Tag Archives: Laughter for a Change

Reporting on Impacts of Youth Media Literacy

  By laurelfelt | March 28, 2014 - 12:46 pm | , , , ,
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"Home Is Where the Heart Is," a silkscreen piece created by participants of Circles Restorative Justice workshop, March 1, 2014

“Home Is Where the Heart Is,” silkscreen piece created by participants of Circles Restorative Justice workshop, March 1, 2014

I’ve recently come full circle in more ways than one.

During high school and college, I had the privilege of reporting features stories for such publications as Glenbrook South High School’s The Oracle and Northwestern University’s The Daily Northwestern, The Summer Northwestern, and arts + performance magazine. 

A dozen-plus years later, I’m reporting features stories once again; appropriately, my first subject was a workshop entitled “Circles.” On Saturday, March 1, 2014, I engaged in participant-observation by joining fabulously motivated peers, jotting notes, and conducting informal interviews at this day-long exploration of Restorative Justice.

Restorative Justice (RJ) seeks to cultivate both peacemaking and healing by facilitating meaningful dialogue. Practiced through conversation circles, whose norms include “listen with respect” and “speak from the heart,” RJ provides contexts for sharing feelings and perspectives related to community issues and conflicts. Individuals directly engaged in altercations, as well as bystanders and other community members, gather to discuss inciting incidents, understandings, preferences, past experiences, ideas, and advice (Felt, 2014, para. 3).

This workshop also was irresistible from a scholarly standpoint as it situated itself squarely within my research interests: youths, social and emotional competence, communication proficiency, arts and media, and community-building. I became acquainted with the phenomenal work of partner organizations, including Las Fotos Project, and am eager to cultivate professional relationships in this space.

My publisher is Departures, a transmedia resource hosted by the largest independent public television station in the United States, KCET. Departures uniquely cultivates southern Californians’ civic pride and sociological imaginations through reporting on community-level stories in such areas as activism, immigration, art, gentrification, food, city planning, small businesses, murals, history, and politics. The Departures site also offers multiple participation points, from opportunities to engage with interactive maps and multimedia installations to invitations to help solve civic challenges (e.g., How would you improve the 710 corridor? How can an empty lot in Cypress Park become a community asset?).

This wasn’t my first brush with Departures. Back in 2011, Rubi Fregoso of Departures Youth Voices facilitated a workshop for graduates of the PLAY! program, a multi-part professional development + research project designed and evaluated by USC Annenberg Innovation Lab colleagues and myself. On January 22, 2014, Rubi again lent her expertise to a USC Annenberg endeavor by participating in a webinar entitled “Spreading Your Story.”  This webinar was sponsored by my friends/associates in the Media, Activism and Participatory Politics project, an entity that bridges the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, the USC School of Cinematic Arts Media + Practice Division, and the Connected Learning Research Network. Kat Primeau, one of my co-conspirators at non-profit Laughter for a Change, also participated in the webinar. With so many friends gathered simultaneously at the same online spot, discussing one of my favorite subjects — how to spread youth civic engagement stories — I couldn’t stop myself from posting to the webinar’s real-time backchannel chat.

Here’s the webinar:

Watch live streaming video from connectedlearningtv at livestream.com

 

In light of all of this journalistic activity and online communication, I have applied to the UCD Clinton Institute’s 2014 Summer Seminar, a week-long deep-dive into how to be an academic AND a journalist. Should I be accepted, I hope to expand on my recent article on Restorative Justice (RJ). I wonder how, if at all, international youth-produced media has supported RJ movements and/or exemplified RJ processes? Which effects, if any, have these youth productions had on knowledge, attitudes, practices, or policies?

Meanwhile, I’m loving the opportunity to interview trailblazing media literacy organizations and share their important work with the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE)’s 2000+ recipients of its online newsletter. My first piece featured the Center for Media Literacy (CML), an assignment for which I interviewed CML’s accomplished President and CEO Tessa Jolls.

Since 1989, when media literacy pioneer Elizabeth Thoman established CML, this organization has served as a global resource for media literacy education. CML has worked with overseas partners in such far-flung nations as Peru, South Korea, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, while simultaneously continuing to produce original curricula that meet the United States’s diverse education standards (Felt, 2014, para. 2).

…

Reflected Jolls, “It’s not so much about the technology, it’s about critical thinking, and having the process skills, whether you’re producing or consuming. So that’s what we’ve been trying to focus on — what’s timeless, what’s a systematic way of looking at media, and how media operate as a system” (Felt, 2014, para. 12).

Reconnecting with my journalism roots and networking with people/organizations whose work supports youths’ cultivation of vital 21st century skills is deeply rewarding both personally and professionally. I look forward to continuing to enjoy this synergy as the District 4 delegate to City Councilmember Tom La Bonge for Los Angeles ArtsDay 2014.

Thanks to everyone who helped to make these developments possible!

Change Through Laughter

  By laurelfelt | February 28, 2013 - 11:53 pm | , , , , , ,
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Viola Spolin and kidsIn the early 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, offered up his mother’s games to his comedic ensemble; and ever since, improvisers the world over have played them in order to hone their craft.

But here in Los Angeles, since the founding of non-profit Laughter for a Change (L4C) in 2007, these games have returned to their original context and purpose: helping to build confidence and meaningful connections among residents of underserved communities.

