Draft

Title: Across the Years, Across The Miles: A Critical Podcasting Exchange Introduction: Two teachers in two schools in two midwestern states. XXXXX KC teaches five sections of high school English in a high test score public high school. Lee works as a literacy coach in a high poverty elementary school three states away. We share a keen interest in digital literacies in school settings and have incorporated podcasting, blogging and other types of digital media (XXXvague...other types? Just mention 2?XXX) into our language arts curricula at our individual school sites. We also share a sociological, critical stance towards literacy, believing that writers and readers have the ability and responsibility to use literacy to analyze, critique and act on their social worlds. Initially, we came together for this project in an effort to increase audience (generate audience?) for student created podcasts. We felt that students had developed some aspects of participatory culture through work with digital media, but wondered if they could forge new ground and deepen their experiences with media creation by building connections across school sites.xxx Digital work engaged students, but we were missing out on a key element, and benefit, of new media---enabling students to cross digital divides and create collaboratively outside the classroom walls. (NCTE has a list of tech terms. Check to see if we're being consistent). We aimed to develop a cross age, cross space podcasting project around texts with social justice themes to help us learn more about how to create within the school site what Jenkins refers to as participatory culture. Drawing on Pierre Levy's conception of collective intelligence (XXXX?? Gotta check this), Henry Jenkins writes (blogs that...) about the responsibilities of members of communities. He asserts that when you learn with others, you have not only an opportunity, but an "obligation to share what you know with the group" and "a need to respect yet critically engage with multiple ways of knowing" (from a blog post on his blog). In this critical podcasting study, we inquire into what is the nature of a participatory culture that originates in school. We also aim to determine what and how critical literacies develop as students come together across space and age. (XXXX read this over later. Do we need any thing else here for an intro or could this suffice? XXXX I think it rocks. XXXX) XXXX We need a paragraph here that says what this actually is??? and why it's fascinating). XXXX (I think we need some sentences somewhere - probably here - about what exactly we decided to do. I'm not sure how much we should say about why it's fascinating at this point because it's pretty clear, I think, and then we discuss exactly why it's clear in the findings?) XXXX Okay, yes, what we decided to do. what our goals/intentions were. That won't be hard. XXXX ======Lit Review or Framework====== Participatory Culture: Jenkins (2006) defines participatory culture as a media creating and consuming community where people are invited to contribute freely. He further specifies that participatory cultures have low barriers for engagement, strong support for creating and sharing, informal mentorship, and a belief on the part of members that their contributions matter. Participatory cultures grow, according to Jenkins, out of a common interest in a certain type of creation. In the internet age, this might include anime, fan fiction, photography, podcasting, or another type of digital media. To encourage the development of a participatory culture in our classrooms seemed to us to be a natural way to build literacy competencies. Within a participatory model of instruction, we could allow students to pursue interests, explore issues, and create media that "matters" to themselves and others. Although Jenkins, et. al.(white paper) describe participatory culture as something that grows organically from a common interest or idea for a certain topic, idea, or genre.(XXX) Our aim was to build a participatory culture out of an existing group of students who have come together not because of a deep, real desire to make something, but because they were required to do so as part of their schooling. In recent years, other teachers and librarians have attempted the same goal. Hamilton (2011) describes the way she re-imagined the school library as a "site of participatory culture," by "distributing" ownership of resources, knowledge, and projects to members of her school community (pg. 41). The resulting space fostered "a climate of participation, risk-taking, acceptance of 'messy' learning, and inquiry" (pg. 43). Kell (2009), another librarian, used participatory culture as a frame for a writing project she undertook with a teacher at her school. Students were encouraged to bring their real-life, out-of-school interests in popular media into the writing lab, which contributed to the success of the project and perhaps the students' experience of participatory culture within the traditional school space. Finally, Project New Media Literacies at MIT (2008), in collaboration with Jenkins, developed a set of professional development tools for teachers designed to foster the conditions of participatory culture within classrooms. PLAY (Participatory Learning and You) encourages an infusion of media tools in the classroom, opportunities for shared problem solving, and outlets for sharing and publishing work. I think maybe we could use some more stuff from the original MacArthur white paper and/or connect it to that piece you linked? I liked this part of the intro of that piece: As students learn to use technology tools to build representations of a social world’s characteristics, they generate reflective critical thought through their analysis and critique of the identities, relationships, and values constructed by the cultural practices and discourses in that social world. I didn't finish reading the whole thing yet. (XXXX I'm not sure if we need this or not? Because the paragraphs above it lay it out beautifully. But I'm not sure. Just my initial thoughts. XXXX) Critical Literacy We specifically aimed to bring a critical perspective to our podcasting work because students who consume and/or create texts without developing (cultivating) resources for text analysis and social critique do not possess all the resources necessary for full literacy in the 21st century. (XXXX Transition sentence here about Luke and Freebody??XXXX) While students must figure out the nuts and bolts of podcasting texts, code breaking is not sufficient for literacy in today's digital world where citizens also can use texts for meaning making, pragmatic purposes, critique and social action. As text critics, students learn to analyze texts in terms of representations of power, and maintenance or disruption of the status quo. (cite Luke and Freebody, xxx). We hoped that an integration of critical literacies and new media would lead to a collaboration where we used "language to exercise