Category Archives: Participatory culture & learning

To throw my hat into the ring for DML 2014, as well as continue processing/writing about my educational research experiences for the purpose of my dissertation, I crafted these three, short accounts.

• How Was the Asteroid Belt Formed?: A Middle School Apprentice and PhD Candidate Explore Digital Research & Community Resources

“My name is Esau and I am in the 7th grade at John Muir Middle School on Vermont and 59th. I am participating in the Spark Program, which helps to keep students in school so they don’t drop out before high school graduation…”

When I agreed to be a Spark mentor (sparkprogram.org) for the spring 2013 semester, I envisioned teaching my apprentice about my job by recruiting him/her as a key informant on 21st century learning. But I discovered, like so many educators before me, that the best-laid plans must be scrapped when a student has other ideas. Instead, my apprentice recruited ME to HIS research project.

In our short talk, Esau and I will explain how we used a blended model of digital and experiential outreach to conduct research and explore resources throughout the community. We will also speak about our development of information literacy and our discovery of both the public’s limited understanding of science and scientists’ limited understanding of the public.

Our mission was to investigate Esau’s hypothesis: “My theory is the Asteroid Belt used to be a planet or one of Jupiter’s moons. It was brought into Jupiter’s atmosphere by its gravitational pull, broken up into millions of asteroids, and spit out into space — forming the Asteroid Belt.” Esau and I emailed USC professors and scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), conducted 12 “man-on-the-street” surveys, attended a USC astronomy lab, searched online, went to a USC science library, and visited the California Science Center. We created a wiki to annotate our journey and present our results (amazinguniverse.wikispaces.com).

Our learning process seamlessly blended the digital and the experiential. The ease with which Esau navigated this process is noteworthy since John Muir Middle School, a Title I school that serves reduced lunch to 80% of its students, cannot afford extensive digital media and/or regular field trips. My experience with Esau suggests avenues for further research, interrogating whether and how families and/or community partners prepare youths for both digital and “real world” engagement.

While Esau was quite comfortable with digital media, he believed in the inherent superiority of books over online information. Thus, our process also scaffolded information literacy, looking at source credibility and evaluating relevance.

In terms of Esau’s theory, eight participants thought it was possible, four did not know whether it was possible, and zero thought that his theory was impossible. This helped us to identify a gap in the public’s understanding of science since the JPL scientist quickly dismissed Esau’s theory. It also illuminated a gap in this scientist’s (and potentially more scientists’) understanding of the public, as he contended, “You might as well be asking them about the dining habits of unicorns or flying monkeys.” We think the blatant impossibility of an apricot-eating unicorn versus a Jupiter moon-originated Asteroid Belt is not equivalent. This suggests that, for community-oriented scholars like us, there is space for service.

• Exploring Media Literacy and Transmedia for Peace: Collaborations Among Students and Teachers From the University of Southern California and the Los Angeles Unified School District

This short talk will review an effort to support teaching and learning about both media literacy and violence/peace-making.

PARTNERS
During the spring of 2013, USC School of Cinematic Arts Associate Professor Vicki Callahan designed two projects in which her pupils in IML 420: New Media for Social Change would actually make new media for social change. To complete these projects, her pupils needed to document Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) students’ media perspectives and negotiations of violence/peace-making. Callahan intended for her pupils to share back with LAUSD these tailored projects, potentially facilitating social change. But this wasn’t all; Callahan also wanted her pupils to give back by teaching a media literacy mini-course to the participating LAUSD students.

The USC Dornsife Joint Educational Project (JEP) grouped Callahan’s 17 pupils into five teaching teams and assigned each team to a LAUSD classroom: two 3rd grade classes, two 6th grade classes, and a combined 7th/8th grade class. Laurel Felt, a media literacy advocate and JEP Instructional Design Specialist, co-created with Callahan a media literacy curriculum, refined lesson plans with pupils, and observed each teaching team.

LINKING LEARNING EXPERIENCES
USC pupils described their USC studies and their LAUSD teaching as disconnected. Many felt unprepared to teach media literacy, especially to eight-year-olds. Incorporating data collection troubled some pupils, while others resented the outreach’s extra work and time commitment, and still others struggled to manage group dynamics.

