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…
At the event, Henry discussed the the context in which he wrote this book and reflected a bit on its relevance six years post-publication. He also invited four of his students — Francesca Marie Smith, Kevin Driscoll, Meryl Alper, and myself — to speak about the book’s impact(s) on our scholarship and the research we’re currently conducting.
Francesca talked about disability rhetoric and the utility of fan culture/writing around Batman’s the Joker for demystifying mental illness.
Kevin, a member of the Civic Paths research group, discussed a couple of cases in which fans leveraged both their mutual passion for making music and the affordances of networked information and communication to fight for their rights.
Meryl discussed her work with Flotsam, a children’s transmedia play experience that enables story creation, telling, and re-telling across multiple analog and digital media platforms.
And I explained my motivations for doctoral study and the philosophies and projects that constitute the PLAY! program. In the video embedded below, I speak from 16:15-23:30.
Here are my notes:
-”all sides want to claim a share in how we educate the young, since shaping childhood is often seen as a way of shaping the future direction of our culture” (p. 177)
-”…what rights we have to read and write about core cultural myths–that is, a struggle over literacy. … We may also see the current struggle over literacy as having the effect of determining who has the right to participate in our culture and on what terms” (pp. 176-177)
-Youth were motivated by their passions to engage deeply. A yearning for creativity may have stoked their passion, and the communities and processes in which they engaged were certainly creative. Colearning occurred organically as they sought information, mutually struggled to realize their visions, and shared the roles of learner and mentor. Their passions and these communities seemed relevant to them, hooked into their identities and goals, delivering a meaningful reward. As such, youths connected this experience to their larger learning ecosystems in such grand ways as the Harry Potter Alliance, where they applied the morals from that world to the injustices in ours, attempting to act as Dumbledore’s Army in stamping out manifestations of the Dark Arts like illiteracy and exploitation, and more “modest” ways, like talking about Harry Potter at home and bringing one’s personal experience into fandom (as in youths’ profiles on The Daily Prophet).
-these are the CPLs: motivation & engagement; creativity; colearning; relevance; and learning ecosystem
-”more and more, educators are coming to value the learning that occurs in these informal and recreational spaces” (p. 185); “Gee and other educators worry that students who are comfortable participating in and exchanging knowledge through affinity spaces are being deskilled as they enter the classroom” (p. 192)
-conclusion of CC also mentions a participation gap (which is “the unequal access to the opportunities, experiences, skills, and knowledge that will prepare youth for full participation in the world of tomorrow” (Jenkins, Purushotma, Clinton, Weigel, & Robison, 2006, p. 3)) — “… we need to confront the cultural factors that diminish the likelihood that different groups will participate. Race, class, language differences amplify these inequalities in opportunities for participation” (p. 269)
-So, we at PLAY! are trying to support the adoption of these best practices from informal spaces into formal spaces
-we have begun by:
ELED: running a youth program that relied on the CPLs and digital citizenship (Explore Locally, Excel Digitally);
SS & POTB: then leading a two-part professional development workshop for LAUSD teachers in participatory learning and play (Summer Sandbox and PLAYing Outside the Box);
PLAYground: asking teachers and their students to alphatest an online, multimedia platform for participatory learning that bridges to transmedia experiences ;
PLAY! On workshops: simultaneously supporting teachers’ applied experiences of playful learning and technological exploration (PLAY On! workshops); and
Laughter for a Change: extending this experience back to students and educators alike in an afterschool improvisational theater workshop
-”…role-playing both as a means of exploring a fictional realm and as a means of developing a richer understanding of the yourself and the culture around you” (p. 185)
-OVERALL, we have a healthy respect for games and voice; we hope to create ourselves and encourage our colleagues to co-configure with students a non-hierarchical culture in which it’s safe to be who you are, try, fail, reflect, and keep on going
Here is a series of images that ran in the background as we spoke, illustrating themes of participatory culture. And here are our collective notes: Questions to Consider
About the Book
What do you see as the most important new developments in media since 2006 when Convergence Culture was published? Which of the emerging trends identified in the book blossomed, and which of its predictions came true? What needs to be adjusted in the book’s argument based on subsequent developments? If you could add a new chapter to the book, what would you talk about?
How might the growth of social media impact the book’s core themes?
How do you think convergence culture and spreadable media models are contributing to shifts in journalistic practices and also to how we talk about journalism?
