Media, Culture, and Education: One Teacher’s Journey through the Mediated Intersections

Today’s classrooms often have a plethora of new ways of reading and writing entering the room, but too often these new ways of “doing” are disregarded and checked at the door. For this reason, one educator shares her journey through the mediated intersections of media, culture, and education. In this piece, she explores how literacy transformations are impacting her classroom and her students’ lives, how she tries to make connections for her students, as well as noting what these mediated intersections might mean for the future of education

Puppets on a String? How Young Adolescents Explore Gender and Health in Advertising

This article presents qualitative research on young adolescents’ abilities in communicating and evaluating health messages in advertising especially how they understand and create gendered identities. A group of grade 6-8 students learned about media techniques and movie making. In groups divided by gender, they created iMovie advertisements for health activities in their school. They represented themselves in these advertisements by creating stick puppets. Observations during lessons, examination of movies and puppets, and interviews with students and their teacher revealed that young adolescents were neither completely manipulated by media nor were they completely in charge of their responses to media’s messages about gender. Offering students an opportunity to de-brief media experiences also helped them to develop critical media health literacy

Reviews Matter: How Distributed Mentoring Predicts Lexical Diversity on Fanfiction.net

Fanfiction.net provides an informal learning space for young writers through distributed mentoring, networked giving and receiving of feedback. In this paper, we quantify the cumulative effect of feedback on lexical diversity for 1.5 million authors.Comment: Connected Learning Summit 201

The Writing Experiences of Urban Adolescents: A Multicase Study

In the field of adolescent literacy studies, writing has been neglected in both research and instruction (Juzwik, Curcic, Wolbers, Moxley, Dimling, & Shankland, 2005; Graham & Perin, 2007; Scherff & Piazza, 2005; Troia, 2007), especially in urban settings. Given the importance of writing instruction in secondary education, this qualitative case study investigates the writing experiences of five urban adolescent writers in a high school in a major city in the Southeastern U.S. Research questions included: (1) What are the writing experiences of urban adolescents in and out of school? and (2) In what ways do urban adolescents make use of multiliteracies in their writing experiences? This multicase study (Merriam, 1998; Stake, 1995) includes data collected from interviews, observations, field notes, samples of student work, and electronic messages. For a period of six months, five key participants acted as co-researchers by providing feedback and collaborating on inductive analysis of the data. Findings revealed that students employed multiple modes and genres of writing, and that they viewed social and technological contexts as important factors in their composing experiences. Despite these findings, the students did not have many opportunities to take advantage of recent advancements in 21st century writing approaches. The new ―Age of Composition‖ (Yancey, 2009) has not arrived in urban environments where concerns of power and access remain. This study contributes to the field of literacy studies by illuminating the experiences of the participants and providing recommendations for educators in urban contexts. As Yancey recommends, educators need to design a new model for 21st century composition instruction. The findings of this study suggest the following instructional implications for secondary classrooms: 1. 21st century composition instruction should include multimodal compositions and multimedia projects. 2. 21st century composition instruction should give a central role to the use of technology. 3. Students should have opportunities for personal expression and identity exploration. 4. Teachers should create composition lessons that engage and empower students. 5. 21st century composition instruction should be transformative

Toward an Ecology of Gaming

In her introduction to the Ecology of Games, Salen argues for the need for an increasingly complex and informed awareness of the meaning, significance, and practicalities of games in young people's lives. The language of the media is replete with references to the devil (and heavy metal) when it comes to the ill-found virtues of videogames, while a growing movement in K-12 education casts them as a Holy Grail in the uphill battle to keep kids learning. Her essay explores the different ways the volume's contributors add shades of grey to this often black-and-white mix, pointing toward a more sophisticated understanding of the myriad ways in which gaming could and should matter to those considering the future of learning

Exploring the Borderlands between Media and Health: Conceptualizing ‘Critical Media Health Literacy’

In Canada, as elsewhere, there is considerable concern about adolescents’ health. Much of the blame is thought to lie in the social context for today’s adolescents and their interaction with and dependence on various media. Yet, it is not clear whether and how adolescents learn to engage critically with media messages about health. Emerging from the authors’ previous work in conceptualizing and measuring adolescent health literacy, this article presents the results of a conceptual analysis process using the terms health literacy, critical health literacy, media literacy, critical media literacy, media activism, and critical viewing among others—to arrive at the unique construct of critical media health literacy (CMHL)

#BlackLiteracyLivesMatter: REVEALING AFRICAN AMERICAN ADOLESCENTS’ MULTIMODAL LITERACY PRACTICES IN ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKS AT A COMMUNITY CENTER

This study investigated the multimodal literacy practices of African American adolescents as they navigated online social networks. Participants ranged from ages 13 to 17 and resided in an inner city East Coast neighborhood. Data collection tools included an online social network survey, online social networking activities log, audio recorded literacy interviews, and screenshots. Pieces of data were carefully analyzed and coded for potential literacy practices. The study revealed four distinct literacy practices of this particular group of African American adolescents: communication, entertainment, information gathering, and taking a stance. Participant data defined each multimodal literacy practice while explaining how and why skills and experiences combined to create the practice. Engagement in online social networks involved these multimodal literacy practices. Often they involved interactions with peers and family members. Participants did not readily compare their multimodal online social network literacy practices to traditional forms of literacy, however, they used traditional words such as reading, writing, and spelling to explain their skills and experiences. Literacy was brought to life in a unique way through the words and multiple modes of communication, entertainment, information gathering, and stance taking of participants. This study questions ‘what’ and possibly ‘whose’ literacy counts. Technology and its affordances allowed participants to engage in practices through multiple modes. Additionally, this group of African American adolescents exposed an avenue through which race related injustices and tensions might be expressed through multimodal literacy practices in online social networks. The results of this study encourages future research to examine what literacy counts, whose literacy counts, and how or why adolescents engage through literacy practices. #BlackLiteracyLivesMatte

The Markings of a New Pencil: Introducing Programming-as-Writing in the Middle School Classroom

Using the setting of a writing workshop to facilitate a deliberate process to learn computer programming, this exploratory study investigates where there is a natural overlap between programming and writing through the storytelling motif, and to what extent existing language arts coursework and pedagogy can be leveraged to introduce this new form of digital composition to middle-school children. Whereas previous studies linking children’s programming with storytelling did so within the informal afterschool clubs, this study focuses on integrating computer science into the classroom, aligning curricula to core-content English language arts instruction