I first read Barr and Tagg's article, "From Teaching to Learning," which advocates a paradigm shift from focusing on instruction to a focus on learning. Barr and Tagg suggest that higher education focuses too narrowly on uniform instruction, most specifically in the one teacher-one classroom-3 credit-50 minute lecture system. However, the authors suggest that this model not only doesn't work for all students, it leaves no way to assess whether students are actually getting anything from that instructional model. The authors claim that this paradigm is systemic and influenced by funding practices of universities. Yet they suggest that small changes that put the focus on the intended outcome of education, learning, could have a profound effect of the work being done in higher education. Some changes suggestedinclude room for opportunities for students to be active learners (as opposed to generally passive in the lecture model) and work with their peers. In this model, teachers would not serve simply as experts relaying information, but facilitators of events and opportunities for learning--opportunities they may not even need to be present for. They also claim that learning should not be atomistic, or compartmentalized into discrete parts, but instead, students should be challenged to look at problems and issues holistically, seeing connections between ideas. This approach, they claim, will promote understanding as opposed to memorization soon to be forgotten. Additionally, Barr and Tagg advocate degree conferral not being connected to the number of credits taken, but to demonstrable skills necessary for the field of study. Finally, they believe that outside assessment of student learning beyond internal course grading is necessary to track what learning is taking place. The idea behind these changes is to create a system in which diverse students with diverse learning styles and needs can gain understanding of material in a way that they can not only remember, but use in an authentic way.

 I next turned to Jenkins et al.'s report on the use of participatory culture in education, which seemed to be a way to take up Barr and Tagg's call for learning centered activities that disrupt the teacher lecturing model. The authors advocate the inclusion of participatory cultures within the classroom or educational systems to intervene in three concerns regarding participatory systems: 1) the participation gap 2) the transparency problem 3) the ethics challenge. The first concern focuses on the much talked about digital divide and how some students may not be achieving the skills they need to be successful in our culture without access to digital technology. The second concern focuses on students’ critical awareness of how media systems work and how evaluate information from various sources. The third concern focuses on the training necessary for students to be responsible creators as they actively create works and content as community participants. The report focuses on the development of key skills of literacy in participatory cultures, including play, performance, appropriation, multitasking, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation, networking and negotiation. For each skill, the report explains its importance and offers examples of successful projects which have fostered this skill through the use of digital technologies, or offers digital technologies that could be used to gain this skill.

            As I read Jenkins et al.'s report, I was reminded of the Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice across various media platforms including vlogs, twitter, and tumbler. Apart from enjoying this as a lover of Austen, I was fascinated by the ways the storytelling negotiated conventions of different platforms and encourage transmedia navigation, demonstrated innovative appropriation, and invited participation. Since many of the characters maintained tumbler and twitter accounts, followers could actually interact with the characters in ways not possible through traditional media. I hope to get a chance to teach the Lizzie Bennet Diaries in a course in the future.

Then, I turned to the various literacy statements. What struck me were some common terms, namely holistic and
student-centered, that seemed to line up with the other two readings. However, what also struck me was that many of the websites seemed to privilege the understanding and synthesizing of media content (AT&T, ISTE, ASCD, ACRL), with the “Partnerships for 21^st Century Skills” being one of the few to explicitly include information on the creation of new media content. A point that really struck me from Jenkins et al. is the notion that many students are already creating within new media, so I think it’s important not to ignore that and give students tools to aid in these creations.

Finally, as I read Boyer's Scholarship Reconsidered, I felt like the expanded notion of scholarship he is advocating creates room for the type of learning activities and skill building promoted in the other readings. Boyer promotes resolving the unbalanced relationship between research, teaching and service, by expanding the notion of scholarship from just the scholarship of discovery, and adding notions of the scholarship of integration, the scholarship of application, and the scholarship of teaching. Like Barr & Tagg's point about institutional funding practices often restricting opportunities to focus on learning as opposed to instruction, Boyer notes that the current tenure system privileges research above all else, but an expanded view of scholarship would eliminate the trichotomy of research-teaching-service by integrating the work of scholars instead of categorizing it. This expanded view of scholarship would also reward those who innovatively teach 21st century literacy skills and use participatory cultures in their classrooms. 

 References

Barr, R.B. & Tagg, J. (1995). From teaching to learning-a new paradigm for undergraduate education. Change. Retrieved from http://www.ius.edu/ilte/pdf/barrtagg.pdf

Boyer, E. (1990). Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate. New York, NY: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

Jenkins, H., Clinton, K., Purushotma, R., Robison, A., & Weigel, M. (2006). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: media education for the 21st century. Chicago, IL: The MacArthur Foundation. Retrieved from

http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED536086.pdf