Week 5 Reading Reflective: Bring Participatory Culture Into Classroom

This week’s required reading for ILT5430 Digital Storytelling class is Afterword written by Henry Jenkins for Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel’s DIY Media: Creating, Sharing and Learning with New Technologies.

Excellent read! My biggest takeaway from this reading is the distinction between traditional “Do It Yourself” culture and the “ Do It Together” participatory culture. Before I read Jenkins’s article, DIY is just a phrase in reference to the emergence of a trend of people undertaking home improvement and various other small craft and construction projects as both a creative-recreational and cost-saving activity. It is often related to “rugged individualism” and “self-reliance.”( Jenkins 2008). Now the term DIY has taken on a broader meaning in Jenkins’s book. Jenkins indicated that he was not comfortable with the term DIY used in the new literacy area. He brought up the concept of " Do It Together” which "better capture collective enterprises within networked publics”.

I felt most inspired by several detailed examples in the book that Jenkins has illustrated how DIY promotes collaboration in an affinity group. One of examples is his observance of a female-centered science fiction fandom in the early 1990s. He wrote:" Each plays multiple roles: sometimes the author, sometimes the reader, some-times the teacher, sometimes the student, sometimes the editor, sometimes the researcher, sometimes the illustrator. They move fluidly from role to role as needed, interrupting their own creative activity to lend skills and knowledge to someone else”.

The multiple roles here are surprisingly representative of the tasks that I would like my students to perform in a typical world language classroom: students read and write, speak and listen, interrupting their own learning to lend skills and knowledge to someone else. However, when I reflect on my teaching pedagogies, there is not a network that supports students fluidly playing multiple roles amongst each other. Most of the support my student receive was from me like I'm the hub and all the spokes lead to me rather than between each other. In most of the cases, it was me who gave them the homework and tasks to finish. There is not much input from students. When I assign them classroom jobs (narrator, presenter, recorder,painter, etc) I have not really asked their preference either. I was too drawn by the idea that everyone has to do the same task and learn same thing and perform equally well. So exploring the ways to employ DIY participatory culture in my classroom is on my to-do list now.

Another example that interested me is the Moby-Dick case from Ricardo Pitts- Wiley. This model provided detailed guide how to bring participatory culture into classroom. Pitts-Willey asked students to associate the book with current social issues and recreate their own characters in the 21st century setting. Later Pitts-Wiley created stage production based on students’ work to promote productive dialogues with young people around literary works.

There are so many interesting ideas this week and I am completely fascinated by Jenkins’ work so I found more of his writings from his blog. I believe this week’s reading has been very beneficial and I will continue to explore the means to connect with my students and motivate them to take their own responsibility that they are interested in.