NCTE+TALK+OUTLINE

Link to work on the Prezi: http://prezi.com/presentation/katwest@edina.k12.mn.us/fcbnd7e/

Notes about Prezi Revisions

The Podcasting Project Screen: Do you think we could say New Media Literacies rather than 21st century skills? It might also be good to say: 2 midwestern cities on that slide?

With the conceptual framework: do you think we can focus on the crit lit slide and then on the 4 dimensions slide. Seems like a lot for them to look at? Same thing with the next slides that are paired. Can we do one and then the other? I like how the arrows connect them, so they could see the pairs first and then zoom in on one and then the other?

3rd podcast 3rd graders: Can we put a photo of Fannie Lou Hamer in there? Here's one that might be good: http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/images/portraits/fannie_lou_hamer.jpg

Fostering Critical Literacy: Can we change that to "Critical Podcasters?" ( I wonder if we could put all the Pluses together in one box and then the Missing IN Action components in another box? I shortened up the statements below? What do you think?

Multiple Perspectives? Drama: Sophs mentor 3rd Graders 3rd: More Identity Play: Literacy Risk Takers 10th: Unified views MIA: Contradictions

Social/Political Issues

Range of political issues explored: No surprise 3rd/10th: Connecting Language and Power (I think 10th graders did this because they did write about how the government and book banners try to overpower others by controlling our access to literacy.)

MIA: Getting at the WHY

DtC: Disrupting how we do school Disrupting assumptions about literacy MIA: Connecting Personal and Social

Taking Action for Justice

Focus on influencing audience, raise awareness

MIA: Taking action here and now

I like the Jenkins stuff a lot.... Some of those "we could have... sentences could have their front ends chopped off and we could just include the statements about what stood out to us.???

I wish there were more pictures or colors in the prezi. Could we change the font color or something? I could take photos of some of the third graders signs? Let me know what you think about that. Including images would make it more interesting to look at.

Okay, I think I'll take a bath. Looking good lady.


 * Introductions**


 * Description of Projec**t: (KC) This project took place over the course of one school year. The project involved the creation of 6 podcasts at 2 different schools. Third graders at a high poverty low test score school made 3 of the podcasts. Sophomores at a low poverty high test score achieving school created the other 3. The project developed as a result about using technology at our work sites. We had both used podcasting as well as other technologies in our language arts classes and we particularly wanted to create additional audience for our podcasters. Our goal was to have students create podcasts as a response to a range of class texts that had to do with social justice themes around literacy. KC worked with 3 sophomore classes of 23, 29, and 27 students. Lee is a literacy coach at her school this year so she worked every Monday in a friend's third grade classroom.


 * Conceptual Framework: Crit Lit (lee) and Participatory Cultures.**

Critical Literacies **are Concerned with…**
 * How “actual and possible social practices and conceptions of reading and writing enable human subjects to understand and engage the politics of daily life in the quest for a more truly democratic social order” (MCLaren, 1991, xviii).**


 * and **** "involve people using language to exercise power, to enhance everyday life in schools and communities, and to question practices of privilege and injustice (Comber, 2001) **


 * Four Interrelated Dimensions of Critical Literacy:**


 * ** Disrupting the commonplace: developing the language of critique, hope and activism **
 * ** Focusing on Sociopolitical issues: developing awareness of how power relations and political systems **
 * ** shape perceptions, responses and actions **
 * ** Interrogating Multiple Perspectives: Examining conflicting perspectives **
 * ** Taking action for social justice: engaging in reflection and action upon the world in order to change status quo **


 * Participatory Cultures and New Media Literacies (KC)**

Jenkins defines participatory culture as a media-creating and consuming community where people are invited to contribute freely. The culture may center around gaming, anime, fan fiction, podcasting or other form of digital media. Jenkins identifies several traits of participatory culture, acknowledging that some members will become more skilled than others, but that the act of engaging at any level is beneficial for members in that they engage in the creative process which has the potential to change the way they see themselves and others.

