1. By Erin Reilly, Henry Jenkins, Laurel J. Felt and Vanessa VartabedianFall 2012

2. p. 3Literacy for Engaging in a Participatory Culturep. 5Pedagogy: Participatory Learningp. 6Playp. 7Progress in Participatory Culturesp. 11 Balancing the Conversation Between Technology and Mediap. 13 Applying New Media Literacies in Learningp. 18 4 Cs of Participationp. 25 Access for All Preparing Educatorsp. 27 References 3. The past two decades have marked a period of profound and prolonged media change, one that has placed more communicative power in the hands of everyday people than ever before. The result has altered the ways major institutions interface with their publics and moved society towards a more participatory culture, a phrase we use to signal the work that still must be done to ensure everyone has the skills, access, and resources needed to participate meaningfully in the core operations of the cul- ture. Often today, people equate participatory culture with a networked, technological society.Students using iPods for How-To Activity But with regards to learning in a participatory culture, a mere technology-based solu- tion will simply result in an arms race where each school spends more and more of its budget on tools while stripping bare the human resources (e.g., teachers, librarians) who might help students learn how to use those tools in ethical, safe, and creative ways. Harvards GoodPlay project has found, for example, that most young people do not have adult mentors who can provide them with meaningful advice about their online lives (James, with Davis, Flores, Francis, Pettingill, Rundle, & Gardner, 2009). In practice, many of the core skills needed to join a networked society can be taught now, even if schools have grossly uneven access to technologies. In fact, for practic- ing certain skills, low-tech or no-tech contexts often prove just as effective, if not more effective, than high-tech counterparts. Developing curriculum that acknowledges the opportunities and challenges of partici- patory culture requires first understanding the nature of our relationships with media. We have sought to facilitate these understandings by developing a variety of resources to explore and practice the new media literacies (NMLs), a set of core cultural compe- tencies and social skills that young people need in our new media landscape (Jenkins,Shall We PLAY? : Literacy for Engaging in a Participatory Culturep. 3 4. Purushotma, Clinton, Weigel & Robison, 2006). The NMLs are technology-neutral that is, they are uncommitted to any particular technology. The NMLs can be embraced by schools that do not have access to state-of-the-art technologies for their students, and can be applied continuously, regardless of future shifts in technological resources. We call the NMLs literacies, but they actually are skills that collectively constitute a lit- eracy the ability to read and write, broadly defined, in a participatory culture.Shall We PLAY? : Literacy for Engaging in a Participatory Culture p. 4 5. With these and other educational considerations in mind, our team evaluated the na-tions educational landscape and made the following observations: 1) To foster instudents the skills needed to engage in a participatory culture, teachers must be com-fortable with new media literacies themselves; and 2) The Common Core Standardsdefine what all students are expected to know and be able to do, but not how teach-ers should teach.Accordingly, we constructed and led professional development programs to bothsupport teachers comfort with the NMLs and introduce participatory learning asan approach to instruction. Participatory learning seeks to engage the whole studentin the learning process, and understands the student as a citizen of a rich learningecosystem. School, after-school, home, and online are organic parts of students andteachers worlds, and learning that occurs in any one location should be integrated andextended across every location.To begin exploring participatory learning, it is crucial to identify the presence and na-ture of participation opportunities in your learning context; then, take action aroundthem. Keeping in mind the following questions can help to initiate the 4 Cs of Partici-pation in the learning process: How do we provide mechanisms to CREATE? How do we support opportunities for media to CIRCULATE across platforms, disciplines and ages? How do we help learners to COLLABORATE and build upon others knowledge? How do we encourage learners to CONNECT with counterparts and establish productive networks?4 Cs of ParticipationShall We PLAY? : Pedagogy: Participatory Learning p. 5 6. During our professional development programs, we found that participating teachersgravitated more towards the new media literacy play than any of the other 11 skills.Play is the capacity to experiment with ones surroundings as a form of problem solving.As a result, we have embraced play as a key focus of our continuing outreach andscholarship. We also refer to our project as PLAY!, an acronym for ParticipatoryLearning and You!We are pushing beyond thinking of play as merely a skill. Play, we