Annotation challenge, first hour winners. pic.twitter.com/XlQ5pFjHpL
— Sharon Murchie (@smurchies) April 11, 2016
*let’s pretend this is an annotated bibliography for the sake of the assignment
- Hickey, D. T., McWilliams, J., & Honeyford, M. A. (2011). Reading Moby-Dick in a Participatory Culture: Organizing Assessment for Engagement in a New Media Era. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 45(2), 247–263.
“New media literacies distinguishes between “technical stuff” (new ways of communicating via increased interactivity, multimodality, and accessibility of communication) and “ethos stuff ” (the spirit of collaboration, contribution to community, and negotiation of and interaction with community norms)” (Lankshear and Knobel 2007).
I was introduced to this Hickey et al. study as I was reading through Greenhow’s “Youth, Learning, and Social Media” (2011). Greenhow stated in her conclusion,
“Toward advancing a solution, Dan Hickey, Jenna McWilliams, and Michelle Honeyford, in their article “Reading Moby-Dick in a Participatory Culture: Organizing Assessment for Engagement in a New Media Era,” identify discrepancies between traditional instructional practices that emphasize individual mastery of abstract concepts and skills, and new media literacy practices that rely upon collaborative, social, and context-specific activity.”
I was excited and intrigued. The ideas of collaborative assessment, and also of meaningful integration of media practices with traditional literature in a traditional classroom could, literally, change everything for 9-12 ELA. And for a classroom to be using a (in my incredibly biased opinion) moldy old classic like Moby Dick that has (again, in my incredibly biased opinion) zero relevance to high school students is a phenomenon worth reading about. How did they build assessments that involved student collaboration without students and parents railing against the unfairness of group work, group assessment, and subjective grading? How did they involve social media and social practices and media literacy throughout the Moby Dick unit in ways that truly engaged students and engendered learning beyond the “let’s play with technology and cool tools” ways? How did they ensure that students were consistently functioning in the application, analysis, and synthesis levels of thought? I couldn’t wait to read about how the researchers remixed the classroom and the teaching strategies and truly connected with the students, the literature, and social media beyond the “cool tools” aspect in powerful and life-changing ways.
Well, as my buildup clearly indicates for those of you who have studied foreshadowing and irony…none of the above actually happened. The school, first of all, was not a traditional k-12 but rather some sort of charter school or alternate remedial high school. The teacher only had 15 students in her class, and the school closed “because of funding issues” after the first year of the study. The use of Moby Dick was not inspired by an attempt to truly engage students but rather because “given its reputation as a boring and difficult book…it proved ideal for illustrating how new media practices could be used to engage students through classic texts and to extend traditional literary analysis to encompass new media literacy practices as well.” In essence, they purposely used a difficult book to prove a point, rather than using a text that could and would fundamentally impact students in a meaningful and positive way. I can’t even begin to unpack the ethical discomfort I have at this point.
But that aside, this article had literally nothing to do with new media literacy practices. The study involved an entire curriculum handbook for teachers that focused on “four units: Appropriation and Remixing, Motives for Reading, Negotiating Cultural Spaces, and Continuities and Silences.” In this specific article, the Appropriation and Remixing unit was used. The authors claim “the Appropriation and Remixing unit introduced traditional literacy practices such as analyses of genre and audience, “hybrid” practices such as distinguishing between creative expression and plagiarism, and new media practices of appropriation and remixing (sampling and combining media to create new expressions) and transmedia navigation (following the flow of stories across multiple media modalities).” The lesson that was used for the study was an “Annotation and Ornamentation (A&O) lesson [that] taught close reading by inviting students to annotate (provide definitions of words, explanations, and historical facts) and ornament (add illustrations, extensions, and personal connections to the text) printed manuscript-formatted pages of the text.” In laymen’s terms, students read a book and annotated it, and then discussed their annotations. The study claimed that this was groundbreaking because it “emphasized literary analysis as a social, not an individual, activity by leveraging and making visible to others the unique expertise each student brought to annotating Moby-Dick.” And the groundbreaking assessment practices? Discussion prompts for formative assessment, short answer test questions on the unit exam, and cherry-picked questions from the state standardized assessment tests that assessed the standards taught in the unit on the final exam.
In essence, this article, although claiming to be about new media literacies, was really just about teaching classic literature using constructivist methods. Students were building their own knowledge through reflection on the text and on the use of annotation and ornamentation. They were discussing their texts (annotations) and the classic text together, and interacting with each other and with the teacher in order to make meaning. They were using paper and pencil methods to annotate and reflect, and face-to-face discussions to make meaning collaboratively, and for formative assessment. This article should have been titled, “using written and oral student reflection to build meaning and understanding of classic literature in small group, face-to-face settings.” Although the four units mentioned in the curriculum handbook would be worth perusing for ideas and inspiration, the only thing this specific article inspired was frustration. Repackaging student reflection and constructivist teaching and learning as “participatory culture” and “new media literacy”is ridiculous. Perhaps I should write an article entitled “Socratic Seminars as New Media Literacy in a Participatory Culture.” Stay tuned for ground-breaking educational ideas, circa 5th century BCE.
- Greenhow, C. (2011). Youth, learning and social media. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 45(2),139-146.
- Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2007). Researching new literacies: Web 2.0 practices and insider perspectives. E-Learning, 4(3), 224-240.