Traits of participatory cultures:


 * ** Relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement. **
 * ** Strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others. **
 * ** Some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. **
 * ** Members believe their contributions matter. **
 * ** Members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at least they care what other people think about what they created) **

**Research Question: (lee)**

How can creating podcasts around the dimensions of critical literacy? (social justice themes) support the development of participatory culture?


 * Timeline of project/ Basic Procedures**

3rd grade podcast: WtWTA, ALA web page on Banned books Week Kids Speak Read a text, Worked through several sessions with the text which included paired responses, gathering student questions, Group discussion around student questions. The questions were then distributed among the four dimensions and students chose one dimension of critical literacy to write about. **xxx lee, take pix of some of the banned books response sheets? Add a power point slide?** Students had a range of responses. 4 came out strong for kids making their own book choices, 3 wrote about purely personal connections to the WtWtA book, and 8 grappled with the contradictions of kids making their own choices, and kids having frightening reactions to texts and movies and perhaps needing some supervision about their reading.
 * Banned Books**, Where the Wild Things Are

High School Podcast: Banned Books Links and Websites (Diigo collection) (kc) We listened to the third graders' podcast. Then, I told them we'd be sending a podcast back about banned books. On my teaching blog, I wrote about the project and directed them to my Diigo page where I'd collected a bunch of links about banned and challenged books. We went to the computer lab. I told the kids to first comment on the third graders' podcast, and then think about how they wanted to respond. To help them think, they were to research banned and challenged books with the links I collected. Two weeks later, we published the banned books podcast. They had two class days to work on their segments: one for writing and rehearsing, and one more for editing and recording.


 * Mr. George Baker**

High School Podcast: The high schoolers ended up podcasting first this time. Lee suggested Mr. George Baker, a book about a 100 year old AA man who goes back to school to learn how to read, as a text. We read this as a class, and then we researched issues related to literacy, using another Diigo set that I compiled as a jumping off point. I found links related to accessing books at low costs, boys and literacy, learning to read as an adult, literacy rates around the world, effects of reading to children, second-language learning, and standardized testing. After kids chose an aspect of literacy on which to focus, they were supposed to use an online database like SIRS or Proquest to find an additional resource on that topic. They had an assignment to annotate and summarize their database articles. After we recorded these segments the first time, we had to re-do them because I thought many of them were confusing and did not include information from their research. Everyone was wiling to edit and re-record their segments. We also added a segment at the beginning of the podcast that was a summary of a discussion I led on Mr. George Baker. I had expected that more kids would react to that text in their segments, but they didn't.

3rd grade podcast: Because our first podcast focused so much on book choices, I wanted to focus on the ways people might be denied literacy choices. We read Mr. George Baker. We also read Wednesday Surprise about a young girl who teaches her grandmother to read. We read information from the Literacy Site web page about the connections to # of books kids own and literacy levels. We also wrote our reactions to statistics about lack of schooling world wide, and adult illiteracy rates. We read Listen to the Wind, the story of challenges to building a school in Korphe Pakistan and the challenges of going to school there. In this podcast, students talked about the things literacy can do for you. It can not only be a source of pleasure, but can help you function day to day and can lead later to access to college and "good jobs." Students shared global stats about literacy, talked about the connection between book ownership or access and literacy rates, and encouraged listeners to click on the Literacy Site each day so free books would be given to people who need them.


