Reinventing ELA for the Digital Age

Micka, Tracy

INFO 266, Fall 2016

Jenkins, H., & Kelley, W. (2013). Reading in a participatory culture: Remixing Moby-Dick in the English classroom. [Kindle version]. Retrieved from amazon.com.

Summary:

Imagine teaching a high school unit on the notoriously long and plodding Moby-Dick and having the students love every minute of it. Daring? Yes. Easy and without hiccups, no. This book chronicles the experience. Employing multimedia mashups, comic strips, staged and recorded plays, music videos, social media, fan fiction, and other ‘new media’, teachers set out to use different expressive practices to enable students to engage with the text in a deep and personally meaningful way. It wasn’t about entertaining the students or making a boring book more palatable, but rather about developing a community of readers and giving students a chance to express their ideas across a range of participatory media platforms and practices.

My comments:

At first blush, it’s easy to miss what this book has to do with collection development in school libraries. This happens when you have a limited view of what a library collection is and does. When you view a library’s collection as x number of books and educational resources, then you are seeing the collection largely as “stuff”; if, however, you are able to envision the collection as a platform for collaboration, or a body of resources that goes beyond “stuff” to include programming, connection-development, and people; as a place that exists both physically and virtually according to a set of norms and practices that emphasize and enable collaboration, participation, and knowledge-sharing, then you can understand that this book has everything to do with collection development in school libraries. With this premise, allow me to share some of the exciting theories and conclusions offered by this book.

This book is the result of the burning desire to reinvent the ELA classroom for the digital age. We are now well into an era that could be characterized as the fall of the ‘expert’. For example, the role of teacher is morphing from the ‘sage on the stage’ to the ‘guide on the side’- since information has become ubiquitous with the internet, teachers (experts) are no longer the gatekeepers to content (information), and instead, use their skills to enable students to productively, ethically, and creatively act upon a distributed network of expertise in a way that is meaningful for both the student and the global community to which the s/he is inextricably linked. This concept has huge ramifications for how schools and classrooms (and, indeed, libraries) work. Reinventing the ELA classroom, then, involves moving the knowledge culture toward the idea that, “no one knows everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity” Levy’s Collective Intelligence (as cited in Jenkins & Kelley, 2013, Loc 3609). In this paradigm, learning is not an individual, solitary pursuit- locating and using information is as important as knowing how to collaborate with others and generate new information from that process. In this context, it becomes clear that ELA is as much about writing as it is about reading; about consuming information, yes, but also creating it; about traditional literacy, but, crucially, also about the new media literacies. A library’s collection can either hamper this ‘new’ kind of learning, or propel it forward.

This is not a book aimed at librarians, per se. It is a book for educators though. And to the extent that a librarian resonates with the role of educator, it is a book for them. Digital curation, issues of copyright, reading motivation, and intellectual freedom are all explored from the lens of What would happen if school work aligned closer to out-of-school / informal learning experiences? This question is of great concern to school librarians who expect to remain useful. Reading in a Participatory Culture is a landmine of ideas, both disruptive and comforting, that will help librarians understand the larger forces at play with regard to transliteracy, and to integrate the values and logic of participatory culture into their collection.