Do you think that convergence culture and spreadable media have altered the nature of what it means to be a public figure, locally and globally? If so, how? (e.g., how one becomes a public figure, how one maintains their public image, how one becomes a public figure while attached to a story they might not want to be publicly associated with)
Reflect on enduring phrase “the whole world is watching” from Chicago in 1968, Jenkins asks in Convergence Culture, “Is there any place on the web where the whole world is watching?” (p. 211). How might we compare the livestreamers at the Occupy Wall Street protests to the protestors at the 1968 political conventions?
What similarities or differences might we see between fans “spoiling” Survivor and the impact that WikiLeaks and Anonymous have had on contemporary politics? Are there other political ramifications of convergence culture beyond what’s described in the book that we might talk about?
One recurring idea in Convergence Culture is the “Black Box Fallacy”: “the attempt to reduce convergence to a purely technological model for identifying which black box will be the nexus through which all future media content will flow” (p. 280). Is this fallacy still in play? Where have you seen it recently? Can we identify material effects of this ideology in the products and services available to us today? (Think about Netflix, Apple TV, or Xbox Live…)
Reflecting on the election in 2004, Jenkins wrote that “candidates may build their base on the internet but they need television to win elections” (p. 213). Is this still true in 2012? What is the relationship of broadcast media to the internet so far in this year’s election?
Jenkins writes, “For some, the concern is with the specific content of those fantasies—whether they are consistent with a Christian worldview. For others, the concern is with the marketing of those fantasies to children—whether we want opportunities for participation to be commodified. Ironically, at the same time, corporations are anxious about this fantasy play because it operates outside their control” (p. 205). So, various adults with different agendas are struggling to control youths’ experience. This suggests that such a thing can be controlled, and that youths need adults to play the role of cultural gatekeeper because youths lack the strength or skepticism to resist “harmful” influences. What do you think of such a position? First, is it possible to shape (or even predict) youths’ experience? Second, is “protection” for youths best achieved from adults’ censorship or adults’ guidance?
About Yourself
Are there stories that you consume across media?
Do you watch television on a television set or on your computer?
How do you think YouTube shapes the way that you assess and value information? How do you think you shape your own YouTube experience? How are these two forces complementary or contradictory?
Do you pass along YouTube videos to others? If so, which videos have you wanted to spread?
What forms of popular culture are you a fan of? What does being a fan mean to you?
How, if at all, have you been affected by the push/pull between consumers and producers of popular media products? Have you illegally downloaded music or movies? Scored your own YouTube videos with copyrighted songs?
Jenkins discusses a then-emerging concern over the shift from Thorburn’s “consensus culture” to de Sola Pool’s “communication niches” (or Negroponte’s “daily me” or Sunstein’s “echo chambers” or “digital enclaves”) (pp. 236-237). Jenkins writes, “Sunstein’s arguments assume that Web groups are primarily formed around ideological rather than cultural axes. Yet, few of us simply interact in political communities; most of us also join communities on the basis of our recreational interests” (p. 238). He adds, “We need to create a context where we listen and learn from one another. We need to deliberate together” (p. 239). Do you have spaces in your life for listening and learning with people from different political points of view? Where do you find them?
Many teachers complain that youths’ adoption of digital norms has harmed their writing skills, specifically in terms of their spelling and grammar. But Chapter Five paints a different story vis-à-vis writing development. Have you ever experienced a similar phenomenon as Heather and Flourish—growing as writers, but also as responsible and responsive community members—due to reading and writing emails, Facebook notes, blogs, fan forum posts, etc.?
About Annenberg
Jenkins writes, “These kids are passionate about writing because they are passionate about what they are writing about. To some degree, pulling such activities into schools is apt to deaden them because school culture generates a different mindset than our recreational life” (p. 194). What do you think about this? Damned if you do, damned if you don’t? Have you ever had an experience at ASCJ in which you were able to work on a passion project, where interest in the subject dictated the extent of your participation (as opposed to consideration of grades/rubrics/etc.)? If so, what happened? What occurred in terms of the hours you put in relative to other projects, your feelings about working on this particular project, your relationship with the passion, and outcomes after turning it in? How can ASCJ encourage professors and create curricula that allow students access to their passions without deadening their recreational quality?
Convergence Culture declares, “Schools impose a fixed leadership hierarchy (including very different roles for adults and teens)” (p. 193). What are the assets and drawbacks of such a hierarchical configuration? Is it useful or obsolete in this “world of constant change” (Thomas & Seely Brown, 2011)? Should merit, passion, or some other trait dictate leadership? Should classrooms be staging grounds/practice arenas for students to prepare for leadership?
Have you ever taught an adult how to do something? Has this ever occurred in the classroom? What happened and how did it feel?
