In a traditional English class, a teacher might assign Herman Melville’s famous novel Moby Dick
in small chunks. Students might complete their reading (or not),
discuss major themes and perhaps write an essay at the end of the unit.
But if a student never gets past the first few pages, the rest of that
unit is lost.
It’s become a common refrain that traditional education isn’t serving
a generation of students whose lives outside of school are completely
disconnected from what happens inside. But there are plenty of teachers
working hard to make reading material relevant to students, including a
team of researchers from University of Southern California Annenberg’s Innovation Lab that includes Henry Jenkins and Erin Reilly. They’ve created a model of what they call participatory learning
that engages students with materials on a personal level, often by
incorporating different types of media into the classroom and offering
varying points of entry to a text. Most recently, the team has put
together a teacher’s strategy guide, Reading in a Participatory Culture: Remixing Moby-Dick in the English, Classroom and an interactive digital book, Flows of Reading, to provide models of their approach.
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