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Reading in a Participatory Culture, edited by Henry Jenkins, Wyn Kelley, Katie Clinton, Jenna McWilliams,Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, and Erin Reilly.

Copyright © 2013 by Teachers College, Columbia University. All rights re-served. Prior to photocopying items for classroom use, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center, CustomerService, 222 Rosewood Dr., Danvers, MA 01923, USA, tel. (978) 750-8400, www.copyright.com.

CHAPTER 1

New Literacies in an Age of

Participatory Culture

Katie Clinton, Henry Jenkins,

and Jenna McWilliams

At first glance, playwright, youth organizer, and community activistRicardo Pitts-Wiley might seem a peculiar inspiration or a book aboutdigital media and participatory culture. Although Pitts-Wiley is enthusi-astic about the potential o new media, much o his work is distinctly low-tech. He writes and produces remixed versions o such classics as Her-man Melville’s Moby-Dick and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or a traditional

venue: the community stage.

But something magical—something participatory —happens on thatstage. First, his plays’ universal themes are seasoned with immediacy, withissues that resonate with his community. His play Moby-Dick: Ten andNow, or example, intermingles the themes o Captain Ahab’s obsessions,his atalism, and his willingness to place his crew in peril with contempo-rary urban gang culture. Te whaling trade rom Melville’s book becomesthe drug trade in the contemporary retelling; Ahab becomes Alba, a teen-age girl whose brother has been killed by a “WhiteTing” a mysteriousfigure or the international cocaine cartel; she devotes her lie to finding,and killing, those responsible or her brother’s death.

In Moby-Dick: Ten and Now, Pitts-Wiley chose not simply to revisethe story, but to incorporate aspects o Melville’s version in counterpointwith Alba’s quest or vengeance. As the young actors pace the stage, tell-ing their story in contemporary garb, lingo, and swagger, a literal scaffoldabove their heads holds a second set o actors, who give lie to Melville’soriginal tale. Te “then” hal o the cast is generally older and Whiter than



4 P ART I: FUNDAMENTALS

the adolescent, mixed-race “now” actors. Te play’s meaning lies in the juxtaposition between these two very different worlds, a juxtapositionsometimes showing commonalities, sometimes contrasts.

Reading in a Participatory Culture reflects an equally dramatic meetingbetween worlds. New Media Literacies (NML) emerged rom the MacAr-thur Foundation’s ground-breaking commitment to create a field arounddigital media and learning. Te oundation sought researchers who wouldinvestigate how young people learned outside the ormal educational set-ting—through their game play, their annish participation, “hanging out,messing around, and geeking out” (Ito et al., 2010). Te goal was to bringinsights drawn rom these sites o inormal learning to the institutions—

schools, museums, and libraries—that affect young people’s lives. Rightnow, many young people are deprived o those most effective learning toolsand practices as they step inside the technology-ree zone characterizingmany schools. Other young people, who lack access to these experiencesoutside school, are doubly deprived because schools are not helping themto catch up to their more highly connected peers.

New Media Literacies—first at MI and now at University o South-ern Caliornia—has brought together a multidisciplinary team o mediaresearchers, designers, and educators to develop new curricular and peda-gogical models that could contribute to this larger project. Tis initiativehas been inormed by Henry Jenkins’s background as a media scholar o-cused on an communities and popular culture and by the applied exper-tise o Erin Reilly, who had previously helped to create Zoey’s Room, awidely acclaimed online learning community that employs participatorypractices to get young women more engaged with science and technology.Te NML team brought together educational researchers (such as KatieClinton, who studied under James Paul Gee, and Jenna McWilliams, who

has an MFA in creative writing and teaching experience in rhetoric andcomposition) with community-based media literacy veterans (like AnnaVan Someren, who ran an aferschool program at the YWCA). FlourishKlink, who had helped to organize the influential Fan Fiction Alley web-site, which provides beta reading or amateur writers to hone their skills,and Lana Swartz, who had been a classroom teacher working with specialneed children, also joined the research group. And the development andfield testing o curricular resources involved NML in collaborating with

other academic researchers, such as scholars engaged in Howard Gardner’sGoodPlay Project at Harvard and Dan Hickey, an expert on participatoryassessment at Indiana University. NML also worked with youth-ocused



New Literacies in an Age of Participatory Culture 5

organizations such as Global Kids, with classroom teachers such as JudithNierenberg and Lynn Sykes in Massachusetts and Becky Rupert in Indi-ana—Nierenberg, Sykes, and Rupert were rethinking and reworking SGmaterials or their instructional purposes—and with scholars such as WynKelley who had long sought new ways to make Melville’s works come alivein classrooms around the country.

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

Popular media representations ofen set so-called digital literacies at odds

with the values and norms o traditional print culture. Tis book’s authorswanted to work across that divide, envisioning a generation o students whocould read with a book in one hand and a mouse in the other. In this view,the new media literacies could supplement and expand traditional print lit-eracies in ways that enriched our culture and deepened our appreciation oclassical stories. New media platorms and practices were giving studentsmuch greater opportunities or communication and expression than couldhave been imagined by any previous generation. But to participate mean-ingully, young people needed to be able to read and write; they needed toknow how to connect their contemporary experiences to a much older tra-dition, and the literature classroom represents a particularly rich environ-ment or using these different ways o learning.

