Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture (Some Fifteen Years Later) (Part Three)

In part three in our series about the production and impact of Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture, we spend a little more time with Connie Yowell, who commissioned the report on behalf of the MacArthur Foundation; Alice Robison, who was one of the co-authors of the report; Mimi Ito, who was another key leader of the Digital Media and Learning Movement; and of course, Henry. We also check in with John Palfrey, who is now President of the MacArthur Foundation and was running an important center at Harvard focused around how “digital natives” learn at the time Jenkins was up the road at MIT.  Each of them addressed Tessa Jolls’ questions about the lasting legacy of the white paper and of the Digital Media and Learning Project more generally.

Connie Yowell: I thought the reaction was two fold. In general, it was like breathing fresh, new life into education and how people think about literacy and how they think about learning. There was a hunger, amongst teachers in particular, to really understand the report and understand what to do with it. Once they saw it, and read it, and understood it, they were really eager to figure out what to do with it. One of the core challenges for teachers is engaging students and finding ways to connect learning to the things that young people care about. Henry’s brilliance was sitting at the intersection of culture, media, literacy and education. It was a new intersection for educators and one that had the potential to pave the way to paradigmatic changes in how we think about learning, technology and learner empowerment. It’s where learner interest, engagement and action intersect. 

Later on, Henry’s work on the Harry Potter Alliance as an illustrative case of how these things come together was equally significant and enabled educators and learners to break out of their traditional learning as transmission of information box, giving us a whole new imagination on where learning can happen, how it can happen and how its supported and embedded in affinity groups.  That was the first step in creating a whole pathway into thinking about a different way of teaching literacy. 

 There was a broad uptake. There were fringes of people who were way more conservative, who really struggled with it, but we saw a massive uptake and interest.

if we had actually had even more uptake and more engagement, we would have had a way of helping our young people understand this shift in online tools that became more ad-based and more focused on capturing their attention rather than engaging them in participation. 

Henry was writing about the first wave of tools that came out, which were all around participation, and making and creating a more extraordinary youth culture--whether it was LiveJournal or some of the other tools he was looking at. Even MySpace was more maker and creator focused than Facebook.  But we took a serious turn with Twitter and Facebook and their use of media to capture and sell attention as opposed to creating onramps to participation and production.  The new media literacy took an invaluable approach to enabling youth to both be critical of and participatory in media. We needed more time to scale the approach, but its not too late.  Its time for another wave of the work.  

Connie Yowell is currently serving as Senior Vice Chancellor of Education Innovation at Northeastern University and was founder of LRNG.

John Palfrey:   It's great to be able to reflect on a previous time in a set of ideas and how they've then tracked through. It's kind of a cool intellectual history journey, which is fun to go on. I would say, clearly, your white paper was a catalytic piece in the context of the digital media and learning work that MacArthur committed many, many years and hundreds of millions of dollars to. You can take great pride in having set up a philosophical framework for a lot of that investment. Then, as Connie Yowell went on to take the LRNG spinoff out of the DML work, trying to focus on the new media literacies of young people outside of schools and in places from Chicago to Birmingham, Alabama, to New Hampshire, she's really taken the same set of ideas and implemented them in a variety of contexts. So it absolutely was one of several, very important blueprints from MacArthur's work and a huge amount of investment.

In some ways, it may be even unusual to say that scholars would have had such a huge impact on what such a program ended up doing. That's actually a hallmark of the Digital Media and Learning project. It took so many cues from the field and from leaders in the field, obviously, but it wasn't so much the brainchild necessarily just of one or two program officers. MacArthur was leaning into what the field thought was required for the next series of directions and then invested behind it. 

Henry Jenkins:  Well, thanks for that. So you were at Harvard at the time we were doing this and you were doing your work on digital natives?

John Palfrey:   We had a great interest in how kids were learning and engaging with information in different ways, and obviously, very focused on what are the ways that we could understand that and support it and then understand some of the ramifications of it. As you know, it was a fun time with danah boyd and, of course, your work and many others in the field kicking around Cambridge and to have interlocutors and people who are kind of writing in public together, both informally and formally. It was actually a pretty generative time, at least from my perspective in terms of thinking through how kids were learning, how that was changing, what was important about it, what was enduring. It kicked off a lot of work that followed.

Henry Jenkins:  The joke has always been that Harvard and MIT are two stops down the Red line and opposite ends of the planet at the same time. But, in those days, we were finding ourselves on somewhat similar trajectories and involved in some productive conversations.

John Palfrey:   I think it's a good example of not necessarily being in the same institution, but being focused on some similar questions and then being able to have a semi-public dialogue that actually could be quite constructive. I certainly am personally grateful for that.

Henry Jenkins:  Me too.   What do you think were the biggest insights that came out of that moment in time in terms in terms of understanding young people's relation to new media technologies?