To what degree does the mix of expertise in Annenberg help to prepare students for a convergence culture?
Have the trends we are discussing impacted the relationship between faculty and students? Have they impacted the ways researchers interface with the larger public?
What roles should academics play in relation to the entertainment and news industries they study?
What ideas from the book might help us have better classrooms? Better jobs after USC?
What skills would you want to make sure every Annenberg student has mastered by graduation (perhaps drawing from the list on p. 176 as a starting point)?
Students in the past were expected to master medium-specific skills and knowledge. Now, many of you will work across many media in the course of your careers and often will be working at the intersections between different media and industries. What should Annenberg be doing to give you the flexibility you need to navigate this unpredictable path and get access to jobs that may not even have names yet?
-“Play is a very serious matter… It is an expression of our creativity; and creativity is at the very root of our ability to learn, to cope, and to become whatever we may be” (Rogers & Sharapan, 1994, p. 13).
-Besides being tied to creativity, play is also science – it is the vehicle through which one asks questions, constructs hypotheses, runs trials, analyzes results, and comes to conclusions. Particularly today, as forward-thinkers exhort innovation and policy-makers (solely, and thus myopically) extol the virtues of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), the seriousness and practicality of this should be obvious.
-“In almost every example of what he describes as “the sacred,” play is the defining feature of our most valued cultural rites and rituals. As such, for Huizinga, play is not something we do; it is who we are” (Thomas & Seely Brown, 2011, p. 97).
What is play good for?
A1. Tinkering (agenda-less play) → innovation
-A 10-year-old’s unbounded experimentation led to her discovery of a new molecule
00:00-01:30
A2. Tinkering → discovery
-Junior Toy Inventors in Mumbai’s Expanding Minds Program learned about balance by working with sundry materials.
A3. Tinkering → personal and social enrichment
-This culturally-inspired innovation in Senegal contributed to Sunukaddu staff member/inventor Idrissa’s sense of pride and self-efficacy, as well as the benefit of learners near and far.
NOTE: This final photo is from the RFKLab, a space for innovation and community-building at the RFK Community Schools in downtown Los Angeles. Laughter for a Change uses the NMLs in its Tuesday after-school program with high school students. Improvisation is an excellent context and tool for getting at play and other key NMLs.
B1. Gaming (purposeful play) → innovation
“This is the first instance that we are aware of in which online gamers solved a longstanding scientific problem,” writes Khatib. “These results indicate the potential for integrating video games into the real-world scientific process: the ingenuity of game players is a formidable force that, if properly directed, can be used to solve a wide range of scientific problems” (Young, 2011).
B2. Gaming → discovery
“… certain games afford their players the opportunity to step virtually into the shoes of a specific profession and, through game play, become familiar with its domains of knowledge, skill base, values, identities, and ways of thinking about the world” (Joseph, 2008, p. 263).
For more about Barry’s incredible global learning and youth development program, check out Global Kids!
-Becoming a better critical thinker, friend, teammate, person as a result of play
Can you think of an example to illustrate this?
Why? How does that work? Why does play produce such incredible results?
1. Flow: “the satisfying, exhilarating feeling of creative accomplishment and heightened functioning” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975, p. xiii).
2. Self-efficacy: belief in one’s capacity to produce effects (Bandura, 1977)
Acting in a game demonstrates to players that they can exert power over something, that their efforts make a difference. “Fiero is what we feel after we triumph over adversity” (McGonigal, 2011, p. 33).
3. Capacity-building
Playing enriches perseverance, emotional stamina, mental toughness, and divergent thinking.
4. Community
Game-related talk (processing experience, comparing performance, exchanging feedback, pursuing mastery) builds relationships and community. “Good games… support social cooperation and civic participation at very big scales. And they help us lead more sustainable lives and become a more resilient species” (McGonigal, 2011, p. 350).
Play and the NMLs
New media literacies (NMLs) are “a set of cultural competencies and social skills young people need” in a culture that “shifts the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement” (Jenkins et al., 2006, p. 4).
Despite their name, NMLs are neither “new” nor exclusively about “media”; rather, they are time-honored practices that support critical thinking and problem-solving.
-Why? Because NMLs are tools for problem-solving. New and old media alike pose “problems,” such as understanding new gadgets, working with dissimilar collaborators, and interpreting data. NMLs – in these examples, play, negotiation, and visualization, respectively — offer tools to solve those problems.