Jenkins and Kelley knew when they first met Pitts-Wiley that they hadound the perect co-conspirator on this journey. Pitts-Wiley had gone intoan institution or incarcerated youth and helped these young men to learnto read Moby-Dick by encouraging them to identiy closely with a singlecharacter and speculate about what kind o person that character would be

i he were living today. In the process, he encouraged them to reimagine Moby-Dick as a novel about not the 19th-century whaling trade but ratherthe 21st-century drug trade—both dangerous proessions involving menon the margins o their society who were loyal to each other and to theirleaders in their ruthless pursuit o their economic interests.

Pitts-Wiley, in turn, took inspiration rom the stories these young mencreated or his own new stage production, Moby-Dick: Ten and Now. In theprocess, Pitts-Wiley became a passionate advocate or getting communities

to read and discuss classical novels together. While Pitts-Wiley saw remixingas an important strategy or constructing a productive dialogue with youngpeople around literary works, he was also emphatic that remixing should




emerge rom a meaningul engagement with the original work. As an Ari-can American, he was very aware o how his culture was ofen “ripped off”by White artists without any acknowledgment o its original meanings andcontexts. He asserted his right to draw on the literary canon, but he also in-sisted that his students pay respect to those who came beore. Creative read-ing worked hand in hand with critical and close reading.

When the Mixed Magic Teatre met NML, the collaboration took allinvolved outside their comort zones, orcing each to think more deeplyabout core assumptions regarding literacy, learning, and cultural expres-sion. Here’s how Pitts-Wiley recalls this encounter:

I didn’t eel dumb or unprepared, but I doubted whether I had thelanguage to translate what I was doing into a orm that both sideswould understand and appreciate. I knew I wasn’t up to speed with thetechnology and concepts the NML team was working with and I wasn’tsure they were going to be helpul in putting a play on stage. However,as the work proceeded, both sides realized that it wasn’t about allowingtechnology to dominate. Rather, we were both interested in betterunderstanding how pop culture, access to inormation, powerulsound, and visuals can hamper or enhance the learning process. Iwas doing things, as a theater artist, to get my cast to perorm withinormed honesty, and I came to see that NML was looking orways to synthesize this process into something that was concise andreplicable. As we did so, we were both looking or ways to work aroundgenerational, economic, and cultural differences that made the worldo MI and the world my young actors inhabited miles apart.

Tis book tells the story o what happened when these collaborators

sought to bridge these two worlds, what they learned rom each otherabout reading in a participatory culture, how they translated that learn-ing into a ramework and a set o classroom activities, and what hap-pened when those approaches got into the hands o gifed teachers. AsNML sought to explore how a curriculum or the English language artsclassroom could draw upon the mindsets and practices o a participatoryculture, it used Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick as its model text and Pitts-Wiley’s play Moby-Dick: Ten and Now as an example o a contempo-rary theater adaptation, to develop what NML calls the teachers’ strategyguide. Te eachers’ Strategy Guide (SG) is not simply a lesson plan thattells teachers what to do, but rather represents an approach or teaching




literature that embraces and supports participatory practices while oster-ing traditional reading and writing skills.

Te SG was field tested in six schools in New England and Indiana,some public, some private; some urban, some rural; some involving highschool students, some middle schools; some working with Moby-Dick,some adapting the approach to other literary works. Work with the In-diana teachers was overseen by a team o Indiana University educationalresearchers who were attempting to model new orms o participatory as-sessment. You have already heard rom Becky Rupert (see the Preace), oneo those educators, and you will get more such perspectives as our accountcontinues. Tis book will combine some materials drawn rom the “Expert

Voices” section o our curriculum (New Media Literacies, 2008), essaysthat introduce our approach and provide some new ways o thinking aboutwhat it means to read and write in an evolving media environment, withsome assessments o our field testing o this curriculum.

Troughout this book there will be recurring reerences to Moby-Dickto illustrate the NML approach. But you don’t need to be teaching thisparticular book to take advantage o these resources. NML and its collab-orating teachers have adopted this ramework to teach a range o other as-signed texts, and Pitts-Wiley has applied the remix practices he developedaround the Moby-Dick project to other canonical works. So can you. NML’smessage to educators is simple: Appropriate and remix these practices oryour students, apply them to any book you wish or are required to teach,create your own community o readers, and embrace those elements oparticipatory culture that you think may empower learners.

TOWARD A MORE PARTICIPATORY CULTURE

Over the past several decades, our culture has undergone a period o pro-ound and prolonged media change, not simply a shif in the technical in-rastructure or communication but shifs in the cultural logics and socialpractices that shape the ways we interact. As a society, we are still sort-ing through the long-term implications o these changes. But one thingis clear: Tese shifs point us toward a more participatory culture, one inwhich everyday citizens have an expanded capacity to communicate andcirculate their ideas, one in which networked communities can help shapeour collective agendas. Te authors believe that these shifs require us toreimagine the nature o literacy itsel.