 * Granddaddy's Gift**

High School Podcast: For our third podcast, the groups diverged a bit in topic. I knew that Lee wanted to focus on the concept of a "right" because her kids had been using that word in their previous segments. She suggested Grandaddy's Gift as a text, but I didn't end up using it. One reason was that our focus for the quarter was on world literature. One of our texts, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi focuses on the role of an oppressive goverment in censoring news and information from the public. I also decided to use Listen to the Wind, which the third graders had read for the previous podcast as a text as a common text. I showed kids how to use the "leading issues" pages on the SIRS Researcher database to explore and choose topics. Then, they used Audacity, an open source recording software, to record and edit segments on the school computers. Our previous podcasts had been recorded on my personal laptop and edited by a few students prior to this experience. Because of this new format, I needed my school's technology integrationist to help me publish the podcasts, which the kids had dropped into a shared folder on the school's server. We miscommunicated about how I wanted them published, and he uploaded them as individual episodes to a feed hosted by my school district. This didn't work for Lee because her school computers weren't fast enough at downloading MP3s. So, I quickly mixed a sampling of segments into a Garage Band file, and posted it to my Edublog as usual. After Lee listened to one segment in particular, we realized we had a problem. One of my most engaged podcasting groups had written and performed a skit wherein they said that community colleges are not good schools. At the beginning of their segment, they focuses on social and political issues related to literacy, asserting that girls should have as much access to education as boys do; and that poor people should have as much access as rich people. This led them to dicuss access to college. They said that although it’s good that kids have access to K-12 education, It’s harder today to go to college because there’s less government money available, and that makes it so poor kids don’t have as many options as rich kids. Rebecca says, “Those lower class students who do get to go to college often must attend inexpensive colleges, often community colleges. They are not very good quality, and they often don’t finish to get a degree… Community colleges educate most of the students who receive Pell Grants. Less than 40% of low-income students earn a degree within six years…. Really only the top 10% of colleges in America are very good.” The group of students in the class all expect to go to “good” schools. 85% of the students at our school go on to a 4-year college, and these students had self-selected an “advanced” track in Enriched English 10. The tone of this segment reflects an assumption that “good” kids go to “good” schools. I don’t think this group considered how this segment would position their listeners. Rebecca’s segment reflects her perspective, but not an awareness of multiple perspectives on college access and quality. Lee and Italked, and I agreed to re-mix the final podcast to exclude this segment. In addition, I decided to try to help the 10th graders understand the missing and hidden narratives in their segments. I had them listen to this and two other segments and respond from three different perspectives. They listened to the Harry Potter segment and wrote reactions as a die-hard Harry Potter fan, a Middle-Eastern woman, and a kid whose parent had attended community college. After we did this activity, I told the kids what had happened with the Harry Potter segment, and they understood why their segment could not be played for the third graders.

3rd Grade Podcast: I didn't feel we had addressed systems of power or taking action for justice in our last 2 podcasts, so I wanted to find materials on how our government or legal system has used literacy to disenfranchise and deny rights to citizens. We read Granddaddy's Gift about an African American man who undertakes the challenge of studying for the literacy test in order to register to vote. We also visited and read text from the SNCC site. (student nonviolent coordinating committee). And read a short text about Fannie Lou Hamer, the voting rights activist and civil rights leader. With this podcast, students knew about podcasting, so they were very particular about how their segment should sound. They would stop in the middle of recording even over very minor mistakes and say, "Let's re-record that." Many of them also made up their own sound effects. Others were very choosy about transition music. This made for a more time consuming recording event, but indicated to me that if we had created a fourth podcast, students could have recorded their own segments. With this podcast, students collaborated on 9 skits about the freedom schools, interviewing a character from Granddaddy's Gift, or gave examples of the importance of voting. One student likened the literacy test to our standardized test that we take in spring, saying that literacy tests are still around today and that they can be "hard and confusing" for students.


 * Data & Analysis**

In addition to the six podcasts, we had conversations around our impressions of the podcast project either on IM or by phone. During these conversations we shared our impressions of student reactions to the projects, we shared our own impressions about the podcast products. And we compared notes about what seemed to be going well and what was not. We created a wiki in order to share and compare data analysis.

While we worked on the project, we had concerns about how "critical" the podcasts were. At times, it seemed like students were focused much more on the personal than the social. When the project was over, we In order to determine if the podcasters were working with a critical literacy frame, we asked a series of four dimension questions. While we acknowledge that the dimensions are interrelated, we wanted to get more information about if the podcasts represented a critical stance and if they did, how so? We answered these questions by determining if any excerpts from the podcasts focused on political issues, presented multiple perspectives, worked to disrupt the status quo and were evidence of students using writing to take action for justice. After finding examples of the dimensions within the podcasts (or not), we wrote narratives for each dimension describing how these dimensions of critical literacy played out in the podcasts.