John Palfrey:  The insights around agency are always ones I keep coming back to -- the things that kids can do relative to media.  It's not simply a passive experience. You and I both have had a great interest in the ways that young people can be involved in shaping, not just communities, but democracy itself. Those insights you included in the paper are important and enduring. The other piece of it, I would say, which is more of this moment, but it may well be enduring too, is that so many kids are learning outside of the classroom and outside of the formal structure of learning. An insight that came through your work, but then was amplified through the DML work broadly is how much learning is happening across a variety of things, whether it's cognitive or social-emotional.  It's harder to describe the kinds of learning kids do when they engage with media outside of school, independent of adult control, and removed from formal education. Right now, that's so important for all reasons - some fatigue; kids not having access to the technology, not being able to participate in the formal learning. It’s important to see that broader set of new media literacies come into play and understand why they matter. Where we can make that available for kids, there’s a huge benefit from an equity perspective. The work that one teacher is doing in that 30 minutes or 45 minutes or whatever it is on Zoom with kids who are not able to be physically proximate to each other actually isn't the end of the story. That may feel like it's sort of a pandemic answer to your question, but I think it could be an enduring answer too.

Henry Jenkins:  The pandemic obviously keeps cropping up in all of these conversations because suddenly, everyone's focused on schools, online education and what that looks like at the current moment. Notions like screen time just has blown up because everything is screen time and we need to be asking what kids are doing on those screens and not just whether there are screens involved.

John Palfrey:  What are you supposed to say? The data have not borne out the idea that screen time in aggregate is a bad thing for most kids. In fact, there's plenty of evidence to say that a bunch of screen time can be quite good for most kids. 

Henry Jenkins:   So, any further thoughts?

John Palfrey:   Just gratitude. I'm grateful for the ideas and the enduring connection and the fact that I get to talk with you for a few minutes across this divide. 

John Palfrey is the President of the MacArthur Foundation.

 Mimi Ito: Our report was empirical and descriptive unlike Henry's work, which was actually suggesting stuff that educators might do. We reissued the Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out book. We've issued a tenth anniversary version where we have a new foreword that looks back on the ten years and what we missed, or not necessarily what we missed, but how the ecosystem changed or what we were surprised about. I think the speed at which the grown-up world gobbled the internet was surprising, or maybe not surprising, but just how quickly it became this arena where grown-ups were doing their grown-up things and they got colonized by politics and commerce. 

When we were doing our research, it was much more of a youth and academic-centered space. It was very different. It was perceived as the space of freedom for young people. Now, it's not at all. Kids are retreating to private spaces and the open internet is not a happy place anymore.

It was a pleasant surprise how many educators embraced our work. I often take a critical view of educational institutions, and I’m not a big fan of teaching myself. I do research and mentor students but I don’t do classroom instruction. I actually enjoyed school myself, but I don’t look to the classroom as a place that is spearheading digital innovation. I wasn’t holding my breath about educator response to our work, but I was pleasantly surprised. Over the years I’ve learned to appreciate and collaborate with more educational institutions instead of just engaging with youth outside of school. It’s a good thing.

One of the big outcomes was the establishment of the YouMedia Learning Lab at the Chicago Public Library and the network of youth media labs that were based off of our research, at least in part. MacArthur incentivized those, but they also brought in a Federal funder, the Institute of Museum and Library Services. That was pretty exciting just to see actual programs being launched. It wasn't like it was an application of the research. It was because we were all in conversation with one another. Then a lot of our subsequent work around connected learning was really knitted around bringing insights from the empirical research, which my study was part of the design and agenda studying stuff, like Henry's report and then people who were actually building and rolling out tests and innovations and practice. Those things all fed together into the two research networks that Henry (Youth and Participatory Politics) and I (Connected Learning) were a part of to build frameworks that were evidenced-driven but were also setting the agenda for innovations and results. Because of MacArthur's funding of all of the subsequent work, there's this ongoing influence that this work has had and because they used the Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out framework for the youth media learning labs and they shortened it to an acronym, HOMAGO. Now, even the library spaces, they're routinely described as HOMAGO spaces.      

Mizuko “Mimi” Ito is a Professor in Residence at the Humanities Research Institute at the University of California, Irvine.

 
Tessa Jolls:  When you think back on it, do you feel like you were surprised by anything? Were there surprises that you just didn’t expect as a result of the reporting being published?