New Media Literacies (Jenkins et al., 2009, pp. 5–6) defines a participa-tory culture o the ollowing eatures:

1. Relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civicengagement;

2. Strong support or creating and sharing creations with others;3. Some type o inormal mentorship whereby what is known by the

most experienced is passed along to novices;4. Members who believe that their contributions matter; and5. Members who eel some degree o social connection with one

another (they care what other people think about what they have

created).

Many o the practices o traditional olk cultures embody these sameeatures, with skills and knowledge passed rom generation to generationthrough structures o inormal mentorship, mostly involving learning bydoing and creating within a shared social context. Te institutional andindustrialized practices o mass media allow or the mass production andcirculation o culture but ofen at the expense o our abilities to meaning-ully participate in those processes at a grassroots level. No longer culturalparticipants, we have become consumers o culture produced by othersand ofen in the service o their goals, and not our own. Everyday peoplehave lacked access to the inrastructure and resources needed to sustaintheir own orms o cultural production (Jenkins, 2006a). Digital tools havelowered the costs o production and circulation, decreasing the investmento skills and money required to meaningully shape our culture, and thushave paved the way or more voices to be heard. In such a world, more andmore people have the capacity to take media into their own hands, creat-

ing and sharing what they know and how they see the world beyond theirimmediate riends and amilies.

And young people are at the heart o these changes. Young peoplein online orums are engaging in close reading activities directed towardpopular music or cult television shows, sometimes engaging in prolongedand impassioned debate about what such works mean and how they con-

vey their meanings; they are recording their impressions, including theirreflections on what they read, through blogs, online journals, video reflec-

tions, social networks, and microblogging platorms.In describing steps toward a “more participatory culture,” the authorsare not asserting that everyone has had an equal chance to participate.




Schools, libraries, and other public institutions have a vital role to playin creating more equitable opportunities or participating. Our studentsneed our help in making sense o a period o proound and prolongedmedia change that has affected every subject we teach. Ideally, eachteacher would take ownership o those new media literacy skills that arepart o his or her proessional and intellectual domain. Te literatureteacher, thus, has an obligation to help young people think more deeplyabout what it means to be a reader and an author in a world where moreand more o us can create and circulate what we create with others. odo this, though, we need to negotiate a new stance toward both print anddigital culture, embracing new opportunities, even as we preserve older

practices, texts, and values.NML believes that the ormal classroom can, should, and must align it-

sel more closely with the clusters o practices that increasingly lead to suc-cess in out-o-school environments. Rather than supporting these ormso inormal learning, classroom participation structures ofen minimizeopportunities or effective collaboration, participatory engagement withcurricular content, and communication practices that extend beyond thephysical limits o the schoolhouse. When read through the lens o partici-patory culture, our ormal education system, as it is currently structured,is deeply flawed; these flaws are not apparent through an examination ostudent test scores, college acceptance rates, or even student satisactionwith their educational experiences. Te problem is deeper and much moreinsidious: Te skills, practices, and dispositions students are encouraged todevelop are filtered through a system designed or an outdated world. Tissystem, built on a “just-in-case” model o learning (Collins & Halverson,2009), prepares learners or a lie o inormation consumption but not oactive circulation, o critical analysis but not o creative activity (Lankshear

& Knobel, 2007).Clearly, the current U.S. educational system needs radical change.

We need to envision an educational system that develops and draws onthe diverse talents o all its stakeholders; courts diversity and cultivatescreativity and innovation; and takes advantage o the new spaces, tools,and ways o “learning to be” (Brown & Adler, 2008). Tat said, changesin educational practices are more ofen evolutionary than revolutionary.Tere is much that schools and educators can do in the meantime, to

make a difference in the lives o their students. And many educators arerising to the challenges o reimagining education or an era o changingopportunities to learn, communicate, and participate in cultural lie. As




you do so, you may find yoursel teaching in new ways, but this transitiondoes not require you to give up on things you value—including booksthat have been meaningul to previous generations and deep-readingpractices that have been productive in helping students understand whatthey are reading.

Reading in a Participatory Culture offers resources teachers can use indeploying these participatory practices in their classrooms. For us, teach-ing the new media literacies involves more than simply teaching kids howto use or even to program digital technologies. Te new media landscapehas as much to do with new social structures and cultural practices as itdoes with new tools and technologies. And as a consequence, we may be

able to teach participatory mindsets and skills even in the absence o richtechnological environments. eaching the new media literacies meanshelping young people to acquire the habits o mind required to ully engagewithin a networked public.

DOES LITERACY HAVE A FUTURE?

