Tag Archives: Participatory Learning and You

Skill Composites

  By laurelfelt | January 24, 2013 - 3:17 pm | , , , , ,
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In 2009, I began examining the intersections between new media literacies (NMLs; Jenkins, Clinton, Purushotma, Weigel, & Robison, 2006) and social and emotional learning skills (SELs; Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, n.d.). I was a student in Dr. Henry Jenkins’s first seminar at USC, and the final paper was looming. I had recently been introduced, via Dr. Michael Cody, to Alexandre Rideau, the director of Senegal’s non-profit Reseau Africain d’Education pour la Sante (RAES) (or, in English, the African Network for Health Education). Alex wanted a proposal for revamping his youth communication for social change program, Sunukaddu. So I completed my assignment in Henry’s class by pitching a NML-rich modification to Sunukaddu for Alex, and adding in the dimension of SEL, which happens to be my passion.

Felt, L.J. (2009). Participatory learning methodologies for enriching an HIV/AIDS intervention to Senegalese youth: The Case for social and emotional learning and new media literacies. Unpublished manuscript.

Both boys bought it, and two important, collaborative relationships were born.

In terms of Alex and Sunukaddu… During the summer of 2010, I traveled to Senegal and spent two months co-designing and implementing Sunukaddu 2.0 with a group of extraordinary colleagues: Idrissa, Tidiane, Charles, and Amadou. Later, Brock also joined our brigade.

There was innovation on the educator level.

Formation Curiculiu, 350
There was learning on the participant level.

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Among both populations post-intervention, growth and advancement:

“You gave me self-confidence thanks to these skills” (Educator Tidiane Thiang, personal communication, September 22, 2010).

“…I saw [Sunukaddu participant] Mami who told me that she’s working in a retail establishment right now and [Sunukaddu participant] Azoupi is enrolled in a computer graphics workshop to become an editor. So, the training awakened vocational interests but also gave youths courage, the courage to take their destinies in their own hands” (Educator Tidiane Thiang, personal communication, October 18, 2010).

And on the communicative/scholarly level, a fair number of works produced (NOTE: The following list just details my efforts, not the textual, multimedia, and programmatic products developed by RAES):

PUBLICATIONS
Felt, L.J., Dura, L., & Singhal, A. (in press). Cultural Beacons in health communication: Leveraging overlooked indicators and grassroots wisdoms. In D.K. Kim, G. Kreps, & A. Singhal (Eds.), Global Health Communication Strategies in the 21st Century. New York: Peter Lang Publishing Group.

Felt, L.J. & Rideau, A. (2012). Our Voice: Public Health and Youths’ Communication for Social Change in Senegal. In M.O. Ensor (Ed.), African Childhoods: Education, Development, Peacebuilding, and the Youngest Continent (pp. 201-217). New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Felt, L.J. (2010, July 29). Making education (double) count: Boosting student learning via social and emotional learning and new media literacy skills. eLearn Magazine: Education and Technology in Perspective.

PRESENTATIONS
Dura, L., Felt, L.J. & Singhal, A. (June 18, 2013). Cultural beacons: Grassroots indicators of change. Paper presented at 63rd Annual International Communication Association Conference, London, UK.
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Igniting a New Civic Spirit

  By laurelfelt | January 16, 2013 - 9:30 pm | , , , ,
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The Fall 2012 edition of USC Annenberg Agenda, the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism’s in-house magazine, included an article in which the PLAY! project was explicated. For posterity, as well as the benefit of clarifying this research, I’ve included the relevant segment below.

Young people are the focus of a multifaceted Innovation Lab research project referred to as PLAY! (Participatory Learning and You!), where children–as well as the adults who surround them–take part in the creation and circulation of media content within social networks that extend from their circle of friends outward into the community.

An important facet of this program takes place within the scope of the Lab’s partnership with the R.F.K.-L.A. media lab at the R.F.K. Community Schools, six autonomous Los Angeles Unified School District pilot schools located at the site of the former Ambassador Hotel. Focusing on the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem solving, students and teachers from elementary to high school engage in multimedia activities designed to encourage participatory learning and civic engagement.

“It’s meant to foster a more participatory culture where everyone has the skills, the knowledge and the support they need to participate in the community,” says Erin Reilly, managing creative director at the Innovation Lab.

“The journalism of the future is definitely about everybody taking ownership of their own public spaces,” Reilly continues. “If we encourage play at a young age–if we encourage experimentation and the willingness to tinker in our surroundings–then we foster the participatory learning that is at the heart of play, and we create a culture where kids will grow up thinking about how to be better citizens and how to voice their opinions in the public space (Fields, 2012, p. 15).

Additionally, our research was reviewed by KQED’s Mind/Shift, a column that examines culture, teaching with tech, trends in learning, and classroom strategies. This review, featuring commentary from Henry Jenkins and Erin Reilly, is entitled “How Can Teachers Prepare Kids for a Connected World?”

Participatory Professional Development

  By laurelfelt | November 2, 2012 - 1:40 pm | , , ,
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Yesterday I had the opportunity to re-join my brilliant colleagues Erin Reilly, Ioana Literat, Sarah Kirn, and Sarah Morrisseau for a chat about our recent media-rich publication, Designing with Teachers: Participatory Approaches to Professional Development in Education. Our talk was moderated by the accomplished S. Craig Watkins and took place via LiveStream ConnectedLearning.tv webinar. To my delight, this technology again allowed me to show up, in real time, on the computer screen of an international friend. Whereas my first brush with webinar-ing motivated my colleague Cathy Tran to proclaim on FB from Norway, “I see you on “TV”!!! :)”, this time my colleague Tidiane Thang posted on FB from Senegal, “Don’t worry be happy, you started a great presentation.”

