Media Education for the 21st Century

In Henry Jenkins's article Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, Jenkins focused on what new media literacies teachers can bring into the classroom. These new media literacies are a set of cultural competencies and social skills that young people need in the new media landscape. This set of skills focus greatly on social involvement and working as a collaboration and network. These skills build upon the traditional skills which are literacy, research, technical, and critical analysis skills.

The new literacy skills allow the student to create as well as learn.

Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving
Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes
Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.
Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information
Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting
multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.

The fact that all of these literacies now include more social development, gives more options for students who may not be interested in art to contribute their ideas and feel that their contributions make a difference. This all plays into our society's participatory culture.

The new literacy that I found most interesting was the idea of play. In my other class, Theory and Practice, we recently looked in depth into the idea of play. Not only does it engage the students in a different way, it is also a way for them to engage in a project in different ways, much like the way each individuals mind works.

At a young age, children are being bombarded with visual and media information that teach them about the world around them. As they grow older, the focus of education suddenly shifts and textbooks and literature are now the focus. For many students the switch from these ways of acquiring knowledge is a struggle. As teachers I feel it is necessary to cater to many different styles of learning.