believe, is also anoutlook on life and learning it is a way of seeing oneself and the world through anew, creative lens. Play is not a solitary occupation but a collective ethos, a shared setof experiences that encourage us to think beyond our disciplines and see with neweyes. Play supports constant learning and innovative responses to our surroundings.Through an iterative, playful process, we support each other to try new things and en-courage a process of innovation and creativity.Play gives educators permission to engage their passions, to experiment collectivelyon problems, and to produce projects that bring pleasure back into the classroom. We need to return play to the heart of learning.Participatory Learning and You!Shall We PLAY? : Play p. 6 7. Current understandings of participatory culture emerged from work in cultural stud- ies, which initially focused on fan communities and other subcultures that were striving to assert their voices on the fringes of a society dominated by mass media. Over the past decade, practices that once might have felt marginal the production and sharing of amateur videos, for example have become increasingly commonplace. More and more, the general public is exerting greater control over the production and circulation of media, often appropriating and remixing content created for entertainment purposes into resources that can be deployed for diverse purposes, for example, participation in politics, education, or religion. Digital media constitutes the arena in which debates of significant social and political importance are being conducted, and skills in creating and circulating media are now tied to a much broader range of economic opportunities (Jenkins, Ford & Green, 2013). Therefore, contemporary educational practices need to embrace participatory culture if our students are to be prepared for their future lives as citizens, workers, community members, and creative individuals. Isabel reflects on her teaching practice The white paper, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, (Jenkins, Purushotma, Clinton, Weigel, & Robison, 2006) identi- fied several opportunities and challenges resulting from the introduction of participa- tory practices through learning. The publication also outlined a series of new media literacies (NMLs), which are core skills and cultural competencies necessary for full andShall We PLAY? : Progress in Participatory Culturesp. 7 8. meaningful cultural participation. Finally, it established a core definition of a participa- tory culture: A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing ones creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most ex- perienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social con- nection with one another (p. 3). Three years later, the Digital Youth Project (Ito, Baumer, Bittanti, boyd, Cody, Herr-Ste- phenson, Horst, & Yardi, 2009) published an extensive study detailing how youth par- ticipate through digital media. The project suggests three modes of engagement that shape young peoples participation in online communities:1.First, many young people go online to hang out with friends they already know from their schools and neighborhoods.2.Second, they may mess around with programs, tools, and platforms just to see what they can do.3.And third, they may geek out as fans, bloggers, creators and designers dig- ging deeply into an area of intense interest to them, and moving beyond their local community to connect with others who share their passions through new media. These reports from the teams of Jenkins and Ito, respectively, strongly endorse the value of informal learning, which often occurs through friendship-based or interest- driven networks and is pursued beyond the school hours. Both reports also acknowl- edge that opportunities for rich informal learning are unevenly distributed across the population not simply in terms of who has access to networked and mobile technolo- gies, but also in terms of who has access to the social scaffolding needed to identify, join and engage with diverse communities of interest. Thus, schools have a vital role to play in helping young people both develop skills and find and access relevant informal learning spaces.Shall We PLAY? : Progress in Participatory Cultures p. 8 9. Several leading foundations have funded a range of educational initiatives aimed at helping students to tap into the rich learning networks that have emerged from partici- patory culture. Many of these initiatives have embraced notions of peer-to-peer and connected learning, as seen in the following examples: Reinvention of library spaces (e.g., Chicago Public Librarys YouMedia Centers), Redesign of schools (e.g., Quest to Learn), Reconceptualization of the museum and other public institutions (e.g. Makers Workshop at Pittsburgh Childrens Museum), Development of new forms of childrens media with a strong focus on games- based learning (e.g., The Joan Ganz Cooney STEM Video Game Challenge), Emergence of new platforms deploying collaborative storytelling (such as Social Samba) and transmedia creation (e.g., Flotsam Transmedia Play Experience, I