Reading in a Participatory Culture offers an alternative approach to themany gloom-and-doom books that have depicted the rise o digital expres-sion as a threat to traditional literacies. Nicholas Carr’s best-selling book,Te Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (2010), offers per-haps the most influential embodiment o contemporary anxieties about the“threat” digital media poses or traditional literacies. Carr sees a “literaryethic” as expressed not only through “what we would normally think o asliterature” but also through the work o the historian, the philosopher, andthe scientist: “None o these momentous intellectual achievements would

have been possible without the changes in reading and writing—and inperceiving and thinking—spurred by the efficient reproduction o longorms on printed pages” (p. 76). Carr worries that the Internet’s intellectualethic creates states o perpetual mental locomotion. Tis loss o contem-plation signals a whole cascade o other losses: “It’s not only deep thinkingthat requires a calm, attentive mind. It’s also empathy and compassion”(p. 220). In which case, according to Carr, our uses o digital media arealtering the depth not only o our thought but also o our emotions. (For

an alternative perspective on how human capacities to communicate haveshifed over time see Figure 1.1.)NML rejects the premise that the new digital mind will render the

literary mind obsolete. Rather, the new media literacies build on older




print-based literacies, expanding opportunities or human expression, asmore and more people pool knowledge and learning together within on-line networks, as teachers expand the learning ecosystem by connectingtheir students to a larger community o readers, and as writers deploy newmedia-rich and media-diverse modes o expression and experiment withnew literary orms. Our society is at a significant turning point that willredefine how knowledge is produced and stories shared or uture genera-tions. What happens in your classrooms is a vital part o the process bywhich our culture negotiates those changes. Te goal should be to embracethose changes that deepen and enrich human consciousness, and to pushback on those that trivialize and distract. It would be tragic i we allowed

new media literacy practices to totally displace traditional print literacypractices, but reusing to engage with new media out o a misplaced ear ochange would be equally tragic.

A well-designed curriculum will help students to develop both the lit-erary mind, as traditionally conceived, and the new competencies requiredto more meaningully engage with the new participatory culture. Readingcan be both personal and social, both public and private. For this book’sauthors, deep reading is just one orm o a reflective practice. Our expand-ed access to how other people read as we enter digital networks has lef uswith a deeper appreciation o the breadth o different ways people makemeaning rom literary texts. Troughout this book, the authors are askingteachers and students to reflect more deeply on their motives or reading,to take greater ownership over the meanings they produce and communi-cate with one another, and to lay claim to certain kinds o expertise thatemerge rom their unique engagement with shared texts. Contrary to Carr,this book suggests that deep reading can be an umbrella term or a wholehost o practices, with the goal o readers’ finding the particular practices

that deepen their engagement with a literary text.It is problematic to imply that humans could not have “deep thought” or

“higher emotions” beore the invention o writing, it is simplistic to assumethat technologies can support only one mindset, and it is wrong-headedto assume the Internet’s intellectual ethic is in direct and total oppositionto that associated with books. Te history o media change throughoutthe 20th century suggests that one medium does not displace another, butrather, each adds a new cultural layer, supporting more diverse ways o

communicating, thinking, eeling, and creating than existed beore. Buteach new medium also disrupts old patterns, requiring us collectively andindividually to actively work through what roles different orms o mediaare going to play in our lives.




DESIGNING FOR FUTURE LITERACIES

Te uture o literacy is a battleground or what we want and what we needthe uture to be. We can help to shape the meaning o these new social

Neuroscientist Merlin Donald suggests that the evolution o the human mindis “largely the story o the development o various semantic representationalsystems” (1991, p. 160), with each new system offering the human mind a newway o representing reality and o generating culture (1993, p. 737). Proposingthat humans have passed through three major cognitive transitions, Donald’s

theory describes how each new orm o representation (mimetic, language,external memory) builds on previous orms and arises during a period orapid, radical change, involving dramatic cultural shifs (1991, p. 16). Duringthe first two transitions—as humans moved rom the culture o apes to theculture o Homo erectus, and then to the culture o Homo sapiens, the majoradaptations were biological. Te third transition, however, Donald proposes,was technological, whereby new cognitive skills result rom the externalizationo memory.

Donald suggests that each new skill was layered on the existing set o

competencies and practices. In the first transition, humans mastered theexpressive potentials o the body-in-motion, adopting mimetic skills, such as theability to rehearse and refine the body’s movements in a voluntary and systematicway, to remember those rehearsals, and to reproduce them on command. Teseskills, in turn, enabled the development o pre-linguistic symbolic traditionssuch as rituals, dance, and craf. Next came the emergence o human speech,along with a new cognitive capacity or constructing and decoding narrative(1991, p. 16). Te result was an oral culture that supported a much more complexmythology. Te next major adaptation involved the development o what Donald

calls “external memory,” through the written word and, later, through print.During this transition, “thought moves rom the relatively inormal narrativeramblings o the isolated mind to the collective arena, and ideas thus accumulateover centuries until they acquire the precision o continuously refined exteriordevices, o which the prime example is modern science” (p. 16).

Donald argues that

in principle, this process [o human cognitive evolution] could continue, and

we may not yet have seen the final modular configuration o the modern

human mind. Teories o human evolution must be expanded and modified to

accommodate this possibility. (1991, p. 382)

David Williamson Shaffer and James Kaput (1999) build on Donald’s theory bycontending that we are currently undergoing a ourth major transition—one

Figure 1.1. How Literacies Evolve




based on the ability not simply to store knowledge outside the brain but also toperorm new kinds o operations on that knowledge, because o the affordances odigital technologies or externalized processing. We can see and act on the world

in new ways as a result o digital modes o representation (e.g., algorithm-basedsimulations, visualizations): Tis new system or representing reality enables thedevelopment o new ways o meaning—ways that we are only just beginning toexplore through our preliminary experiments with these digital affordances.

