Thinking Creatively About the Challenges of Participatory Culture

Considering the surge of youth as online media creators and sharers, Jenkins article makes it clear that educators today have a duty to teach their students in harmony with participatory culture—not at odds with it. Though the statistics can be intimidating, I felt encouraged by the ideas presented in the article about how to embrace the participatory culture of my students and use it as an asset to my teaching and our classroom environment.

The article’s definitions of participatory culture are so fresh and inspiring that I feel that they are suited to become a sort of mantra or credo to our future classrooms if we want to offer our students the best and most relevant knowledge and skills they will need in the 21st century. Take a look at this language:

• “relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement”
• “strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations”
• “members believe their contributions matter”
• “[members] feel some degree of social connection with one another”
• “producing new creative forms”
• “collaborative problem-solving—working together in teams”

These are the exact same attitudes and perspectives I want to promote in my future classroom! I wholeheartedly want my students to support each other’s creations and problem-solve together. I would love it if they felt connected and worked in teams for artistic endeavors. And most of all, I deeply hope my students will believe their contributions matter.

Clearly, these principles specified by the article are pertinent to our future as educators.

Nevertheless, challenges obviously arise in conjunction with the vastness and mutability of a participatory culture. One particular phrase from the article stood out to me as the ultimate challenge facing prospective teachers in this setting:

“a changed attitude toward intellectual property.”

While this is shift in outlook has positive potential, I am aware of the problems it presents. So, although I could spend the rest of my 684 allotted words describing the benefits and opportunities of participatory culture, I will instead devote the remainder of my response on the challenges raised by participatory culture and pose some possible remedies I think fit to countering these difficulties. The primary hazards I anticipate involve (1) an unequal distribution of access to technology in our various students’ residences, and (2) the transformation of plagiarism and regulations as new forms of media permeate the educational realm.

Open me in a new tab--I get bigger!

First, we will have to be mindful of the assigned work we generate for students outside of class. If nothing else, we have to beware of putting some students at a disadvantage if they don’t have the same technological opportunities at home. Instead, we can create and structure learning activities to be done in the classroom as much as possible. I can only imagine the enormous benefit to students by taking our classes to labs available in the school (computer, music, photography, etc.) and teaching them as a class how to apply the concepts of theatre or English in a technological setting.

A memorable example of this surfaced in my grammar education course last semester. We read an article about a teacher who spent a few class periods in computer classrooms with her junior high students to learn the nuts and bolts of Spellcheck. The students were familiarized with word processing and quickly became aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the program. By playing a game to try to “trick the spellchecker,” the Language Arts teacher not only reinforced grammar principles for her students, but also helped them understand that we cannot simply rely on or completely trust the accuracy of technology to do our thinking for us. (Another example of this is when ESL students might try to use Google Translate or a similar program to compose their essays for them.) By adapting some of our traditional English/theatre lessons into a non-traditional classroom setting (like a computer lab), we’re benefiting our students by helping them learn how to be responsible for the work they create.

On that note, the other potential challenge instigated by the rise of participatory culture is the spread and transmutation of plagiarism. In the past, teachers have only had to check written essays for plagiarism (for the most part). Now, in this adapting participatory culture, educators will need to be mindful of the new forms of plagiarism as it might surface in different mediums beyond the written word, such as photographs, images, blogs, videos, message boards, etc.

Honestly, the best way I believe that we can help students understand the parameters of plagiarism and how to properly credit references is to require them to use these current advances of participatory culture in our classrooms and then guide them in their efforts to appropriately cite their sources. We can do this by setting up blogs, message boards, or online communities for our students to regularly contribute to. We can ask them to find mixed media (music, photographs, art, and video) to design a creative project. If we as educators do not stay informed and active in participatory culture, then we are disabling ourselves from being able to empower, inform, and teach these principles of responsibility and creativity to our students.