Alice Robinson:  I shouldn’t have been, but I was surprised that some media literacy educators were resentful that the report got so much attention. That was unfortunate; however, I don’t necessarily think they were wrong. We didn’t do enough to acknowledge the deep history of media literacy to begin with. However, I don’t think any of us wrote the paper with the intent of reaching an audience beyond media study folks. None of us was an expert in any way on media literacy and we should have brought in media literacy folks. We were a group of literacy scholars and media scholars, and it got taken up by the media literacy audience, but it was not written for the media literacy audience. We should have anticipated that, and we didn’t, and that was I think unfortunate. However, it was incredibly well received by literacy, especially digital literacy, scholars and educators, and that made me really happy because I really wanted them to look at literacy in different ways as not just sort of an acquisition problem and so I thought that that was really great. I was really thrilled that media folks found themselves thinking more about learning and literacy.

Tessa Jolls: Agreed. Media people, in general, were just in shock at that point in time and they were really scrambling to understand this new world that they were having [0:52:36 inaudible]and I think the report was just so awakening for a lot of them or they knew they needed to know something, and it gave them something to go to, and be able to understand the framework for it, and that articulation that you talked about was very important and [0:53:03 inaudible]for lots of people, so that… yeah, that’s a wonderful point to make.

AliceRobison, Ph.D.,is co-founder of Quick Brown Fox Consulting, LLC.

Mimi Ito:  I certainly don't think that our reports would have had the influence they did if there wasn't for the additional support MacArthur was giving to other organizations that were taking up the work. I'm guessing the same for Henry's report as well, but I don't have as much insight into that.   

Tessa Jolls: Yes, understandable. Do you think we're in one of those innovative moments now with COVID and all the homeschooling going on? I mean it's hard to tell, but at the same time it seems like things are really shaking up right now. That can be an opportunity, as well as certainly disruptive. 

Mimi Ito:  I think it's hard to know. I mean it's definitely going to change things. Whether it's an opportunity for the things we care about to survive --  that I think is less certain. It does feel to me similar to that moment in history that we were talking about earlier. COVID has really accelerated the next wave of mainstreaming of online learning. Before COVID, when people said online learning, they actually didn't think of the things that I study, like kids geeking out on videogames and things like that. They wouldn't have considered  the more expansive version of literacy that Henry talks about.  A lot of people would not associate that with digital learning because they think of online teaching as the delivery of standardized formal education for the most part. I think that has changed because people understand the importance of digital and social connection because of COVID. 

COVID has accelerated the recognition that kids can't learn academic subjects unless they feel connected and safe and/or well-fed. It seemed obvious but it's a big deal that is officially being recognized. Before COVID, homeschooling was growing slowly, but it was still a fringe set of groups that consider themselves homeschoolers and schools repeatedly ignored the home context and saw their mission as residing within the four walls of the school. 

We had been seeing a lot of growth in online learning in the Higher Ed because you have a lot of non-traditional learners there, but it had been really slow in the K12 sector.  Suddenly all doctors are doing telemedicine. It's like, "Okay. Now, we actually have to think about not only what  it means for kids to be able to access the school content from home, but also how do you design an online learning environment, which has never been a mainstream concern within education. 

The fact that Zoom has come to dominate online learning is unfortunate. Why aren’t virtual worlds where learners can interact socially and create things being used? I am running a nonprofit, Connected Camps, that is trying to do this more social and project-based kind of online learning, together with Katie Salen, also from the MacArthur network. Our focus has been offering live, social, online learning experiences in platforms like Minecraft and Roblox. These are some of the only learning platforms that some educators use, that allows for kids to engage in a social, hands-on way. Compare that to Zoom, which often translates to a second-rate version of lectures or classroom discussion. Minecraft is a digital environment that gives you new and different powers that you don’t have in the physical environment.

There were never resources or thoughts from educational community of putting imagination as a priority.  Imagine if we had invested in a metaverse that was actually good for kids where they could build things together and where a teacher could circulate among groups of kids instead of having this metaphor of face-to-face and breakout rooms, which is not how educators work.  If you want to do project-based stuff, You can't. It's very difficult to do anything that's inquiry-based in Zoom. Since March, we expanded our team from a group of 25 to 125 and we're still not able to meet the demand of summer. 

Tessa Jolls:   Wow! That's really something, Mimi. Congratulations. You kept into it, yet a good time and needed, so needed. 

Mimi Ito:  Yes, it almost killed us. We're still trying to keep things afloat, but there wasn't much out there. Families were just desperate for a step that was social and engaging and meaningful for their kids. 

Tessa Jolls:  Yes, I believe it. It's been so helpful to explore this with you because I think the timing is good with all of this change going on and yet I think it's also important to recognize how some of the work that was done early on has really blossomed. I think that the work that MacArthur undertook has really made a contribution and, in a way, we're probably going to see more from that contribution now even then we did in the past, especially when we look at the education space. Do you have any other thoughts you'd like to share on MacArthur and the impacts that it had? 