Donald’s stage theory, and Shaffer and Kaput’s proposed extension, illustratehow each new orm o representation—each new way o representing reality—expands the human cognitive repertoire, even as we preserve and protect thegains o earlier stages in the evolution o human communication. So, mimesis (thebody-in-motion as a orm o expression) remains a vital mode o communication

as deployed in theater and dance, or as captured in the visual arts, and we stillrely heavily on gestures and body language in communicating our meaning toeach other through ace-to-ace exchanges. We did not stop speaking once we hadthe capacity to write, but the unctions and status o oral communication shifedas written and printed language could make some tasks easier to perorm andallowed knowledge to be more ully exchanged across geographic and temporaldistances. Since capacities linked to each previous semantic representationalsystem (mimesis, language) are still with us today, there is no reason to believethat the unique thought patterns and capacities enabled by the technology o

writing will be lost. New media have absorbed and enhanced many pre-existingcommunication capacities, allowing us to deploy sounds and images alongsideprinted texts, or example, to create a new kind o “writing space” (Bolter, 1991).

Within this new writing space, all previous orms o representation cancoexist. And, as it includes wholly new orms o representation, it introduces anew kind o literacy experience. As studied by Clinton (2006, p. 193), a digitaltechnology–based movement (the sort o movement experienced in videogames) enables a orm o learning-by-being. In games where the player controlsthe actions o a game character, the process o playing the game (o “reading”

the video game) is a process o “writing” the experience o the game character,who could be a specific person (maybe Hamlet, Helen Keller, or a amouspeace activist, explorer, or religious figure), a specific kind o person (good orteaching disciplinary orms o knowledge [Shaffer, Squire, Halverson, & Gee,2005], ideologies, and religious perspectives), or even a nonhuman animate orm(perhaps a lion, a hawk, or whale). Learning-by-being is similar to the experienceo identiying with a character in a book, yet, because o how the process o“being in the gameworld as the game-character” solicits our pre-linguistic sense-making capacities, the eeling o identification is generated at a bodily level.

By supporting ways o experiencing stories and data “rom the inside,” digitaltechnologies open up possibilities or creating literacy experiences that addressthe problem o student readers’ sometimes eeling no affective connections towhat they are reading.




practices only i we experience the new modes o action, reflection, and re-sponse that they enable. While traditional reading and writing skills remainessential, print-literacy ways o reading, writing, and interacting with textare not enough to satisy the needs o an increasingly participatory culture.

What ollows is a statement o the core principles that guided the de-sign and deployment o the SG. Consider these principles a potentialblueprint or other uture developments in this space. It is necessarily astatement o values and belies, since in designing a curriculum, NML isalso laying down stakes or a particular kind o uture.

1. Address the Participation Gap

Access to technology is necessary but not sufficient; all learners

must be supported in learning how to contribute, in believing

that they can contribute and that what they contribute will be

appropriately valued.

Te goal o a “participatory” curriculum is to offer strategies or nar-rowing the participation gap: the unequal access to opportunities, experi-ences, skills, and knowledge that will prepare youth or ull participationin the world o tomorrow (Jenkins et al., 2009). Te participation gap isperhaps the most significant and enduring barrier to artistic expressionand civic engagement; it is the perception, and ofen the reality, that evenin an increasingly participatory culture not all community members mustor even can contribute. echnology is pervasive, and young people’s accessto networked tools is near universal in the United States (Lenhart, Purcell,Smith, & Zickuhr, 2010; Rideout, Foehr, & Roberts, 2010); but that matters

very little i many lack the skills required to meaningully participate or ear

that they do not have anything o value to contribute. While some youthare already quite fluent in new media practices, others have had little or noexposure to the “affinity spaces” (Gee, 2004) wherein these new social andcultural skills are being used and, consequently, are at a disadvantage whenit comes to knowing how to think and act in a networked society.

Describing a role or schools to help students on both sides o the gap,Jenkins (2007b) notes,

Even i we see young people acquiring some o these skills on theirown, outside o ormal educational institutions, there’s still a strongrole or adults to play in ensuring that young people develop a critical

vocabulary or thinking about the place o media in their lives and




engage in meaningul reflection about the ethical choices they make asmedia producers and participants in online communities.” In designingthe SG, NML attempted to create a participatory curriculum byharnessing the skills some students already have acquired throughnew media practices and by expanding access and participation tothose who have otherwise been marginalized and excluded romparticipation.

Key to our efforts to narrow the participation gap is the belie that all writ-ers are also readers and that every reader has the potential to become awriter. Within this model, reading is an essential starting point or cre-

ative work. Alongside a notion o reading or mastery, we can add an un-derstanding o reading that crucially links with creative and generativeprocesses that include writing (Brandt, 2009) as well as communicationthrough other genres (video, songwriting, and other orms o expression).Participatory reading is a matter not only o knowing how to respond to atext creatively and critically but also o knowing how to create and circulatecontent. Proficiency in these practices requires students to define personalmotives or reading and to have opportunities or participating in interpre-tive communities connected to their interests.