After analyzing the podcast for critical content, we analyzed our field notes and conversation notes for examples of students demonstrating the elements of participatory cultures. KC also had student evaluations of the project that were analyzed. (Lee did not have the students evaluate the project. We could see that elements of participatory culture were missing from the project, but we wanted to determine if any elements were present and what we could integrate into our next podcasting project to bring the groups together more effectively. //)//


 * Findings**


 * Fostering Critical Literacy?**
 * Social and Political Issues**
 * connecting language and power**
 * Inherent in this project: book banning and readers' choice, literacy as a human right, inequitable distribution of literacy resources, literacy tests and disenfranchisement; government control of internet**
 * AND Varying degrees of depth and interrogation of "why," really questioning, rather than simply presenting "practices of privilege and power."**


 * Multiple Perspectives**
 * 3rd graders included more multiple perspectives; high schoolers more unified views**
 * Increase in dramatic sketches for 3rd graders over time, mentored by high schoolers**
 * Gradual move to including more voices, taking on identities of literacy risk takers**
 * AND contradictory voices/positions could have been more evident**


 * TA4J**
 * Podcasting viewed as social action**
 * AND... we could have done more to discuss ways to take social action in the here and now on these issues**


 * DtC**
 * Disruption of School Traditions**
 * Shining spotlight on frequently taken for granted literacy issues**
 * AND more efforts could have been made to connect the personal and the social.**

In all the podcasts, students developed their use of critical literacy resources.

Exploring Social and Political Issues:

Social issues and multiple perspectives were developed as literacy resources through the podcasting project, but we could have done much more work together to get at the "why" behind many of the issues and perspectives presented. The third graders were more willing to talk about social problems in the United States than the older kids were, but in both sites, there was little direct interrogation of the connections between literacy and race and class, even though many of our key texts did explore these themes. The third graders went beyond the personal in deeper ways than the high schoolers did.

Multiple perspectives: Overall, the high school kids presented more personal views of literacy in their readings and segments, presenting an overall view that literacy is a site for enjoyment and pleasure**.** Literacy for third graders was not only a site for pleasure, but also helped people with daily social functions, access to economic gain, and could be used to wield or deny power. The sophs podcasts presented more unified views on most issues: Where their views on censorship were that it was always negative, the third graders felt that censorship of books for young children might be appropriate at times. Where the sophs felt adults should butt out of kids' choices, some third graders felt that adults should be protect young kids against texts that could frighten them. The sophs recognize oppression in other governments, but they resist recognizing racism and inequity in the United States. They present a unified viewpoint on most issues: "Censorship is always bad;" "Literacy is always good;" "Other governments suppress freedom of speech, which is bad."

Taking action for justice was also developed as a reading resource in that students in both sites felt they were creating podcasts that could educate and influence their audiences. On the other hand, we did not create opportunities for students and teachers to reflect on ways besides podcasting that we could take action about some of the political issues we illuminated in the podcasts. We talked about two action projects in the second podcasts: The Literacy Site and the Pass the Book program, but focusing on these small low impact actions did not lead to an interrogation of the root causes of literacy injustice or explores ways for podcasters or their audience to come to gether for collective social action. The third graders did highlight ways others have taken social action in their focus on the Freedom Schools in their third podcast.

Disrupting the commonplace: At both school sites, the actual making of the podcasts did represent a disruption of the status quo of school and the way it runs. It is atypical in both schools for students and teachers to have space and time for "playful" activities or media production.There were missed opportunities to connect the personal and the social, to inquire more deeply about how the status quo perpetuates literacy inequity. Throughout the project, more third graders developed a stronger language of critique that they were able to use to write dramatic scripts about literacy and the law. In all the podcasts, however, there were unique, outlier, statements communicated by individual students that, had we paid attention to them, could have led to productive critique of the status quo and deeper connection between the personal and the social in our lives. An example of this is when Isaac connected literacy tests for voting from the past to present day standardized literacy testing in schools, which are both "hard and confusing" for students. The sophs explorations of internet censorship worked to bring a modern connection to the third graders' historical view of ways governments censor the right to freedom of expression. But in both podcasts, we focused on political issues, without connecting these to our own lives or disrupting commonplace assumptions about how state control of literacy is part of our lives today.


