January 9, 2013 By Katrina Schwartz
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.
“The teachers who
let it get a little messy are finding something very powerful.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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