In Practice

The Smart Mobs blog announced that a book chapter by Howard Rheingold titled “Using Participatory Media and Public Voice to Encourage Civic Engagement” was posted online by MIT Press this week. The book, Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth, is alsoavailable online.

One of the most common claims for using digital media in the classroom is that it increases student engagement. That may be true, but engagement alone doesn’t ensure academic traction. Rheingold asks whether kids’ enthusiasm for digital media can be harnessed to increase civic engagement. It’s an attractive idea, and it’s worth exploring. But as I read the chapter I’m not convinced that such an outcome is equally likely for all students.

The chapter examines the possibilities for helping students develop a “public voice” which they can use to speak out on issues they care about. And while Rheingold offers a lot of practical suggestions for doing that, he merely waves in the direction of obstacles to implementation:

It is not easy for many teachers to adopt this perspective and put it into action in the classroom—the political and economic necessity of teaching to the test leaves little room to fit these kinds of skills lessons into mandated and standardized curriculum. “Accountability” and innovation are often locked into a zero-sum game. Lack of resources, training, and technical support offer significant additional obstacles.

I don’t agree that accountability is necessarily an obstacle to innovation, but I do recognize that curricular constraints, lack of resources, and technical support are problematic. Many students have serious academic and personal needs which push media literacy education down on the priority list. Rheingold acknowledges the political nature of these obstacles, saying that, “The struggle for participatory media literacy in schools must be seen in the context of these broader societal conflicts.”

I lose some enthusiasm for the edtech vision when these critical hurdles are set up and then sidestepped because the enterprise becomes a mirage for me with my less affluent, more challenging, students. And that’s where I see participatory media literacy education breaking down as an avenue for populist civic reform. It does not extend to everyone equally because the obstacles for some are all too real, and “the vision” is dimmed in the context of a classroom culture impacted by domestic trauma and neighborhood drama.

Nonetheless, Rheingold offers some concrete classroom exercises for developing public voice with blogs, wikis, and podcasts using annotated links and connective, analytic, and persuasive, writing. He looks, also, at possibilities for engaging students in citizen journalism projects such as news reporting, investigative blogging, hyperlocal journalism, and digital storytelling. These are all worthy ideas that seem do-able with middle school-aged students, and they’re certainly worth looking at. There is a wiki, Participatory Media Literacy, set up as a resource for educators.

Rheingold’s question about whether developing a public voice can lead to more civic participation is critically important, but if we’re going to talk about student voice, we need to be clear about whose voices they are. Identity is inseparable from voice, and the possibilities for privileging some over others is no different in a digital environment than anywhere else. The project will need attention from a broad spectrum of educators working with digital media if the question is to be effectively answered.