Media Literacy Proficiency, Participatory Cultures: Reflection on Week 11

On Proficiency: Please Fill In These Multiple Choice Bubbles to Demonstrate Your Knowledge of How You Critically Evaluate Media

The idea that we have to measure media literacy proficiency makes me wonder if one day we’ll see media literacy sections in standardized tests. Wouldn’t that be funny, to see teachers and students scramble to cover material based solely on yearly scantron tests designed to satisfying media literacy requirements outlined in something similar to No Child Left Behind? The fact that such an idea feels so fundamentally ludicrous makes me feel more strongly that education in the U.S. would have to shift drastically from its current path in order to accommodate some of the more abstract or open-ended goals outlined in the NCTE Guideline.

… Or are these goals really so broad in scope that they veer into the academic aether, never to be touched by ordinary folk with ordinary goals? I’m thinking the answer is no. If anything, the teaching method outlined in class yesterday from Understanding by Design gets away from the Möbius strip of false understanding implicit in the “teach to the test” standardized testing method and brings students to a form of understanding that is more real and therefore more capable of measurement in the first place.

I call it a Möbius strip because it doesn’t seem to go anywhere. Forgive me for my blathering (and I will do much of it in this post), but in class this week I found myself thinking of possible analogies or metaphors for the critical thinking skills and media awareness that we are trying to bestow upon these hypothetical young persons. On the whiteboard this week, we came up with things like teaching people to “look behind the message” and “recognize media”:

And when we came up with all that (sorry, I couldn’t get all 4 groups’ content into the shot) it made me think that there’s something primal to it akin to philosophical stuff like lifting the veil of illusion in Buddhism or teaching people Plato’s allegory about seeing shadows on the cave wall. When we describe something like “look behind the message” or say we want youths to become “critical readers of the world”, isn’t that what we mean? It’s heady to think about. I’m reminded of why we teach kids anything, and I think of my first time learning deconstructionism or postmodernism in my British Literature class in high school (thanks, Mr. Scotese). To put it plainly, seeing how everything is interconnected (like on the whiteboard, or in mashups, or in social networking) felt like the moment when Neo was finally able to “see the matrix” in its entirety, in its foundational structure. Stuff like this is where you can really get into the heart of the facets of understanding we talked about in class: explanation, interpretation, application, perspective, empathy, and self-knowledge. It was so eye opening about and it seemed to bear little relevance with learning goals or objectives based on institutional standards.

But like Carol said in class, relevance is subjective. And I’ve come around to the idea that a structured learning format like in Understanding by Design where you think of what you want your students to learn before you go through the process of creating a curriculum or evaluation methods is not only a relevant method of learning but is probably the smartest thing I’ve heard all week. It’s not abstract, it’s goal-oriented in a way that encompasses the whole learning process. It makes room for the idea of “richer, nuanced learning” spoken of in Hobbs by focusing on understanding over performance. That level of engagement requires discipline from students and balanced guidance from educators, and what’s more grounded than that?


On Participatory Cultures: Your Contribution Is Appreciated

Do we all have to create things? The question brings to mind my artist friends who sometimes talk as if I, their non-artist friend, am not in the room. They ask wonderingly: “How can anybody go through life without creating music?” And I would briefly feel like some non-artistic leper, resentful that I lack musical talent and happen to go through life without ever creating much of anything tangible. In short, I used to think the answer is that we don’t all have to create things to get through life … but I’ve changed my mind since then.

Not all teens are engaged in participatory culture. For every teen who has a blog or a twitter, there’s one who doesn’t. How much of this is due to what Jenkins called the “participation gap” and how much of this is due to teens who don’t want to or feel like they can’t? We spoke in class of arts-based vs. civics-based approaches to media literacy education and it makes me think of how not every teen happens to be a whiz-kid that whips out million dollar programs every other week and on the other side of the spectrum not every teen even has a MySpace profile.

But ultimately, I’m feeling optimistic about participatory culture. Maybe because I ultimately don’t believe in dichotomies like “arts-based vs. civics-based”. That like we learned in our high school English classes and in our readings this week, everything is interconnected and part of one big social construction. I feel differently about Web 2.0 stuff than I do about my lack of musical ability because even a dabbler like me can feel useful when it comes to participatory culture. I may not make music or know how to paint, but every Flickr photo I put up and every blog post I write is part of the greater whole, as cheesy as that sounds. The threshold is so low that essentially anyone who wants to communicate with other people is a participant. In turn, we as communicators need to be made self-aware about the contributions we make and how we fit into history or into the universe.

Anyhow, that's the stuff I was thinking of this week. Blogger may have a spell check, but there's no check for long-windedness or dithering. I'll go communicate elsewhere on the internet now.