REFLECTIVE PRACTICE
Despite these issues, each USC participant created a useful video featuring LAUSD students speaking about media representation and/or heroes; they screened these for the LAUSD students. Observed participant DB, “I found the kids to be surprisingly more open-minded regarding issues about diversity and its representation than I had originally expected” (2013). Wrote participant SO, “I think they got the idea that one should question what they watch” (2013).

The USC pupils’ last project was to collaboratively design a transmedia “story|storyworld about non-violence and peace-building that brings in the perspectives of your LAUSD students as well as yourself” (Callahan, 2013). Reflected participant KL, “Our kids, specifically, had a much easier time coming up with violent issues than peaceful ones in our brainstorming session… Many times, the kids would mention a violent issue with the complete awareness that it was morally reprehensible yet they would still treat it jokingly.”

Post-data collection, the USC pupils collectively created Break the Cycle, a transmedia property that showcases seven fictional youths’ various negotiations of violence and peace-making. The site offers information about each character via bios, webcomics, and social media accounts; it also hosts an interactive game.

LINKING LEARNING EXPERIENCES REVISITED
Whether and how the LAUSD students engaged with the transmedia property is ambiguous. The USC pupils finished this project after their final site visits. Representatives from each teaching team emailed the Break the Cycle URL to their host teacher; however, issues with firewalls, computer access, and/or scheduling might have prevented the LAUSD students from exploring the site themselves.

• Making Change as We Laugh Along: How Improv Games Make a Difference in the World

What do improvisational theater (improv) games have to do with social change? A lot! Improv games offer a no-tech context to practice negotiating trust and exploring identity. Their execution involves learning through play, working collaboratively, designing messages, commenting on lived realities, supporting teammates, embracing flexibility, and respecting ethics; in terms of media literacy, improv games also provide opportunities to demystify genre, remix pop culture, and critique celebrities. This workshop will explain improv games’ origins, briefly explore two case studies, and invite participants to play!

HISTORY
In the 1940s, social worker Viola Spolin developed a suite of theater games to stimulate creative expression and build community among Chicago’s diverse immigrant populations. Spolin’s son Paul Sills, founder of legendary theater The Second City, introduced these games to his comedic ensembles to help them hone their craft. But Laughter for a Change (L4C), a non-profit founded by The Second City director Ed Greenberg, uses improv games to serve the people and functions that Spolin originally intended: building confidence and connections among members of underserved communities.

CASE STUDY #1: RFK
During 2011-2012, L4C ran an after-school workshop at the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools (RFK) with 12 low-income, Latino high school freshmen. Greenberg’s first goal was to establish a “safe space,” or supportive context in which participants felt empowered to take risks and play freely; this is very similar to the “magic circle” (Huizinga, 1938; Salen & Zimmerman, 2003). Participants reported less shyness, more self-confidence, increased comfort with public speaking, greater participation in academic classes, a broader view of teamwork, and fun (Felt & Greenberg, 2013).

CASE STUDY #2: KYCC
During the summer of 2013, L4C ran an 8-week workshop at the Koreatown Youth Community Center (KYCC) with nine mixed-income, Korean-American middle school students who had recently participated in L4C at KYCC’s 2012-2013 after-school program. L4C Comedy Mentors Ruth Silveira and Maggie Marion shared their perspectives on participants’ take-aways. Marion observed that, within the stable summer camp context, “…the kids began being able to trust each other in a way that isn’t possible when people are coming in and out and having different experiences.” This both illuminates how a safe space is essential to meaningful improv play, and slightly differentiates its nature from the magic circle. The mentors also reported participants’ increased comfort with both voicing “what was in their own heads” and “making mistakes.” Said Silveira, “They had to overcome [the desire of] getting the ‘right’ answer, doing it ‘right’… They didn’t like being ‘wrong.’ We had to get the scene player to support this ‘mistake,’ make it part of the experience…. More specifically, I think it’s about breaking them out of the idea that everybody thinks the same way.”

WORKSHOP
DML participants will practice improv’s basic tenet of “Yes and” and engage in team-building by playing the Mirror, Conducted Story, and World’s Worst games. They also will process their play experiences and discoveries via guided debriefings.