 * Participatory Culture? Not really!**


 * High barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement : Separate sites, separate creations**
 * Some support for creating and sharing one's creations: Comments were always positive, brief, but not collaborative.**
 * Some evidence mentorship: Copying creative moves: 3rd graders 3rd graders learned more @ creative podcasting.**
 * Belief that our Contributions matter? We Dropped the ball here, ignoring this naturally occurring in podcast one. Podcast #1: Highschoolers took actual lines from the 3rd graders pc's and integrated them into their podcast. This was extremely motivating and made the students feel like collaborators, but we dropped the ball on this. We could have had students use the other sites podcast as part of our text sets. Also, the first podcast brought solidarity to the groups as they both advocated for their favorite texts. Attention to themes that can unite the two sites would have helped strengthen pc.**
 * Social connection? The groups provided audience, but this was fairly anonymous. "I wish we had more interaction!"**


 * Mind the Gaps:**


 * Participation Gap? creating the media....Difficult, but imp.**
 * Transparency Gap: Language of critique, truer mentorship.**
 * Ethics Gap: Rehearsal Revisions: Listening for and responding to "Othering."**

The podcasting project did support the development of participatory culture within each classroom community. Within the high school classes, podcasting was a source of fun and creativity. The barriers to participating were low, as the kids could podcast alone or with a group and were not given formal grades on their products. Kids who knew how to use recording software could coach others or lead their groups. The publishing aspect of the project made the kids feel important - they knew the third graders would listen to and respond to their work. The development of the culture for this project carried over into other projects, namely our blended learning pilot in the spring. The third graders had a similar experience with making their podcasts. They supported each other, often offering compliments to one another on listening to the products. The connection to civic engagement was inherent in our project, but the third graders also engaged artistically, writing more dramatic scripts over time and working to add sound effects and other interesting features. They watched Lee edit their podcast segments and learned over the three podcasts how to add sound effects and became more particular about how their segments sounded.

Between the groups, we noticed the beginnings of participatory culture. In our first episode, the kids took up many of the ideas originally presented by the third graders. This thrilled the third graders, who often called out "I said that!" when they heard the high school kids reacting to their work. The groups cared about the other group's reactions to their pieces and liked reading the comments each group left for the other. The high school kids were less likely to be mentored by third graders because they saw themselves as "the mentors" of the project, even though their readings were less critical and complex than many of the younger kids' were.


 * Looking forward?**


 * We believe that there were tentative steps made toward creating a critically literate participatory culture through this project. Students did engage in artistic and civic dialogue around social justice themes at their school sites and to a lesser extent, across sites. Jenkins talks about potential for pc's to combine and come together as hybrid cultures. Our initial podcasts were a step in the right direction because the sophs used the third grade podcast as a text when creating their own podcast on book banning. Jenkins recommends this kind of reading and remixing for students at all age levels. We are learning more about using Aviary and Dropbox to make future podcasting more collaborative. With these tools, students in each group could mix voices and segments together into one file. Using the four dimensions of crit lit to plan the podcasting project was helpful, but incomplete since we didn't use as a guide for revising the podcast. This doesn't have to be a time consuming endeavor, but a quick list of questions that we could ask along with the students about our segments could lead to focused revision of the podcasts and our collective consciousness as we work on future podcasts.**

Though the project didn't result in true participatory culture between our two sites, we do believe we learned more about the benefits and challenges of having students collaborate and circulate new media across diverse sites. and we agree with Jenkins when he says,
 * //“We must integrate these new knowledge cultures into our schools, not only through group work but also through long-distance collaborations across different learning communities” (21// **