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Participatory culture is a term coined by media scholar Henry Jenkins to describe a culture where people not only consume, but also produce and share content. In participatory cultures, individuals feel empowered to contribute, collaborate, and create, blurring the traditional lines between audience and creator.

"For the moment, let’s define participatory culture as one:
1.With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement
2.With strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others
3.With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is
passed along to novices
4.Where members believe that their contributions matter
5.Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created)."

"In such a world, many will only dabble, some will dig deeper, and still others will master the skills that are most valued within the community."

"Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from one
of individual expression to community involvement."

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Participatory culture supports collaboration, creativity, media literacy, and civic engagement.

With all this being said, teachers can apply these ideas to the classroom setting in order to teach students how to incorporate their interests into school to find their passions, feel more engaged, and think more critically about the more "relatable" content.

In a world fueled with social media and content creation, we as teachers must adhere to the worldly changes to ensure our students have the best education that prepares them for the world outside, meaning we must incorporate things like this in order to ensure they have a full understanding of creative liberaties and social media, the pros and the cons.

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“While to adults the Internet primarily means the world wide web, for children it means email, chat, games— and here they are already content producers.Too often neglected, except as a source of risk, these communication and entertainment focused activities, by contrast with the information-focused uses at the centre of public and policy agendas, are driving emerging media literacy.Through such uses, children are most engaged— multi-tasking, becoming proficient at navigation and manoeuvre so as to win, judging their participation and that of others, etc.... In terms of personal development, identity, expression and their social
consequences— participation, social capital, civic culture- these are the activities that serve to network today’s
younger generation.”
—Livingstone, 2003, pp.15-16).

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"According to a 2005 study conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life project
(Lenhardt & Madden, 2005), more than one-half of all American teens—and 57 percent of
teens who use the Internet—could be considered media creators. For the purpose of the study,
a media creator is someone who created a blog or webpage, posted original artwork, photogra-
phy, stories or videos online or remixed online content into their own new creations. Most
have done two or more of these activities. One-third of teens share what they create online
with others, 22 percent have their own websites, 19 percent blog, and 19 percent remix online
content."

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Students can not only find creative outlets, but can find their passions through this process, ultimately allowing students to relate more to their learning:

The student could make a podcast project and find a love for public speaking, leading them into a variety of roles in their adult life, such as politics.

One student creates a blog for a novel project and finds love for reporting, leading them into a role of journalism in their adult years.

Another student could fuse literature with music, leading them into a career of music.

While these are just a few examples, we are giving our students a voice to be heard when we implement this culture into our classrooms. Outside of just being relatable, this could be genuinely helpful to their development.

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Some of the qualities needed for this type of culture:

Creativity

Passion

Finding the "gap"- a problem to be solved

Understanding of culture(s)

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"Play"- the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-
solving

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"Play"- the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-
solving

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"Play" can happen in school; little kids get recess, but our students do not have that opportunity. Therefore, our students should have time in class to explore multiple areas of interest and make it with their own hands, giving them more autonomy in how they learn these key standards.

"Through play, children try on roles, experiment with culturally central processes, manipulate core resources, and explore their immediate environments."

Important to considering this "play":

Activity: we must ensure each activity ties into academic subjects through standards (i.e. BEST standards)

Scaffold: This goes hand and hand with the latter, but we are essentially scaffolding instruction for them to work with these different modes of expression, which we must ensure will not only be fun, but make them think more critically and efficiently then they would before without this difference in mode.

Interest: Students MUST have an interest in the scaffold, which introduces student choice. If we have a student interested in soccer, why should he have to write an essay on the argument of AI? We should allow them to create a soccer "highlight reel" which explains the game and ties into the same standards that the essay would with their argument, cohesion of the trailer, and more.

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Simulation-  the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real world

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Simulation-  the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real world

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To create more understanding, we can simulate different types of events in history or background knowledge needed for books in order to give our students context.

One example I have seen of this is through a teacher on TikTok who simulated the draft of the Vietnam War with her students so they understood the emotional values of "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien:

Students grab a sealed envelope when they sat down, and paced her lesson to have them open it. Half were being "drafted", the other half weren't

Half not chosen wrote about their life 5 years after the draft (or what they would imagine their lives being)

Half "drafted" wrote about them not being able to explore their lives due to the war, but what they wanted to do or what they want to do while they are home.

Then, 3 students found out they were injured and would not return to war, and the teacher announced for those to stand up. They had to walk to the front, and write their goodbye letters to family and friends, while the others sat at their desk.

All the while, the teacher had created a video with draft videos, propaganda, and war songs to similate what the tone of that era was.

Through things like this, we can allow our students schema to be unlocked, all while informing them of the entire "landscape" of what they need to know before learning. This allowed the students to be more engaged and thoughtful with the novel, and she reported many of her students used it for the AP exams, receiving an overwhelming amount of 4-5s.

