Designing For Participation

Written by Rebecca Itow
September 05, 2011

How do we engage students in meaningful ways with the curriculum and content prescribed by the powers that be, relay life lessons, and effectively prepare students for the state assessments? This is a question that has long troubled teachers, administrators, and just about everyone involved in education. Is there a way to adequately prepare students so they perform at the necessary levels to satisfy state and federal goals, while teaching effectively? The answer is yes, and one avenue to achieving this goal lies in an education framework we call Designing For Participation (DFP).

Through years of work with classroom teachers and students, Indiana University researchers, and graduate students, a kind of framework has been developed to engage students in active participation with content. We treat academic concepts (e.g. character analysis and the idea of literacy) as “tools” that students can use to help them succeed in their academic, professional, and personal lives. However, before students can use the tool, they must first pick it up and explore it, try it out, and use it in some familiar settings.

We have developed several modules based on a curriculum framework that are centered on using 21st Century and traditional resources to engage students and teach the skills outline int he Common Core Standards. Our goal is to share these modules with other teachers and learn about their experiences with the modules. These are meant to be used, altered, and refined based on the student population and as technology and society grow and change.

We hope you will read more about our work, explore these modules, and engage in a meaningful discussion about your experiences with the modules. If you alter a module significantly, we also encourage you to create a resource about that experience so others may learn from you as well.

Literacy in Our Lives: Expanding the Definition of “Literacy”

In this module, students create a short video clip in which they introduce themselves (individually, or as a class) to a collaborating group of students in the network by sharing their literacy identities and practices. The videos provide a way for students to get to know one another through their literacy lives, and to analyze the literacy identities and practices of themselves and the group as a whole. By broadening the students’ definitions of literacy and texts, they will be more inclined to discover the multiple identities they have as readers and writers, understand that “texts” can include a wide range of print and media, gather that there are different ways we approach the reading of texts, realize that the resources they bring as readers and writers contributes to the collective knowledge of the class, and recognize that the strategies they use to read and write texts outside of school may also be useful in school.

Click on the links below to view the module itself, as well as other teachers’ experiences with and the incarnations of this module.

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Networked Peer Review (NPR)

Networked Peer Review uses social media-type forums such as blogs, wikis, or discussion forums as a place for students to review and reflect upon their writing. It is typically used for both less formal networked writing and more formal writing (like structured essays). In addition to increasing writing fluency, grammar, and mechanics, students engage in critical analysis of their own and each other’s writing, which helps them develop the skills to write and revise analytically and critically. It also helps students identify and develop the strategies they need to successfully engage in the writing process in this activity and beyond the classroom walls. Further, students learn to use and communicate productively, safely and effectively within a social networking media.

The Modules

In order to try out our ideas in the classroom, we have developed curriculum units we call modules that use the DFP guiding principles, and have had great success. In every module, three specific practices that many ELA teachers find useful are:

context x content reflections
Networked Peer Review
and grading of artifacts via reflections.

You can read more about what these practices are and how we used them in the following pages.

Each module features a primary focus on a Common Core Standards and at least one secondary focus on another Common Core Standard, ensuring that the curriculum is not only engaging, but aligned to state guidelines. Additionally, we have included activities that involve both traditional and 21st Century tools and resources. This helps engage students in technology they may find attractive, teach students to use the technology that surrounds them in useful and effective ways, and draws a link between the traditional and the new. Most modules begin with 21st Century tools and end in more traditional assessments in order to more clearly demonstrate to students the relevance of these traditional assessments and the ways in which they can use technology to enhance learning.

At present, the following modules are being implemented:

Literacy In Our Lives: Expanding the Definition of “Literacy”

The Consequences of Ignorance: Analyzing Character Action in Contexts

To become highly literate, students first need meaningful opportunities to test out seemingly abstract concepts like character analysis and begin using them. That initial use provides a context in which they discuss and learn what it means to use the concept appropriately in different circumstances. This module consists of several activities – some of which were obtained as open educational resources (OERs) – that foster this initial use and gradually leads to students’ independent use of character analysis as a tool for exploring and understanding literature. The activities – including whole class discussion, Literary Characters on Trial, a Multi-Textual Digital Poster, a formal essay, and informal and formal reflections embedded within each activity – all focus on characters’ actions and motivations within The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, and how those actions and motivations reveal themes of ignorance and wisdom.

Empathy and Elaboration: Using 21st Century Tools to Enhance Creative Writing

This module focuses on appropriation and remixing – drawing tools and ideas from a text and “remixing” the stories in a new way. In this case, students explore and take on the personality traits of a character in Homer’s The Odyssey and, after developing sufficient understanding of and empathy for that character, extend their story in the medium of a fanfiction piece. In addition to students practicing skills related to character analysis, plot development, and creative writing, they also learn to use social networking sites productively and safely, as well as to publish their story to a closed site on the web.