O course, “participation” isn’t something that can be taught in a sin-gle class or even over the course o a school year. Tere are many routesto—and diverse orms o—participation, and providing all students theopportunity to develop the knowledge, skills, and dispositions or mean-ingul participation is a long-term endeavor. Our schools need to make acommitment, at each grade level, and in all subject areas, to support thedevelopment o the skills necessary or engaging with the world criticallyand creatively.

2. Bring New Expertises and Perspectives into the

English Language Arts Domain

There are many different forms of literary scholarship, and “literary

analysis” is not a monolithic set of practices and skills.

New media technologies make it possible or people to engage withsource materials across multiple disciplines and perspectives. In such aculture, meaning-making increasingly extends beyond traditional do-main boundaries. How might new voices be brought into the Englishclassroom?




Te movement toward multiculturalism has ocused on expanding thecanon, affecting what is read in the English classroom. It is equally impor-tant to bring alternative motives or reading into the English classroom inorder to expand how the canon is read. Bringing new voices (identities,perspectives, expertises) into the English classroom adds new content andintroduces new practices. Ideally, doing so also acknowledges how peopleacross fields and domains are working with literary texts in interestingways, using various media platorms and artiacts; shaping, reshaping, andtaking things apart and putting them back together; putting classic texts“in conversation with” contemporary culture.

When we read a text or different reasons in the service o different

goals and interests, we read it in different ways, asking different questions,noticing different things, and generating different responses. In school,there has too ofen been a tendency to reiy one kind o reading—one thatcan easily be reduced to SparkNotes—as i that were the natural or logi-cal way o responding to particular texts. Students are not asked to thinkabout why they, personally, individually, or as members o a larger learningcommunity, might be reading Moby-Dick; they have simply been assigneda book, and they are reading it because the teacher, the school board, or thenational standards dictate that they should do so. Tis raming cuts read-ing in the literature class off rom the other reasons young people mightchoose to read outside the classroom and thus diminishes the relevance othe skills we are teaching.

What i young people were asked to identiy their own goals or read-ing a text, to take responsibility or shaping what they learned rom eachother, and to translate their engagement with the text into a springboardor other creative, critical, and expressive activities? Tese questions re-quire teachers to embrace a much more collaborative atmosphere in their

classrooms, allowing students to develop and assert distinctive expertiseas they pool their knowledge to work through complex problems together.

I literary scholarship is understood as a diverse set o practices, be-lies, and goals, then the notion o reading “as a literary scholar” can bedecoupled rom generalized expectations about what it means to read.Instead, this approach to reading is understood as being defined by thespecific needs o members o a particular discipline, proession, or com-munity. Reading as a literary scholar is certainly valuable, but it is scarcely

the only option or a meaningul engagement with a classic text. Indeed,we also find deep value in considering the practices o a broad spectrum oexperts and artists as they engage with literary works.




3. Begin with Core Literary Concepts/Practices and Expand

Traditional literacy practices take on new meaning when extended

into participatory cultures.

Working rom the assumption that traditional literacy practices arenecessary, but no longer sufficient, or ull social participation in the newdigital culture, a strategy or creating activities in the SG was to extend orexpand core literary concepts and practices (close reading, allusion, multi-culturalism, and structural analysis) to include characteristic “moves” and“moods” o a digital culture. For example, in one early unit, the SG begins

with the idea o “close reading,” a oundational practice that is traditionallyunderstood as critical engagement with a text, and we “expand” this notionto include both the idea o creative engagement with a text and a move-ment rom a ocus on personal to collective meaning-making. Accordingly,while close reading is traditionally taught as individual engagement witha text, our expanded orm o “close reading”—what NML calls “annota-tion and ornamentation”—suggests that creative reading can work hand inhand with critical reading, and that pooling individual insights can deepenthe class’s collective comprehension o a text.

Learning to read in this context o shared and dispersed expertise is“messier” than learning to read in a traditional classroom, much as themixing and matching o production practices within any given creativecommunity is much messier than trying to deal with the practices in-dividually. eachers reported struggling with their own entrenched as-sumptions about what orms o culture or what types o reading were

valuable and ofen got caught off guard by materials students wanted tobring into the discussion that had not yet been vetted or their appropri-

ateness or by directions where students wanted to take the conversationthat were ar removed rom the instructor’s own expertise and training.Ofen, students were most engaged when the SG practices elt least likenormal schooling and were least engaged when the bureaucratic struc-tures reasserted themselves.

4. Media Studies Approach

Comparative perspectives encourage an exploration of the

intersection between literature and other media, often deepening

an appreciation of the cultural impact of classic texts.




Students should be taught that a book like Moby-Dick is a ounda-tional text that continues to leave its mark on contemporary society.Perhaps the best way to convey this insight is by actively studying themarks that it continues to leave. As Moby-Dick is taken up in popularmusic, film, television, and theater and as the story migrates across spaceand time, it becomes a site or studying contemporary media practices.Studying these related texts helps students not only to master the text butalso to develop a deeper understanding o the contexts through whichit circulates, to understand the roles that canonical texts perorm in thecontemporary media landscape.

