood how much more there is to learn about the book.

“That’s a different kind of learning outcome than we usually get when we convince people they’ve exhausted a book, that they’ve gotten it, when they’ve only touched it superficially,” Jenkins said. He sees the goal as both teaching something about Moby Dick in the moment as well as fostering a community of readers who know that reading Melville in high school English doesn’t mean they’ve conquered it.

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“We may be romanticizing what people got out of Moby Dick in the traditional classroom,” Jenkins said. “This is just taking ownership over that and allowing students to pursue their passion and interests.” Piloting this curriculum Jenkins’ team found that it worked less effectively when teachers used it more traditionally. “The closer we got to traditional school, the more they shut down,” Jenkins said. “No curriculum is idiot proof. You have to get teachers who understand the participatory mindset.”

The other part of the project, Flows of Reading, helps encourage participation around literature and models an expanded approach to literacy and the reading and writing that make up the discipline. The digital book allows readers to follow hyperlinks, enjoy embedded video content, and add to an online space for related work. It broadens the model beyond Moby Dick and applies it to reading at all age levels from a wordless picture book to the Hunger Games and Lord of the Rings. It offers four pathways or ways to view a text.

Henry Jenkins

MOTIVES FOR READING
This pathway and assorted material address the idea that people read various kinds of textual content for all kinds of reasons. Reading a website may be different from reading a book, but they both require literacy and are appropriate at different points. This pathway explores how seemingly different kinds of reading might be more akin than they seem.

ADAPTATION AND REMIXING
While the book encourages students to elaborate and create material based on parts of a text that speak to them, this section also discusses appropriate and respectful adaptation and remixing. It brings in the ethics of attribution and fair use.

NEGOTIATING CULTURAL SPACES
This pathway discusses the various identities that each person brings to reading whether it is gender, ethnicity, specific experiences or anything else that shapes the reading process.

CONTINUITIES AND SPACES
These are “the spaces where your imagination can go wild,” said Erin Reilly, who led the effort to create Flows. This pathway explores how to creatively share stories and layer upon the original.

Throughout the research and implementation of this project Jenkins and Reilly knew they’d need to think about assessment. They brought in Dan Hickey from Indiana University to help develop assessments that are immediate and happen as part of the learning process. The state standards are a minimum, Reilly and Jenkins maintain should be easy to reach if students are engaged. They insist that learning activities should be open and free — a space for creativity; the reflection on that activity and how it ties back to the text is an area for worthwhile assessment.

Educators are always striving to find ways to make curriculum relevant in students’ everyday lives. More and more teachers are using social media around lessons, allowing students to use their cell phones to do research and participate in class, and developing their curriculum around projects to ground learning around an activity. These strategies are all part of a larger goal to help students connect to social and cultural spaces.

And it’s part of what defines “participatory learning,” coined by University of Southern California Annenberg Professor Henry Jenkins, who published his first article on the topic “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture,” in 2006. His work sprang out of the desire to understand the grassroots nature of creativity, how projects are being shared online and what an increasingly networked culture looks like. Since then, he and a team of researchers at USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab have been trying to understand the skills that young people need to creatively participate in a networked world.

In an effort to change how American schools think about teaching, Jenkins’ team developed a strategy called PLAY (Participatory Learning and You) to explain the exploratory and experimental approach to teaching they think students would benefit from. The team worked with teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District, and recently released a series of studies that describe what they found.

“PLAY describes a mode of experimentation, of testing materials, trying out new solutions, exploring new horizons,” Jenkins said. It’s how kids interact with games – throwing themselves in without reading the rules, testing the limits and feeling free to try and fail. But this learning style is hard to achieve in a system ruled by high-stakes testing where there is no room for students to fail. Everything they do goes on their academic record and they have become unaccustomed to experimenting.

Ed-tech has claimed a noisy role in the debate about how to engage kids with class work, but it isn’t the only way, he said. The ed-tech movement is one part of the participatory learning that Jenkins discusses, but there are other ways to help kids develop skills that will allow them to creatively connect with a culture that’s increasingly networked.

“It’s about a shift in how they think rather than thinking that tech is going to save them or that they need to learn all these tools in order to play, in order to experiment and tinker,” said Erin Reilly, the project’s research director who has led efforts to work with teachers on developing specific strategies for teaching kids ways to collaborate, problem-solve and think creatively.