Define Fanfiction: The encyclopedic ambitions of transmedia texts often results in what might be seen as gaps or excesses in the unfolding of the story: that is, they introduce potential plots which can not be fully told or extra details which hint at more than can be revealed. Readers, thus, have a strong incentive to continue to elaborate on these story elements, working them over through their speculations, until they take on a life of their own. Fan fiction can be seen as an unauthorized expansion of these media franchises into new directions which reflect the reader’s desire to “fill in the gaps” they have discovered in the commercially produced material (Henry Jenkins).

The Method Behind The Madness

In each implementation of a module, we have worked to identify what works and what does not, and have refined the modules and the principles that guide our work. The outcome has been the development of five guiding principles that frame the development of our modules:

1. Reframe Knowledge. This means transform domain knowledge into tools used in contexts in order to create a context in which the other principles can be implemented. We assembled modules from complementary open education resources (OER) to help designers and educators determine which OERs provide best contexts for fostering participation in CCSs. In addition to being widely available and “user-friendly” so designers could focus on the work rather than learning a new technology, these OERs engaged students with the targeted learning goal in different ways and to varying degrees of complexity. This served to keep the content challenging and interesting for students, as well as provide teachers with multiple demonstrations of students’ knowledge and understanding of the concepts. Further, designers and teachers could use the type and order in which the OERs are presented in the module to design their next unit.

2. Scaffold Participation. This means embed features to motivate and foster discourse about using tools, in order to prompt learners to pick up tools initially and then practice using them appropriately. In our OER module, we embed informal reflections within modules to foster reflection on CCS practices in OER contexts. Within each module, we added prompts which were intended to get students to initially enlist the disciplinary tools that represented the common core standard. These prompts were used to foster discourse in which the disciplinary tools were at least used forthe first time, with little attention to whether or not students were using them appropriately. In addition to supporting student learning, the discourse that emerged around these prompts was expected to help the teachers learn about students’ experiences with both the targeted tools and the curricular context.

3. Assess Reflections. This means assess student reflections on artifacts and comments (but not comments or artifacts) in order to keep learner agency and minimize unsustainable teacher intervention for individual guidance. In our OER module, we had students reflect on their artifacts as evidence of consequential, critical, and collaborative engagement. These reflections demonstrated engaged participation in disciplinary knowledge practices on the part of the student, allowing the teacher opportunities to assess students’ conceptual understanding of domain knowledge practice, and the degree to which students engaged successfully in disciplinary knowledge practices. In reflecting upon consequential engagement, students discussed the ways in which the context itself affected the learning of the concept.
Reflection upon critical engagement discussed the tools, and asked students to ponder how a context could be structured differently in order to make learning to use the tool more effective. In asking this, students must articulate their knowledge of the tool, as well as their understanding of how that tool works in different contexts. They demonstrate here that they not only understand what the tool is, but how to apply it in different contexts. Finally, reflection upon collaborative engagement examines how discourse with and the act of participating in that discourse affected their understanding of and ability to use and apply the tool.

4. Re-mediate Accountability. This means treat conventional assessments and tests as specific knowledge practice in order to obtain useful formative and summative evidence without undermining participation. Each module features low stakes curriculum-oriented assessments of targeted ELA concepts that teachers could use to assess students’ understanding of targeted course concepts. In this way, teachers could measure the specific knowledge needed to engage in the material (did the students read the chapter?) and assess their level of engagement and understanding of the material and concepts (“What are some reasons that using the trial might not be the best context for learning character analysis? Is there a better context? Why would that context be better in general or better for these characters?”)

Each module also includes no-staks standards-oriented testlets using released multiple choice items aligned to targeted standards. This very specifically tests the module’s impact on CCS achievement, and allows for measurement of success for the teacher, designer, and policy makers. These testlets target the standard, but are not related to the context (Romeo and Juliet) in any way. This measures the skills themselves, testing whether the student is able to transfer their knowledge of a particular tool or concept to another context, or if their knowledge is limited to the context in which the concepts were presented.

5. Iteratively Refine. This means iteratively align course features to foster more engaged participation in order to continually increase participation, understanding, and achievement. In each module, we align activities to artifacts, then align artifacts to reflections, then align reflections to assessments. This leads to increased impact on discourse, understanding, and achievement as the module is refined. It is our goal that educators who engage with already created modules will discuss their experiences and offer insights to assist in the refinement process. We want to create a community …

Further, the continued reflection upon practice and refinement of the module increases and ensures the usefulness of specific DFP ELA features to other designers and educators. Without constant feedback and refinement, curriculum can become irrelevant and ineffective due to advances in technology, changes in culture, and the resources and abilities of the teacher and students. Another goal as the community of discussion around the DFP modules grows, is that educators and designers will consider this feedback when designing new curriculum.