During 2011-2012, L4C founder/director Ed Greenberg ran an after-school workshop with a dozen predominantly low-income, Latino high school freshmen; a trained improviser/doctoral candidate acted as a participant-observer during this year. Through analysis of ethnographic fieldnotes, surveys, and interviews, they found that improvisational theater games provided a no-tech context to practice skills vital to media literacy, such as negotiating trust and exploring identity. As articulated by Felt and Rideau (2012), developing these skills, even in no-tech contexts, prepares learners to apply them in mediated contexts.

In terms of products, participants reported less shyness, more self-confidence, increased comfort with public speaking, greater participation in academic classes, a broader view of teamwork, and fun. L4C’s use of games may help to explain its educational effectiveness. According to USC’s Project New Media Literacies, play “supports constant learning and innovative responses to our surroundings” (Reilly, Jenkins, Felt & Vartabedian, 2012, p. 6). Positive affective climates such as L4C’s also predict such educational boons as greater academic risk-taking and increased motivation (Meyer & Turner, 2006).

L4C’s website claims, “Laughter is powerful. Laughter heals. Laughter builds community.” This study’s findings suggest that L4C’s pedagogy is powerful too, and might help to leverage formal and informal educational settings for healing challenged communities.

For she’s a jolly good Fellow?

  By laurelfelt | February 17, 2012 - 12:45 pm | , , , ,
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The USC Annenberg Graduate Fellowship Program is seeking abstracts for the fourth Annual Research and Creative Project Symposium on April 11, 2012. Abstracts should describe a creative project or original work that investigates questions in communication and digital media research.

The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is simultaneously committed to boosting students’ digital proficiency and challenged by these learners’ academic disengagement. In response, Participatory Learning and You! (PLAY!) designed a theoretical framework and methodology for introducing a pedagogy of participatory culture, and applied it in a pilot after-school program at LAUSD’s Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools. Dubbed “Explore Locally, Excel Digitally” (ELED), this program invited high school students to hone their digital citizenship. Ethnographic fieldnotes, video recordings, and student reflection from ELED’s 15 weeks illustrate this program’s culture of participatory learning, characterized by motivation and engagement, creativity, relevance, co-learning, and ecological learning. ELED also supported participants’ acquisition of digital literacy skills, new media literacies proficiencies, and social and emotional learning competencies. This experience suggests that relationship-building is integral and foundational to establishing citizenship, both online and offline.

  • Feeling our way through: Exploring the potential of Dojo, a biofeedback-enhanced video game for emotional regulation training = DENIED

How do we boost students’ test scores, improve school safety, cultivate creativity, and combat the spread of public health challenges such as HIV/AIDS? Complementary research from diverse fields suggests that the key is emotional regulation (Elias, Zins, Weissberg, Frey, Greenberg, Haynes, Kessler, Schwab-Stone, & Shriver, 1997; Clark, Miller, Nagy, Avery, Roth, Liddon, & Mukherjee, 2005; Immordino-Yang & Damasio, 2007). But despite this considerable body of evidence, emotional regulation is the least taught competency of all of the social and emotional learning (SEL) learning skills (Collaborative for Academic Social and Emotional Learning, 2003). Educators’ lack of pedagogy for addressing students’ emotional regulation contributes to its curricular absence; difficulties around unambiguous perception both of one’s own emotional state as well as that of others also embattles the development, uptake, and successful realization of such curricula. GameDesk’s state-of-the-art emotional regulation video game Dojo addresses this visibility issue via biofeedback. Fingertip sensors record skin conductance and heart rate as players negotiate game-related quests; in addition to displaying these levels on-screen, the game’s difficulty increases when players’ stress increases, thus compelling players to consciously apply emotional regulation mechanisms in order to prevail. The pedagogy issue, however, remains largely unaddressed. This presentation will offer a compendium of guiding principles and best practices to inform the development of a Dojo-related emotional regulation curriculum for students in grades 6-9. It will review results from similar SEL curricula, identify successful strategies for both teaching and coping, recommend analog assessment measures, articulate past and possible future relationships between technology and behavior change, and spotlight key areas for continued research, development, and intervention. Finally, attendees will have the opportunity to slip on a set of sensors and pilot Dojo themselves.

Play and negotiation are crucial tools as contemporary education stands at a crossroads: emphases on standardized testing and digital proficiency call into question what to teach and how to teach it; changes in social relationships and communication norms introduce promises and perils for students seeking support and self-expression; and anticipation of future shifts for both technology and job opportunities (Johnson, Smith, Willis, Levine, & Haywood, 2011; Thomas & Seely Brown, 2011) also challenge established theory and practice vis-à-vis education. In order to address this, educators should engage learners in play and negotiation. “Play” and “negotiation,” respectively defined as “the ability to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving” and “the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms” (Jenkins, Purushotma, Clinton, Weigel, & Robison, 2006, p. 4), provide opportunities for youthful collaborators to “…increase developmental assets such as competence, self-efficacy and sense of control by developing an awareness of and engaging with their environment” (Wong & Zimmerman, 2005, p. 105). A play- and negotiation-rich intervention with Los Angeles high school students functions as a case study. Implemented in the fall of 2011, non-profit organization Laughter for a Change established a weekly, after-school improvisational theater workshop for students at the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools. Ethnographic fieldnotes, documentary photography and videography, as well as students’ end-of-semester reflections reveal participants’ learning outcomes that range from stronger performance skills to greater self-confidence to richer interpersonal relationships to increased willingness to take risks. Additionally, analysis of students’ process confirms their motivation and engagement, creativity, relevance-seeking, co-learning, and ecological learning, collectively suggesting that Laughter for a Change established a culture in which participatory learning flourished.