Statement of Teaching Philosophy: Issues to Consider. II. Fundamental Values of Teaching.
Shared by Professor Armand R. Tanguay, Jr.

• Creativity
• Inventiveness
• Reflective thinking
• Analytical skills
• Breadth of knowledge
• Depth of knowledge in one or more specific areas
• Individual achievement
• Ability to collaborate and work in groups effectively
• Challenge (personal growth, ability to overcome)
• Knowledge
• Independence of thought and action
• Leadership
• Decision making ability
• Cultural sensitivity

III. Unique Teaching Methods and Approaches

• Unique teaching methods and approaches
  • Infection vs injection
  • Programmed failure
  • Scientific Method vs. the Scientific Approach
    • Well-formulated problems (hypotheses)
  • Art of scientific presentation
  • Incorporation of design problems
  • Ability to deal with ambiguity
  • Development of creativity
  • Development of leadership skills
    • Research group structure and responsibilities
• Intimate Coupling of Teaching and Research
  • Teaching research skills
  • Researching teaching methods and approaches
  • Laboratory and field trip experiences
  • Critical literature searches
• Unique Subject Matter
• Unique Approach to Traditional Subject Matter
  • Systems perspective
  • Top down instead of bottom up
  • Disassembly of computers, devices in class

 

I am an eager learner, critical thinker, and sensitive communicator with a fervent desire to do work that matters. I believe in the value of inter-disciplinary collaboration for building, remixing, and extending theory, and for constructing comprehensive, practical responses to multi-faceted, real world challenges. Here is a brief explanation of my current projects:

• Joint Educational Project (JEP)

In 2012, Laurel joined the staff of the USC Joint Educational Project (JEP). One of the oldest and most celebrated service-learning programs in the country, JEP was hailed by the 2000 TIME/The Princeton Review College Guide as “the most ambitious social-outreach program of any private university in the nation” (Hornblower, 2000, p. 71). In her role as Research Assistant & Instructional Design Specialist, Laurel investigates the diverse outcomes of service-learning participation, creates curriculum to scaffold reflection and facilitate transfer of 20+ courses’ specific content, supervises a media literacy outreach program, and mentors six undergraduate peer educators who collectively support 250 service-learners.

• Dissertation

Laurel’s dissertation includes ethnographic research, needs assessment, curriculum design, experimentation, and evaluation of a tailored, optional, online, self-guided training experience for JEP mini-course members.

Participatory Action Research (PAR)

This research, currently in its formative phase, utilizes a participatory action research (PAR) design; as such, Laurel is working with a talented team of undergraduates: Jodie Guller, Ashley Harlow, and Shivika Poonglia, all former participants of the JEP mini-course program. She is also reaching out to other stakeholders, including mini-course members, LAUSD host teachers, LAUSD schoolchildren, and JEP full-time staff, in order to ensure buy-in and external validity.

• Other Significant Research

From 2010-2012, Laurel was lead research assistant with Project New Media Literacies’s applied research project, PLAY!. This project (based out of USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab and funded by The Gates Foundation) explored how best to nurture play and participatory learning in high-tech, low-tech, and no-tech contexts.

See Felt, Vartabedian, Literat, and Mehta (2012); Vartabedian and Felt (2012); Reilly, Jenkins, Felt, and Vartabedian (2012); Reilly, Vartabedian, Felt, and Jenkins (2012).

During the second half of 2012, Laurel also worked part-time for USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History & Education. As the Interim Instructional Design Coordinator, Laurel built developmentally-appropriate, critical thinking-oriented, multi-media rich curricula for IWitness, an online application that allows secondary school students and teachers to search, watch, and interact with more than 1,000 video testimonies of genocide survivors and other witnesses.

See Cole, Street and Felt (in press).

Since 2011, Laurel has consulted with Laughter for a Change, a non-profit whose improvisational theatre workshops in underserved communities share the joys and benefits of comedy.

See Felt and Greenberg (in press).

In 2010, Laurel designed a new pedagogical method and curriculum for training Senegalese youths in effective communication, dubbed Sunukaddu 2.0. On-site in Dakar, she conducted professional development, wrote curriculum, designed assessments, engaged in participant-observation, and analyzed data. She continues to consult with this non-profit.