Other key NMLs include collective intelligence, “the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others towards a common goal”; and negotiation, “the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms” (p. 4)
-Problems have an emotional piece to them — they elicit emotional/physical responses in our bodies. Certain strategies can help you to defuse or limit the emotional intensity of a problem. (You can practice these strategies via innovative video game Dojo from GameDesk!)
-Problems also have a practical piece to them — they present real barriers to maximally productive workflow. Which strategies can you invoke for managing conflict and solving problems?
ABCDE Exercise
NOTE: My dear friend and mentor, brilliant Garden Nursery School director Jenn Guptill, co-presented this exercise with me back in 2004, when we taught workshops in supporting young children’s conflict resolution for fellow early childhood educators. A-D might be a product of the Safe and Caring Classrooms study group in which we participated, and then we added the E…
-Ask for volunteers to roleplay two characters in a contextually relevant problematic scenario
-These volunteers will play out an encounter in which they address the scenario
-Then they will see what happens when they try out steps A-E
A. Ask neutrally if there is a problem
-Do not assign blame, characterize someone as bad, or assume malicious intent; speak about how things look to you: ”I notice that when I do X, it seems like you do Y.”
-Use “I statements,” explaining how behaviors (NOT the person, just certain acts) they make you feel: “When you do X, it makes me feel like Y.”
-Invite other person to share his/her perspective: ”What do you think is happening?” “What do you think about that?” “What have you noticed?”
B. Brainstorm possible solutions to the conflict
-Both parties ideally should contribute to the brainstorming session
-Ideas should be heard and, ideally, not criticized
-The point is to establish trust and step away from putting people on the defensive
C. Choose which solution you will employ and how you will follow up to assess
-Both parties should agree to the action plan
-The assessment part is key — how will you know if things are working? When will you check in again to ensure that there’s satisfaction and open dialogue?
D. Do it!
-Get ‘er done
E. Evaluate
-This part is often left out but it allows for minor adjustments, guards against strained relations and icy silence/alienation post-confrontation, and renews awareness of/commitment to the solution (because it can be easy to fall back into old habits)
Play for Problem-solving Activity
-Break into small groups of 5-6, work through a problematic scenario by using a mode of play
Modes of play:
1. examples from nature — think about plants, animals, etc and see if that helps you to model and problem-solve
2. roleplaying — think about the characters involved in a problem and step into their shoes, act like them and try to think like them in order to problem-solve
3. manipulatives — use assorted objects to model systems and relationships
4. art — express problem, using as few words as possible, via paper, markers, Post-Its, and other art supplies
5. narrative — turn the problem into a simple story, as if you were explaining to a young child or an alien from another planet in order to boil it down to its most essential elements and make new discoveries
6. free play — find another playful mode of exploring your group’s problem!
Possible thematic outcomes:
1. innovation: new solutions
2. discovery: new skills or knowledge
3. personal and/or social enrichment: new relationships and/or intrapersonal understandings
4. other
Possible deliverables:
1. a way to communicate the problem so that the organization (and/or multiple stakeholders) better understand it
2. multiple possible solutions, a long brainstorm session
3. one processual solution and a set of action steps and recommendations for implementation and evaluation
4. an organizational restructuring involving new working groups or work flows or communication processes, etc.
5. other
Shareout
What did you come up with?
How did your group members work together (e.g., strategies, roles, conflicts, solutions, etc)?
-Reflections can be enriched by use of ORID (Stanfield, 2000), a protocol for facilitating group discussions that is based on four lines of inquiry: Objective (e.g., “What happened?”); Reflective (e.g., “How did it make you feel?”); Interpretive (e.g., “What is this all about?”); and Decisional (e.g., “What is our response?”).
O: What happened? Which words/phrases/moments do you most vividly remember?
R: How did it feel? Where were you surprised/delighted/frustrated?
I: What is all this about? What does all this mean for us? How will this affect our work? What are we learning from this? What is the insight?
D: What is our response? What action is called for? What are our next steps?
Epilogue: City Year L.A. Plays to Problem-solve!
This incredible group of open-hearted, fun-loving, forward-thinking folks enthusiastically embraced the challenge to approach organizational issues from a playful perspective. They harnessed modeling clay, blocks, animal figurines, toothpicks, gumdrops, a Barrel of Monkeys, and narrative form in order to think innovatively and develop viable solutions. Thanks to Shira Weiner for dreaming up and bringing in all of these creative materials, and for inviting me to City Year in the first place! C.Y.L.A., let’s play, hook!
Listen to this recording of the group members’ fantastic solutions!
The University of Southern California (USC) is well known for football, and all of the glory and scandal that comes with it. Some folks also associate USC with privilege and derisively refer to it as the “University of Spoiled Children.”