Moby-Dick not only is one o the most widely remixed English-language

literary texts but also is itsel a classic example o a remix. As Kelley pointsout in Chapter 11 o this book, Melville mixed together travel narratives,scientific treatises, philosophical texts, and myths and Bible stories to craf

Moby-Dick, and its multigenre characteristics present much o the challengeo reading the book . Since Moby-Dick is both a masterul remix and an easytext to repurpose, it makes it an excellent source text or practicing the newmedia literacy skill o transmedia navigation: the ability to ollow the flowo stories and inormation across multiple modalities (Jenkins et al., 2009,p. xiv).

5. Stance on Popular Culture

Popular culture offers a culturally contested and therefore valuable

and necessary avenue for developing new media literacies skills.

Te SG proposed ways that meaning-making practices developed inthe world o popular culture can offer powerul new approaches or read-

ing literature. New media practices represent shifs in the ways we under-stand ourselves, media, and the world around us; this shif is first enactedin our relations with popular culture, but then the skills we acquire throughplay are adapted and reapplied and come to have implications or how welearn, work, participate in civic lie, and connect with other people aroundthe world (Jenkins, 2006a). People engage with popular culture in part insearch o shared and meaningul resources through which they can con-struct their identities and give expressive shape to their own lived experi-ences. Bringing such materials and practices into the classroom may givestudents a chance to reflect more deeply on their own emerging interpre-tive and creative skills, and deploy them in relation to the kinds o contentschools have traditionally promoted.




A core premise o this book is that the English classroom can be a hy-brid space in which some pop culture material does have a reason to reside.But doing so means addressing a range o ethical issues that can arise whenbringing popular culture content and resources into the English classroomand providing supports and guidance or teachers and students to togethernegotiate this new ethical territory. Lacking clear guidelines about how tosupport popular and participatory culture in their classrooms, educatorsneed to proceed at their own risk, a prospect that can be rightening tothose used to state-approved curricula and textbooks.

6. Stance on Technology

There are multiple avenues to participatory culture, and many

barriers that limit students’ access to these cultures. Our hope is

to offer a range of activities, both high- and low-tech, to support as

many different kinds of classroom communities as possible.

One aim or creating the SG was to take a first pass at consideringhow new media practices and mindsets can be applied to reading classictexts. But too many teachers put off introducing new media literacies totheir students because they eel that they do not have the right tools andinrastructure to support those digital practices, because they are workingwith computers clogged with mandatory filters and with policies that blocktheir use o key web 2.0 platorms, because they can’t access Youube orFacebook or witter or . . . .

Given the current budget crisis in American education, teachers maybe waiting a long time beore they achieve those ideal conditions. In themeantime, however, they might introduce some o these basic skills and

dispositions through offline activities. NML’s pedagogical commitment isto create a curriculum that introduces (and offers all students a chance topractice) social and cultural skills valued in a participatory culture, usingboth online and offline activities. Te SG, which offers activities that re-quire minimal access to digital technology in addition to more high-techapproaches to instruction, attempts both to prepare learners or an increas-ingly participatory, digital uture and to acknowledge the realities o ourcurrent educational and economic climate—a climate characterized bydeep disparities in distribution o technologies and support or their use.

Tis approach came in handy or Laurel Felt (Jenkins & Felt, 2010),a PhD candidate who joined the NML team afer it moved to USC. Lau-rel ound hersel teaching the new media literacies in a Senegalese school




where the power generator went down at the beginning o the term andstayed down more or less continuously throughout her course. She wasable to adopt clotheslines, which are widespread through this communi-ty, as a means o identiying and displaying the participatory skills thatemerged throughout her interactions with her students.

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Reading in a Participatory Culture is not simply a celebration o an innova-

tive educational experiment: It will also reflect on what went wrong, on

some o the ways that schools, students, and teachers struggled to incorpo-rate participatory culture into their pedagogical practices, and on the waysour university-based research team was out o touch with some o the reali-ties that teachers ace in the day-to-day practice o schooling in the UnitedStates. For example, some o the highest-rated students, those involved inadvanced placement classes, were the most impatient with the creative andplayul aspects o the curriculum, having already internalized a culture ostandardized tests, while other students had difficulty ully grasping whatit might mean to embrace a public voice that extended beyond the schoolitsel and to engage others in the larger community. NML also struggled,or example, with filters on school computers that blocked access to SG materials because the title o Herman Melville’s literary classic had theword dick in it, or principals who were resistant to allowing students toshare what they knew on Wikipedia because they had been taught not totrust its contents.

Part I, “Fundamentals,” offers an overview o NML, its goals and ac-tivities, and the ways it translated a particular understanding o “new me-

dia literacies” into a curriculum or teaching canonical literature in theschools. By now, you have already learned about the SG and what NMLhoped to achieve by testing this approach through classroom interven-tions. In the next chapter, you will read more about some o the activitiesand approaches included in the curriculum and how they emerged romthe theoretical commitments described above.

Part II, “Motives or Reading,” encourages students to become moreamiliar with the different kinds o things proessionals (literary and media

scholars, actors, playwrights, directors) do with classic texts. By examiningthe process o writing and staging Moby-Dick: Ten and Now and the tra- jectories that led participants to their involvement in developing the SG,




we share the ways different specialists’ reading practices (those o a literarycritic, a media scholar, a director/playwright, an actor, etc.) provide a basisor creating different kinds o products (a media analysis, a literary essay, aplay, a perormance, etc.). Each expert offers an example o how reading isa different kind o thing as it is enacted using different strategies and goals.But why stop there? A more participatory approach to learning demandsthat students and teacher alike come to grips with their own motives, takeownership o the knowledge they help to generate, and respect the differentkinds o expertise that get mobilized through their classroom discussion.Call this situation co-created learning .