See Felt and Rideau (2012).

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21st Century Learning:
Research and Praxis

During the summer of 2013, I pursued 21st century learning by attending conferences, conducting research and analysis, teaching USC undergraduates, editing final proofs of two pieces for which I am the lead author, and continuing formative dissertation work.

At the 63rd annual International Communication Association conference in London, I moderated a panel at the Children and Media division’s pre-conference and, for the Global Communication and Social Change division, co-presented a paper that outlined a participatory research methodology (cultural beacons) developed by my colleagues and myself. Later in the summer, I co-led a workshop at the National Association for Media Literacy Education conference that introduced media literacy educators to improvisation as a pedagogical strategy. At every session, my participatory style engaged audience members and helped to create a learning community.

In terms of research and analysis, I pursued several projects. Immediately after LAUSD educators closed down their classrooms for the summer, I invited back to the Annenberg Innovation Lab nine prior participants of the PLAY! project. Within the context of semi-structured, one-on-one interviews, I asked each educator if and how their engagement in the PLAY! program (Summer–Fall 2011) had affected their work. I have identified three key themes and will continue to mine this rich corpus in order to generate an executive summary as well as a longitudinal article for a peer-reviewed journal.

In Paris, I met with my former RAES supervisor (and Annenberg graduate) Alex Rideau in order to discuss a follow-up publication to our Summer 2010 collaboration and 2012 book chapter. This next piece will target a popular press outlet and describe how his sub-Saharan non-profit has continued to innovate and generate, despite the global economic slowdown and physical absence of Western researchers.

Finally, I sought to discover both participants’ and instructors’ learning and growth from engaging in an improvisational theater summer program – Laughter for a Change at Koreatown Youth Community Center (L4C at KYCC). I discussed the program and its goals with the L4C founder and L4C at KYCC head teacher, constructed evaluation instruments, distributed pre/post surveys to participants, observed the first and last day of the summer workshop (completing observation inventories and jotting field notes), attended the final performance, and jointly interviewed the two instructors. I have transcribed this interview and will analyze participants’ (anonymously identified) self-reported changes.

I had the honor of teaching COMM 204: Public Speaking. Via improv warm-ups, personal storytelling, and unconditional support, my students and I developed a safe and caring classroom in which the skills of every participant flourished.

I also delivered final revisions to a peer-reviewed journal article about the impacts of participation in L4C’s year-long, after-school workshop at RFK Community Schools, and a book chapter about the ways in which to design, implement, and evaluate research with cultural beacons.

My pedagogically-oriented research and praxis informs my dissertation on 21st century learning. This dissertation examines an original, online curriculum that seeks to enhance undergraduates’ social and emotional competence by offering opportunities to practice skills in real-world contexts, think with/through media, and participate in a hybrid (both online and offline) community of practice.

LAUREL J. FELT is an expert in 21^st century learning. She is an Instructional Design Specialist with the USC Dornsife Joint Educational Project, one of the largest and most well respected service-learning organizations in the country. She also consults with two non-profits: Laughter for a Change (L4C) and The African Network for Health Education (RAES). L4C employs improvisational theater games and comedy training to foster new forms of learning and contribute to healing and a sense of well-being, particularly among underserved populations. RAES, based in Senegal’s capital city of Dakar, supports innovative applications of information and communication technology to strengthen local health and education programs.

Currently a doctoral candidate in Communication at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, Laurel is crafting a dissertation that showcases her expertise in designing innovative curriculum and conducting participatory assessment, and also honors her commitment to fostering social and emotional competence and media literacy. Specifically, this dissertation examines the impacts of an original, online curriculum aimed at enhancing undergraduates’ social and emotional competence by offering them opportunities to practice skills in service-learning contexts, think with/through media, and participate in a hybrid (online and offline) community of practice.

For Laurel, 21^st century learning encompasses the following research interests: participatory learning[i]; social and emotional learning[ii]; new media literacies[iii]; traditional and evolving definitions of media literacy[iv]; and powerful play, a mode that combines fun with experimentation in hopes of facilitating transformative outcomes (e.g., joy, learning, rapport). Impact games and improvisation are both forms of powerful play[v].