power....and to question practices of privilege and injustice" (Comber, 2001). As teachers who work from a critical perspective, we believe that schools can and should provide opportunities for students to use literacy to participate in the public sphere, for the public good (Giroux). Four dimensions of critical literacy have been presented as salient in a literature review by L, SF, VS. While these dimensions interact and do not stand alone, we found them useful organizational tools for podcast production and also useful analytic tools for interpreting the podcast scripts and so we highlight their elements here: (XXXX Or something like... we consider how we fit into this definition.... something like that? I reworked there definitions as "we...." But I'm not sure about that now? Could work if it were introduced differently. XXXX) * Disrupting the commonplace refers to our ability to question society's standard operating procedures, to problematize the status quo and to investigate how all texts work to position readers and writers in particular ways. Critical teachers disrupt the commonplace of school by incorporating popular culture and multimedia into the classroom in order to develop awareness of how media represents and misrepresents individuals and social groups. We reject a transmission model of education and instead see our classrooms as sites of social inquiry and critique. * Interrogating multiple viewpoints requires that we use our social imaginations (Johnston uses this term. Can we?) to explore multiple, and often contradictory, perspectives. We read texts with attention to the voices therein that are marginalized as well as those that are privileged. As teachers we embrace open ended dialogue around complex concepts with no clear cut answers. * Focusing on sociopolitical issues with students leads to greater awareness of the ways power is enacted through language. Literacy becomes a tool for exploring equity issues in and out of the classroom. Along with our students, we take up a more sociological view of literacy in order to learn more about how our individual lives connect to and are constrained by societal and political domains. ??? * Taking Action and Promoting Social Justice depends upon the other three dimensions. Working for social justice requires citizens to be knowledgeable about current and historical stakes at play in any particular social issue. As critical educators, we aim to present opportunities for students take up an activist stance with literacy, aiming to understand and support full rights of citizenship for all individuals and groups. The four dimensions of critical literacy can lead students and their teachers to a greater awareness of the political and ethical nature of pedagogy. Writing podcast scripts helps to highlight the political nature of writing pedagogy since student texts are broadcast to audiences outside the classroom. This cross school project especially helped participants grow in awareness of the stakes inherent in the writing act since their writing .... xxxx...(xxxx fix this last bit. Sounds weird. Conclusion to framework is needed so it should be something about critical literacy and participatory culture and how they are blended or what it means for them to be used together. Also do we need a 3rd section, we don't want a dichotomy, maybe that could be something we say...that we are looking at participatory culture critically, or critical literacy in more participatory ways....How these 2 frameworks could be helpful informants to each other. something like that. XXXX). Reader REsponse could also be part of this framework???? (Or maybe not.... I can't decide. XXXX) (I feel like if we add reader response, it will be too long and convoluted, maybe? The other frameworks are detailed and rich on their own? I think, re-reading this, that it's complex enough as is?) Methodology: Catchy headings needed **The Podcasters.** Third graders and High Schoolers were the participants in this study. The third graders attended a historic downtown school in a midsized midwestern college town. The school has been located near the downtown square for over 100 years. The school is a high poverty school, where 92% of the kids qualify for free and reduced lunch. The school has an enrollment of 300 students. 15% of the students are multiracial. 17% are African American. 4% are Hispanic. 64% are white. The school was required to implement a restructuring plan, having failed to meet AYP requirements for 7 years running. racial Demographics for the school? I need to get those. The third grade teacher, KS (pseudonym or not?), wanted to collaborate on a podcasting project that focused on critical literacy. Lee worked in the classroom one morning each week during the entire school year with her 16 students. (Something about literacy coaching, and using podcasting for book responses??? Why did she want to do this? Push for technology use in the school????) **Creating Podcast Texts.** The four dimensions of critical literacy were a guiding framework for creating the podcasts. (Maybe cite Sarah here?) All 3 sets of podcasts focused on some element of literacy. For our first podcast, we focused on Banned Books.The second focused on Access to Literacy. The third focused on Literacy and the Law. Lee and KC read /shared a selection of texts with students around this topic. INSERT TABLE OF BOOK, first column topic of podcast. 2nd column 3rd grade texts, 3rd column high school texts. Insert table here. Did the high schoolers use the 4 dimensions? We could lie and say they did? The third graders then worked in pairs to write their reactions to the texts. Lee took their comments and questions and aligned these with a 4 Dimensions Framework. Kids then picked one dimension to explore in the podcasts. Flow chart? Three podcasts were produced during the school year. At each site? XXXX Our first podcast developed around the theme of book banning. LH shared information about book banning with a power point. She then read frequently banned book, Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. Students were surprised to learn that this favorite text had been questioned XXX this isn't the word. There's banning, and then there's something else. . We reviewed comments on the Kids Speak site, where student writers protest censorship. XXX We did a ton of stuff, so we may want to make a kind of table, sharing the texts, (maybe in a bulleted list) and then a general statement about what was covered in the podcast, followed by some sample statements from the prezi slide. Not sure. XXX (I think maybe we could do some kind of table that says: Texts, Themes, Representative Statements? Something simple like that? I want to delete this little table here, but I'm not sure how…. || || || || || || || Now we write about the big kids here. Th participants Procedures/Protocols for creating podcasts Might be good to slip in some power point slides too here. Data Analysis We could slip in some charts here too. Findings Conclusions