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What defines the PLAY strategy are things like creativity, co-learning, engagement and motivation, making learning relevant, and thinking of education as an ecosystem, where the connections between school, home, community and the broader world are all equally important. Using those principles, the goal is to teach skills students will need in the outside world — things like exercising sound judgment.

“We’ve always wanted young people to critically engage with the information around them,” Jenkins said. “That takes on more urgency in an age of networked communication,” he said. Other skills have risen out of the technology’s influence, like the ability to visualize knowledge and understand visual information. Other skills, like multi-tasking and networking, have been around for a long time, but aren’t always emphasized in traditional classrooms.

The skills that PLAY fosters are based on values that lie beneath the social and cultural experience of this generation, Jenkins said. Educators in Los Angeles who have been incorporating PLAY methods learned how deeply these ideas run in society, no longer worried as much about the specific technology they used to teach. Instead, they felt the freedom to try low-tech ways of getting at the same ideas. The tools were far less important than the tactics that served the learning goals.

One of the biggest challenges for teachers attempting to implement PLAY’s pedagogy is letting go of some of the control that teachers are taught to maintain over their classrooms. A teacher-centered approach can stifle the creative, experimental, and sometimes accidental learning that can be transformative.

“What we hear a lot is teachers describing our approaches as messy, as getting out of control,” Jenkins said. “But the teachers who let it get a little messy are finding something very powerful.” Students might not be learning exactly the same thing, but they involve themselves and their passions in the learning, instilling a sense of ownership. But an apparently uncontrolled classroom can be hard to explain to an administrator who drops in, making it feel risky to teachers who are often alone in the fight to change public education.

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One teacher in the study had every intention of letting her students experiment in content, but had a harder time letting go of the format. She had her students create public service announcements on whatever topic felt relevant to them. Students spoke to their families and friends before picking topics they found meaningful. One group worked on depression and shared personal experiences as part of the process.

When it came time to create a project, the teacher wanted students to use PowerPoint, a tool she was familiar with, but let go of the idea and allowed them to make their projects on technology with which she was unfamiliar. Teacher and students learned together, each bringing something unique to the table. That type of co-learning is exactly what PLAY mentors feel needs to happen more often in classrooms.

But it’s not easy to be the sole innovator in a school. “Teachers all over the country are fighting this fight alone,” Jenkins said. “By putting our weight behind those teachers we can be a support to that evolution.” The USC team knows that they are working with early adopters and that scalability will be difficult. Still the long term goal is to eliminate a common question heard from students, “when will I ever have to use this.”

WHAT ABOUT ASSESSMENTS?

To gauge the impact of the PLAY program, the group performed a variety of assessments, including surveys, interviews, peer reflected videos. “In the test-driven environment of the contemporary classroom, there is hardly ever any free time,” Reilly said. “Even in after-school programs, there is a strong push for evaluation, assessment, and continuation of the school day, leaving fewer opportunities for children to play, explore and use their imaginations.”

Despite decades of calls for inquiry-based learning, many teachers find they have less time to experiment with open-learning practices, she added, and as a result, the goal to help learners develop 21st century skills is in direct opposition to the expectation that they teach to the test.

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So the group approached assessments in this way, Reilly said: “We understand the Common Core Standards define what all students are expected to know and be able to do, but not how teachers should teach. We introduced teachers to new practices and ways of thinking about teaching. This, in turn was not to detract from addressing the requirement teachers have of preparing their students for the tests, but instead to give new practices that could result in perhaps more engaged students with material relevant to them so that the knowledge was gained in a different way — thus resulting in we hope better results for the tests.”

For instance, one middle school science teacher, experimented with a new activity that required letting go: rather than leading his students to a solution, he allowed for unexpected outcomes as his students used their collective knowledge to understand and solve the problem. The teacher gave students an array of artifacts, such as plastic tubing, paper and tape, and asked them to create a physical representation of what they had learned about how the digestive system functions. He wanted to use this opportunity to explore assessment in collaborative learning settings, and to examine how peer-to-peer processes could foster deep learning.

In addition to the project, the teacher also implemented a traditional written test, asking them to sequentially identify how the digestive system works. More than 98 percent scored well, Reilly said.

“They used the time order transitional words correctly… and that is actually a California Standards Test question that they have to take at the end of this year,” the teacher said. From that point forward, students continued to suggest ways of applying the tools and resources around them to creatively and collaboratively engage in their assignments.

For more information, read Designing With Teachers: Participatory to Professional Development in Education, Shall We Play? and PLAY! Participatory Learning and You.