Over the years, Laurel has explored these research interests in various roles:

• Lead Research Assistant with USC Project New Media Literacies’s program, Participatory Learning And You!;
• Teacher-Researcher with the Expanding Minds Program in Mumbai, India;
• Interim Instructional Design Coordinator with the USC Shoah Foundation;
• Research Assistant with Dr. Sheila Murphy’s entertainment-education research program at Hollywood, Health, and Society; 
• Research Assistant with Dr. Stacy Smith’s females-in-film research program; and
• Co-chair of USC Impact Games.

Currently, Laurel has a book chapter and two peer-reviewed journal articles in press, and several projects in development that extend both theory and practice in the aforementioned research areas.

In terms of secondary research interests, Laurel is committed to designing, implementing, and championing methodologies that amplify participants’ voices in assessment activities[vi]. She hopes to use these inclusive tools for evaluating youth storytelling programs, since evaluations tend to highlight growth in only technical (and not also academic, social, and emotional) competence. Laurel foresees working with such individuals as improvisational and traditional theater educators, media literacy/production instructors, creative writing teachers, game designers, and librarians.

To conversations about teaching and learning in the 21^st century, Laurel wishes to contribute evidence and strategies that support holism and balance, e.g., incorporating the cognitive AND the social-emotional, the digital AND the analog. Laurel also hopes to engage in dialogue with educational administrators and policymakers who under-appreciate how participation in activities that support self-expression and occur within a supportive community of practice, such as artistic endeavors, can enrich healthy, holistic development.

Laurel is a member of the Digital Media and Learning network, the National Association for Media Literacy Education, the International Communication Association, and the National Communication Association, and has presented papers at all of these organizations’ conferences. She is also an alumna of Northwestern University and Tufts University.

As an undergraduate at Northwestern University, Laurel completed minors in political science and French and earned a bachelor’s degree in social policy. Her applied experiences were just as (if not more) important than her classroom work. Laurel interned with U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in Washington, D.C., and the U.S. State Department in Vienna, Austria; she  also spent her junior year abroad in Paris, France. During her three years on campus, Laurel studied and performed improvisational theater with a consistent ensemble, frequently volunteered with student film projects, and wrote for the nationally-recognized campus newspaper The Daily Northwestern in various capacities– as a features reporter, film critic, and weekly humor columnist. For her honors thesis, Laurel conducted one-on-one interviews with early childhood educators on-site in Chicago, Paris, and Oslo, examining if and how these participants’ self-reported professional priority – specifically, education or care – correlated with their nation’s social policies.

After graduation, Laurel interned with non-profit children’s theater/creative writing workshop Barrel of Monkeys, served as a media educator for The Chicago International Children’s Film Festival (the world’s largest festival of children’s film), and worked in the cutting-edge multimedia department of a suburban library. Six months later, she relocated to Boston…

Laurel attended Tufts University from 2004–2006, earning a master’s degree in child development. For her applied practicum, she interned for PBS Kids’s educational television show Fetch! with Ruff Ruffman. Laurel also facilitated formative evaluation of PBS Kids’s educational television show Postcards from Buster by training and supervising a team of data collectors, as well as liaising with five urban, 1st-grade classrooms. Laurel’s honors thesis, which utilized survey research and focus groups, contextualized middle school girls’ use of instant messaging within an Ericksonian developmental framework. Laurel identified the various types of social aggression that participants reported in that online space, and also explained the ways in which certain features of instant messaging met these adolescents’ developmental and functional needs. Finally, Laurel worked for four years as an early childhood educator, employed as a Graduate Teaching Assistant at the department’s laboratory school, the Eliot-Pearson Children’s School, and previously at Harvard Yard Child Care Center and the Open Center for Children. Throughout these years, Laurel sat on the Steering Committee of Teachers Resisting Unhealthy Children’s Entertainment, assessing the developmental productiveness of various best-selling toys.

After graduation, she worked for two years as an editor and freelance writer of educational print products for primary school students and teachers. She also performed with all-female improvisational theater troupe Valid Hysteria, and co-founded a Los Angeles-based company that produced live-action, webisodic e-cards featuring a cast of irrepressible twenty-something’s. Then she started her PhD…

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