Tis unit also links these motives to specific reading practices, mak-

ing a case or the value o nonlinear reading as a means o extractingmeaning rom a digressive text like Moby-Dick. Drawing on his extensiveresearch into the interpretive communities around andom, Henry Jen-kins explores the diverse ways ans make meaning o the texts that matterto them and then extends this analysis to look at the way Herman Mel-

ville represents his own relationship to a community o people invested inwhaling within Moby-Dick. Wyn Kelley extends this ocus on Melville asa reader (who became an author) in her examination o the book’s ram-shackle structure, its many different goals and the voices through whichthey are expressed, and the marginal annotations that survive, suggestingthe way that the author sought inspiration and critically engaged with arange o different source texts.

Part III, “Learning Trough Remixing,” digs deeper into the new me-dia literacy skill o appropriation, seeking to understand how a deeper en-gagement with remix practice might revitalize the study o literature. Manyeducators conuse the rich orms o appropriation and remixing that char-acterize participatory culture with the kinds o plagiarism that they have

long sought to discourage in their classroom. In practice, remix is muchmore closely linked to what early literary scholars might have described as“allusions.” Tat is, meaning is created by linking the current text back toearlier works, showing how the author builds upon a larger literary tradi-tion or on the vocabulary o particular genres. Sometimes, the goal is toreerence a specific work either to carry orward some o its original mean-ings or to contest them in ways that may push the cultural conversation tothe next level. Henry Jenkins explains the distinctions between artistic de-

bates about appropriation, legal debates about copyright inringement, andethical debates about plagiarism. Ten he offers a series o close readingso how subsequent authors have appropriated and remixed elements rom




Moby-Dick in their work, concluding with a consideration o how popu-lar culture reerences work in Pitts-Wiley’s stage play. Wyn Kelley, in turn,examines the processes by which Herman Melville himsel created Moby-Dick through a similar process o absorbing and remixing elements o the19th-century whaling culture and previous literary materials and the waysthat various characters in the novel model different orms o appropriationas they draw insights rom the culture around them.

I Moby-Dick can be understood as a series o meaningul ragments,some o which, such as the contents o 19th-century commonplace books,were taken more or less directly rom what Melville was reading, the textcan also be read in terms o its gaps and silences that have ofen provided

spaces or subsequent readers and authors to insert themselves into thenarrative. Wyn Kelley, or example, explores the ways readers are asked tofill in the gaps within what seems at once an exhaustive and elliptical nar-rative. In particular, she discusses the absence o women in the novel as achallenge that readers, critics, and artists have conronted in various ways.Henry Jenkins, again dipping into the literature on ans and an fiction,describes some o the properties o texts that have inspired an authors towrite in the margins o existing media narratives, suggesting how teachersmight harness this same process to get their students to engage criticallyand creatively with literary works.

In the final section, Part IV, “Beyond Moby-Dick: Challenges and Op-portunities,” project participants offer reflections about what they learnedwhen NML field tested the SG and the challenges o bringing participa-tory culture practices and logics into the classroom. NML researcher Hill-ary Kolos and classroom teacher Judith Nierenberg discuss the ways theyadopted the SG’s ramework and activities to engage with a young adultnovel, wists and urns (McDonald, 2003), and to help their students de-

velop a richer sense o their own identity as readers and to acilitate newinsights into the concept o culture. Jenna McWilliams then describes whathappened when a school board decision threatened to close Aurora HighSchool, where Becky Rupert and McWilliams were seeking to expand theSG to provide greater ocus on improving students’ writing skills. Sud-denly, the teacher had a much more applied context that required her tohelp students improve their communication skills in order to save theirschool. As McWilliams notes, that initial effort proved unsuccessul in pro-

tecting this alternative school rom closure and thus raises questions abouthow the empowerment shaping our concept o participatory culture may




or may not prepare students or experiences o disappointment and disillu-sionment. Learning scientist Daniel Hickey and his collaborators, MichelleHoneyord and Jenna McWilliams, examine the politics o assessment, ar-guing that our current regimes ocused on high-stakes testing ofen dis-courage educators rom embracing more experimental approaches suchas the ones proposed by Reading in a Participatory Culture. Tey proposealternative models or testing participatory learning and illustrate whathappened when they adopted these approaches or measuring the successo the Aurora High School students.

In the Conclusion, Katie Clinton and Jenna McWilliams reflect onthe tensions encountered in putting some o these ideals about participa-

tory culture into practice within schools as they currently exist. Tis clos-ing chapter points to the need to negotiate change at the most local level,adopting those practices that can be absorbed by a particular communityat a given moment, accepting those conditions that cannot be changed, butcontinually struggling to transorm the nature o schooling as we seek waysto ensure that all students have access to the skills and technologies theyneed to meaningully participate in the culture around them.

new literacies participatory culture

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