Mimi Ito: For a lot of people who are touched by it, it created a set of relationships in a community that has been very resilient.  Some of what I have tried to inherit and steward even after the official DML initiative ended a couple of years ago, I recruited eight faculty who were involved in the DML initiative to our campus at UC Irvine and started a new research institute, the Connected Learning Lab as a steward of some of the community and the resources that came out of that work.  We have a website, the Connected Learning Alliance, where we continue to blog and publish reports. My team at UC Irvine has been running the annual DML conference. Henry was our very first chair for the very first DML. We merged with Games, Learning, and Society and the Sandbox Summit, into a new event called the Connected Learning Summit, which we had to cancel this year.   This year would have been the third year in this new format. Yes, the community is still very robust. I have no idea if we're going to be able to continue it in the world post-COVID, but at least for the first two years, even after MacArthur ended its funding, it was sustainable as a community supported event. I think that the people like to see each other. They like to stay connected with each other. I think that's also a really nice outcome of that work. 

Mizuko “Mimi” Ito is a Professor in Residence at the Humanities Research Institute at the University of California, Irvine.

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Henry Jenkins: We wanted to make the report as concrete for teachers as we could. That was part of the writing process. So when the report came out, the first stories we were hearing were that groups of teachers were sitting down at the faculty lounge in schools across the country, reading the report, discussing it, trying to identify what they were already doing, trying to identify what next steps they wanted to take. I heard from so many teachers through the years, that they had department-wide or school-wide discussions over the report when it came out. That was really a surprise to me.

Then we started getting requests to translate it into foreign languages. We soon lost track of the number of different languages it got translated into. We are hearing reports, particularly in Scandinavia, was one pocket that really embraced it and was discussing it very far and wide. I was invited to Latin America after the report came out, to a Buenos Aires conference with delegates of all the school superintendents and educational policy-makers of the Latin American countries. So, we know it had an impact. We don't know how big an impact it was or where the impact was best felt because it was  beyond our control.  MacArthur put the report out in the public domain and people were translating themselves and studying it themselves. So, there is no way to estimate the scale of where it traveled.

The media literacy movement embraced the report  in a very serious and thoughtful way. There was some unfortunate divide. Some people didn't understand why we were not sticking with the traditional framework media literacy had developed through the years. We challenged them in some ways that we thought were productive. We saw the existing media literacy work as  part of a larger framework we were describing, and didn't feel the need to reinvent the wheel or to reproduce what was already out there, but instead, to  direct people to read that existing material. Some connected learning people probably did not appreciate fully the work that has already gone on in terms of the media literacy movement: the recruitment of teachers, the building up of the vocabulary, and so forth. I tried in my own work to bridge that divide and to be someone who had a toe in both of those camps and saw the potential of us working together to achieve a more literate culture in all senses of the word.

Tessa Jolls: You have really lived with those words, Henry. I know from my perspective, you cited the Center for Media Literacy’s framework called the attention to the fact that it was geared toward more of a passive kind of questioning in terms of media being developed by someone else. I think that your report had a huge impact. I know it did on our organization because we subsequently used your research and then developed a process of inquiry for producers of media so that it can be taken a questioning approach from an active standpoint. So, I think the research was very timely and very informative. 

Henry Jenkins: Yes, you  did an excellent job of revisiting that and responding to that critique in a very constructive and generative way. I appreciate it, that the critique got taken in the spirit in which it was meant. 

 The work that we did for the white paper led directly to the work we did with Ricardo Pitts Wiley, Wyn Kelly, Katie Clinton and others on the Moby-Dick project, which became the book, Reading in a Participatory Culture.  Erin Reilly took over the leadership of Project New Media Literacies from Margaret Weigel as we moved towards a fuller application of the ideas in the white paper, and we ended up, among other things, developing a professional development program for teachers associated with the Los Angeles Unified School District, helping them apply participatory learning practices into their classrooms. The conversations I was having with danah boyd and Mimi Ito were commemorated in the book, Participatory Culture in a Network Era, which is a book-long conversation about our intersecting research through the Digital Media and Learning initiative.

I continued to work with the MacArthur Foundation, moving gradually from work on new media literacies (with Erin Reilly) to work (with Sangita Shresthova) on civic media, civic engagement, the political lives of young people, first through the Youth in Participatory Politics Research Network.  Our work in that phase culminated with By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activists. More recently, our Civic Imagination Project is part of the civic media grant making that MacArthur is doing. So participatory culture has continued to drive a lot of the research that I've done.  It doesn't shape everything that I do. I've done work on comics and some other things that are largely unrelated to that strand, although you can always see the connections. But that strand on participatory culture runs from Textual Poachers atthe beginning of my career down to our current projects on Popular Culture and the Civic imagination and onward into the future. 

In the final section, Tessa Jolls and Henry Jenkins reflect back on the report today and what we know now that we did not know when the report was first written.