But USC knows, as I have learned well, that you can’t just rest on your laurels.* We must look to the future.
The Strategic Vision identifies three paths forward, which constitute the heart of our academic vision.
Transforming Education for a Rapidly Changing World highlights building the ranks of transformative faculty and reinventing education at the undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral levels. It also focuses on the need to insure student access to education and our commitment to accountability.
Creating Scholarship with Consequence emphasizes the growing importance of translational research, creative work and professional practice that make a significant impact on society. This will require increasingly more interdisciplinary and inter-professional collaboration.
Connecting the Individual to the World calls for promoting local and global engagement to foster mutual understanding. This begins with self-knowledge and self-reflection, critical thought, appreciation of diversity, aesthetic sensibility, civility, and empathy across all spheres of life. Given the broad scope and depth of our academic programs, we must not lose sight of the importance of cultivating human wholeness.
-Elizabeth Garrett, USC Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs, 1/9/12
These values echo my own and if I were more jingoistic, I might be inclined to say something like “I am USC.”
My latest inspiration for my dissertation reflects this commitment to transformative education, meaningful contribution, and human wholeness. It incorporates positive deviance, participatory action research, participatory design, participatory culture, participatory learning, serious games, and social and emotional competence.
Project Plan:
1. Gather baseline data on a youth population (utilize multiple methods to triangulate members’ capacity to emotionally regulate and perform in Dojo).
2. Identify positive deviants (PD’s), or those whose adeptness at emotional regulation qualifies as aberrational; in other words, individuals who thrive despite the odds, without access to special resources.
3. Identify their emotional regulation strategies — How do they do what they do?
4. Work with these PD’s to suggest game design modifications and curriculum components for Dojo.
5. Liaise with GameDesk developers regarding game design modifications and take lead on realizing complementary curriculum.
6. Facilitate outreach efforts with PD’s and other interested youths, spreading the word about Dojo and PD’s emotional regulation strategies.
7. Gather endline data on youth population (utilize multiple methods to triangulate members’ capacity to emotionally regulate and perform in Dojo).
Of course, this plan is ambitious and will undergo intensive revision — part of the process. For now, this is the blue sky I’m eyeballing.
How can any contemporary woman (especially one with brains and a lamentably slow metabolism) not be struck by the following passage from Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (courtesy of COMM 395: Gender, Media & Communication)?
“…women, feminists included, are starving themselves to death in our culture.
This is not to deny the benefits of diet, exercise, and other forms of body management. Rather, I view our bodies as a site of struggle, resistance to gender domination, not in the service of docility and gender normalization. This work requires, I believe, a determinedly skeptical attitude toward the routes of seeming liberation and pleasure offered by our culture. It also demands an awareness of the often contradictory relations between image and practice, between rhetoric and reality. Popular representations, as we have seen, may forcefully employ the rhetoric and symbolism of empowerment, personal freedom, “having it all.” Yet female bodies, pursuing these ideals, may find themselves as distracted, depressed, and physically ill as female bodies in the nineteenth century were made when pursuing a feminine ideal of dependency, domesticity, and delicacy. The recognition and analysis of such contradictions, and of all the other collusions, subversions, and enticements through which culture enjoins the aid of our bodies in the reproduction of gender, require that we restore a concern for female praxis to its formerly central place in feminist politics” (Bordo, 1993, pp. 183-184).
Bartky (1998) enumerates these practices: “…those that aim to produce a body of a certain size and general configuration; those that bring forth from this body a specific repertoire of gestures, postures, and movements; and those that are directed toward the display of this body as an ornamented surface” (p. 27).
Indeed, and it’s as I’ve known for quite a while: The culture might be serving up toxicity, but we’re also feeding it ourselves… and cooking up new creations at home.
“We.” I just implicated a “we,” Bordo admonished a proactive “we”… which is who? All women? Some shadowy phalanx of feminist scholars and advocates? How do I play a role in that inchoate “we”? Does it begin with the “I”? Or is that too linear and individualistic? Perhaps I can retrain the “I” by participating in the “we” — community, then self…?
Regardless of the player, what’s the game? What is anyone to do? Are we to recognize these contradictions? Rationalize these contradictions? Strive to eliminate these contradictions by modifying practice? modifying ideals?
The simple answer is “Yes.”
I recently came across this Chinese Proverb: “Those who say it cannot be done should get out of the way of those doing it.”
Who’s doing it, and how? Or is this when Gandhi’s words should be applied? “You must be the change you want to see in the world.”