Tidiane was comforting me because my computer connection went awry — I might have had too many windows open (I was trying to backchannel with listeners via LiveStream chat as well as answer a few emails and skim the PDF, then toggle back to the webinar screen and see if I’d missed anything in our internal chat). I spoke around minute 33, then got kicked off at 34:24 in a very tragic, abrupt fashion. The “hilarious” part is that I continued speaking for at least two more minutes after that! :) Oy. I spoke up again around 40:30, got all touchy-feely around 47:30 by throwing down the term “self-actualization,” then revealed my obsession with food by likening technology to dessert around 49:50.

Beyond navel-gazing, though, I appreciated the opportunity to acknowledge the complexities and constraints that teachers negotiate. I’m disappointed by the reductive rhetoric that is usually invoked vis-a-vis school reform and American achievement. Rather than respect teachers as professionals, stakeholders, and heroes, we villainize teachers as lazy, underperforming, or even lascivious. How many more stories about teacher-on-student abuse have we heard than stories about teacher-for/with-student uplift? If the teacher isn’t female, white, and cute, and if her students aren’t black, brown, and poor, then the extraordinary teacher story isn’t deliberately buried — it’s never pursued or located in the first place.

I admire teachers’ work. I value researchers’ knowledge. If we could bring together these two products and their respective producers by translating and collaborating, as well as welcome more constituents including administrators, students, parents, and community members, then what a dynamo we would have. Then just try to stop us! Who could stop us? Everyone would be on board, helping to push us along!

I’m a lucky human being (as I own at 55:42!) and a motivated partner. Let’s make some magic, mes amis.

USC Annenberg Fellows Symposium

  By laurelfelt | April 10, 2012 - 5:44 pm | , , , ,
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On Wednesday, April 11, 2012, I presented Explore Locally, Excel Digitally: A participatory learning-oriented after-school program for enriching citizenship on- and offline at the fourth annual USC Annenberg Graduate Fellowship Research and Creative Project Symposium.

I spent hours on my gorgeous Powerpoint presentation but not a soul reviewed it. If I’d remained in my booth, perhaps I would have gotten some visitors. But since the crowd was anemically thin, I opted to court professional development by engaging with colleagues. I got to know some of the first-year PhD students in my program. I caught up with Katya Ognyanova, who I’d taken a class with back in Fall 2008 and haven’t really spoken with on an academic level ever since. I embraced my friend Lori, who became DR. LOPEZ yesterday when she successfully defended her dissertation! I chatted with my colleague Rhea Vichot, who wryly observed that conferences never know how to classify her scholarship. I asked two Greek engineers about their top takeaways from their presentation on big data. Their answer: new solutions to backing up must be devised and implemented. (We also spoke about Thessaloniki, Greek islands, cheese, and yogurt.) I heard Ritesh Mehta and Tisha Dejmanee share their phenomenological take on Facebook, then sat down with Erin Kamler (and LeeAnn Sangalang) to discuss participatory action research, Theater of the Oppressed, and Erin’s recent paper that examined modes of establishing validity in interventions that combine both approaches. We discussed the power of comradeship and fantasized about forming a reading/critical feedback circle to provide each other with intellectual/practical support. I told them to set up the Doodle. We’ll see if anyone follows through… But our hearts were in the right place.

I also attended a session in which the focus was on money and conspicuous consumption. USC Annenberg PhD student Laura Alberti spoke about the EU debt crisis and the framing of Greece as a deadbeat family member, USC Annenberg PhD student Lana Swartz spoke about the rise and fall of Diner’s Club credit cards, and USC School of Cinematic Arts PhD student Katherine Wagner explored Yelp’s implications for Los Angeles segregation. USC Annenberg PhD student LeeAnn Sangalang served as moderator.

While this event wasn’t exactly what I expected, I feel nonetheless that I benefited from learning about others’ diverse scholarship. I also strengthened collegial connections that, at the end of the day, matter far more than any one project. Therefore, I thank you, USC Annenberg Graduate Fellowship Research and Creative Project Symposium. Thank you very much.

Pecha Kuchas at USC Annenberg Dean’s Forum

  By laurelfelt | April 10, 2012 - 2:16 pm | , , , ,
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On October 14, 2010, USC Annenberg Innovation Lab‘s Project New Media Literacies and other USC entities/individuals presented a series of “blue sky” propositions at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism Dean’s Forum: Fostering Community for Robert F. Kennedy’s Legacy in Action. Attending representatives from the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools, and non-profit RFK-Legacy in Action — including LAUSD School Board president Monica Garcia, several RFK Community Schools principals, and Robert F. Kennedy’s son and daughter-in law — pondered how we might spark new forms of teaching and learning while honoring the social justice philosophy that inspired these RFK institutions.

I speak Pecha Kucha-style from 1:04:30-1:08:30. That means that my 12 graphically-oriented slides advance every 20 seconds, whether I’m ready or not, for precisely four minutes. You can see me in the flesh at the beginning and the end — in the middle, you just see my slides. This is the event that paved the way for the next year and a half of PLAY! research. And the rest, as they say, is history…

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