Jenkins et al. "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture"

Henry Jenkins et al. in “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21^st Century” argue that the emergence of new skills created by a participatory culture should begin to reflect in the pedagogies of teachers and the goals of education. With this new culture comes problems—they also focus on the participation gap (unequal access), the transparency problem (do youth reflect on their own practices), and the ethics challenge (preparing youth to be community members).

Because of the new communication technologies that children are growing up with, Jenkins et al. suggest taking an ecological approach to see how the technologies work together, how they connect cultures and communities, and how they encourage certain activities. What this means for education, then, is that it needs to rethink its static, conservative approach and perhaps begin to incorporate the experimental learning that children (and adults, although that is not the focus of this paper) are doing on their own time. Jenkins et al. seem to be entering the conversation by disagreeing with reports from the Kaiser Family Foundation that focus on the negatives of “screen time.” They do not dismiss these concerns, but they instead explain they will be focusing on the skills and knowledge that are developing from this “screen time.”

Rethinking literacy does not mean a complete overhaul of previous notions—Jenkins et al. explain that students must be able to read and write to be part of the participatory culture. Instead of replacing these skills, students must expand them. They also explain that these new literacies are social skills. These skills include play, simulation, performance, appropriation, multi-tasking, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation, networking, and negotiation. For each of these skills, Jenkins et al. describe how they define the skill, give examples of the skill in practice, include relevant research or scholars who discuss the skill and the practices that accompany it, and finally offer several discipline-specific suggestions on how to incorporate activities into the classroom (what seems to be the K-12 classroom.) 

Jenkins et al. offer three calls-to-action. They argue that schools do not need to make more room in the curriculum for these new skills, but rather need to reshape the current curriculum to include active application of these new skills and knowledge-making. They acknowledge that more research does need to be done in order to make these skills more effective and personalized for each discipline. After school programs are also important, not as an add-on to school, but as a place for both students and teachers to examine and produce media. Lastly, parents are targeted as media literacy sponsors. They argue that parents should not try to prevent their children from use of media; rather, parents should be helping their children develop these skills. Currently there seems to be a large gap in the literature on how parents can approach this responsibility.