Link to video: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8BtaHHx/

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Performance-  the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of
improvisation and discovery

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Performance-  the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of
improvisation and discovery

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Sometimes, our children have to "perform" something in order to understand it. One common use of this in English class is readers theatre, where the children are acting out the scenes to reinforce their ideas about it, and for them to truly understand the content.

can allow for critical thinking- "us[ing] dramatizations to teach children to reflect more deeply on their experiences of stories" in literature class.

However, we can also "role play" with our students under this lense. For example, as an activating strategy for "Lord of the Flies":

classes split in two, one having a society with rules and order that must be followed and another with no rules and no societal foundation.

Through a game, answer questions to see where their society ends up and how it affects their society (what the society with order looks like at the end, and what the society without it looks like at the end).

After game over, explain how in "Lord of the Flies", they had no order, no function, and no rules of morality to follow, allowing for the desent of humanity (one of the major themes of the novel).

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3 ideas in participatory culture have been described, but there are more to explore, including the following:

Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others towards a common goal

Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources

Transmedia Navigation — the ability to deal with 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 sets of norms

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Affinity spaces- why people learn
more, participate more actively, engage more deeply with popular culture than they do with
the contents of their textbooks.

Utilizes universal opportunities for all of our students to find their footing not only in our class with the culture(s) they have grown up in during this social media age, but also find their passions that will fuel their future learning and aid their success outside of the classroom and transitioning to adult life.

What they do:

offer powerful opportunities for learning because they are sustained by common endeavors that bridge differences

peer-to-peer teaching with each participant constantly motivated to acquire new knowledge or refine their existing skills

allow each participant to feel like an expert while tapping the expertise of others.

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Questions to Ask Yourself, as the Teacher 

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Questions to Ask Yourself, as the Teacher 

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These 3 key questions should drive our instruction and allow us to see if we are engaging in participatory culture efficiently and effectively to ensure the best education for all of our students:

How do we ensure that every child has access to the skills and experiences needed to
become a full participant in the social, cultural, economic, and political future of our society?

How do we ensure that every child has the ability to articulate his or her understanding
of the way that media shapes perceptions of the world

How do we ensure that every child has been socialized into the emerging ethical standards that will shape their practices as media makers and as participants within online communities?

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As cliche as it sounds, it takes a village to raise a child. Therefore, to have our students interact in participatory culture actively and safely, we must employ all of the above facets to build the student into their best version through these processes.

Schools:

What helps students?

the use of educational simulations, alternative and augmented reality games,
webquests, production activities, blogs and wikis, and deliberation exercises.

"We should view its introduction as a paradigm shift, one that, like mul-
ticulturalism or globalization, reshapes how we teach every existing subject. Media change is affecting every aspect of our contemporary experience, and as a consequence, every school discipline needs to take responsibility for helping students to master the skills and knowledge they
need to function in a hypermediated environment."

After school:

"Afterschool programs may introduce core technical
skills that students need to advance as media makers. In these more informal learning contexts,
students may explore rich examples of existing media practice and develop a vocabulary for
critically assessing work in these emerging fields. Students may also have more time to produce
their own media and to reflect on their own production activities"

Media literacy can be used effectively after school in order to know how to correctly engage in this culture. Following details key questions to ask about the web and posts before students engage outside of school:

Who created the message? What creative techniques are used to attract my attention? How may different people understand this message differently than me?What lifestyles, values, and points of view are represented in – or omitted from – this
message? Why is this message being sent out?

School based after school programs/after school programs in general can take the time to teach proper media literacy to create a safe space on the web for everyone, and to inform students about their digital footprint and what is acceptable to post vs. not.

Parents:

Play a key role in ensuring child's safety online and engaing in this culture.

Key quote: "Opportunities and risks go
hand in hand...The more children experience one, the more they also experience the other."

While there are few resources to allow parents to know everything about what their child engages is, it is our role as teachers to give parents that voice.

Ex: Parent opt out forms, letters home when independent reading, sending resources out via email when you find them.

Along with that, parents can play as a key partner in ensuring student's growth with these mediums. Therefore, establishing this relationship early is KEY to success within not only this culture, but in school in general.

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Challenges Ahead within Participatory Culture 

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Challenges Ahead within Participatory Culture 

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Economic status of students/school districts can disrupt this culture in your classroom.

With this being said, we must scaffold those issues. Student does not have a computer to create an infographic? Let them draw it on with blank paper and coloring utensils. Student does not have wifi to look up a song when writing a paper on themes in songs? Print it out for them and have resources for them to continue their project at school during class time. Teacher does not have a laptop cart in the room for them to create visuals? Try to make direramas in class in groups on trips-folds.

Even if technology is an issue due to lack thereof, there are still ways for us to create engaging and introspective content on the lens of participatory culture outside of just the internet. We as teachers must be creative, and allow that same creativity for our students to flow out of them through the opportunities we give them at school. Creativity drives curiousity, and curiosity drives learning. We must afford these opportunties to ALL of our students to be equitable.

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Jenkins, H., Purushotma, R., Clinton, K., Weigel, M., & Robison, A. J. (2009). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8435.001.0001