An Overview of TEAM
BY LIZ PARROTT RADZICKI
TEAM was established to explore the question: What could arts integration look like in
the 21st century?
Digital media in arts-integration settings is not new. Filmmaking, photography,
graphic design—students have been learning through these art forms for years, but
over the last decade, new media has exponentially increased accessibility, connectivity, and shareability. (I remember having to make enough DVD copies for all the kids
and their parents in one of my residencies. Now I just post everything to Vimeo with a
password-protected link. Five minutes versus six hours.) Those elements are not simply
new media features in the 21st century, they have fundamentally redefined what media
is, who can use it, and what they can do with it. Advances in technology have prompted
a revolutionary shift in the type of work media artists are creating and the kind of big
ideas they are wrestling with. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, SoundCloud:
these words didn’t even exist 10 years ago, and now they are a crucial part of seeing,
making, and sharing art. Artists have gone beyond making work with digital media; it’s
become such a zeitgeist that artists are even making work about digital media.
Artists are often on the cutting edge of culture,
so it’s not surprising that digital media is consistently embraced in creative communities.
Public schools are another story. Underfunded
and systemically behind, public schools have
been slow to adapt to a changing technological
landscape. Digital media in the 21st century requires access to high-speed internet and up-todate (or at least well-maintained) devices, and
school systems don’t always see those things
as priorities, given all the other mandates. Digital media is still seen as an extra, something
that only rich schools can afford, but isn’t necessary to an equitable education so students at
poor schools don’t get it (I taught at a school
that showed filmstrips in 2004. FILMSTRIPS!!
That’s what we had, so that’s what we used).
Unfortunately, this assumption is incredibly
wrong, criminally wrong. More and more, our
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society is driven by the connectivity that highspeed internet and digital media afford. But it
goes beyond access. What’s needed is a new
definition of literacy, one that includes active
participation and an understanding of how
digital media can be harnessed strategically.
In order to participate in the 21st century—
civically, politically, financially, socially—you
must be able to navigate a digital landscape or
you will be left out and left behind, disengaged
and disenfranchised. To only build these new
literacies in students who go to “rich” schools
contributes to a segregated and unequal future, widening what Henry Jenkins calls “the
participation gap.” Digital-media literacy is
not an extra; these days it is as important to
success in life as reading and math.
In an effort to catch up, schools often
purchase trendy new equipment (SMART
boards in every classroom! Laser discs will fix
everything!), then give no training, context,
or support to teachers, much less explain
how to build learning experiences around
it. I can’t tell you how many schools I’ve
worked in that have closets full of some bygone equipment, collecting dust, unopened
instruction manuals littering the floor. The
focus is on the technology, the tool, rather
than on how to use it. This would be like improving writing skills by giving kids better
pencils. As Jenkins (2009) puts it, “A focus
on expanding access to new technologies
carries us only so far if we do not also foster
the skills and cultural knowledge necessary
to deploy those tools toward our own ends.”
There is a telling analogy that gets at the
heart of the challenge of integration: Without understanding the potential, one could
simply see the arts or media as something
that can “pretty up” the learning, to borrow
a phrase from CCAP teaching artist Eden
ÜnlÜata. Take your math lesson and add art
to it, and you’ve got kids drawing pretty triangles. Add media to it, and you’ve got kids
playing video games where an animated
penguin jumps on an iceberg if you answer
a multiplication problem correctly (I call
these “worksheets that plug into the wall”).
That might make activities more engaging,
but it’s not really integration; according to
Reuben Puentedura’s SAMR model (Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, Redefinition), it’s substitution. It doesn’t change
the shape or depth of learning, it just changes the writing surface.
In the early days of TEAM, as I was researching best practices in media integration,
I found a lot of substitution. In a district-wide
survey asking principals how media was being integrated at their schools, they proudly
stated that their students were using computers to take high-stakes tests. Other players are a little farther along the continuum,
into augmentation. Companies like Pearson
provide digital versions of textbooks with
interactive features such as embedded videos
and mini-quizzes. The problem with these
materials is that in order to be truly effective,
they require a 1-to-1 solution, which is only
feasible for a small portion of schools.
This kind of integration, which focuses more on technology (tool), is inherently
flawed and way behind the times. This is
a 1.0 view of media, where a professional
media producer creates something that is
broadcast out to consumers, and those two
groups of people are separated by definition.
Technology might make a worksheet more
engaging, or a quiz easier to grade, or help
a kid learn how to use a mouse or a touch
screen, but it doesn’t do anything to address
the 3.0 media ecosystem that young people
are actually facing in the world; an ecosystem with little to no distinction between
producers and consumers, where participation is democratized. By and large, schools
are utilizing technology in a way that denies
the reality that young people face in the 21st
century. With TEAM, we had the opportunity to uncover the best practices for how to
change that on a larger scale.
By partnering teachers with artists our
hope was to redefine how media could improve academic learning and prepare young
people more effectively for the world. In
terms of philosophy and structure, TEAM
was built on the success of Project AIM,
CCAP’s flagship arts-integration program.
Project AIM was established in 2002 to
give middle-school teachers and students
across Chicago access to deeper and richer
arts-learning experiences. In Project AIM,
teachers and teaching artists work together
to plan and facilitate projects where students are exploring big ideas and concepts
through the creative process. What emerged
from the work of Project AIM was the importance of the relationships between the
teachers and teaching artists. Teachers are
experts in pedagogy, skills, and academic
content; but so often, they succumb to the
false assumption that they are not creative
because they are not professional artists. In
building these long-lasting relationships,
teachers are able to work closely with professional artists, and together they translate the vocabularies and values between
school and art, finding common ground
on which to build learning experiences:
weaving together arts, academics, and social-emotional growth; diving deep into
the creative process to explore big questions and ideas. What we sought to do with
TEAM was to explore how the main tenets
of Project AIM could be enhanced by the affordances of digital media.
In TEAM, we learned that the relationship between teacher and artist was doubly
important because teachers were stretching beyond themselves in terms of creativity and technology. Teachers weren’t confident technology users and they worried
that “something would go wrong” and they
wouldn’t know how to fix it. Again, teachers
were focusing on the technology tools, rather than on opportunities for students to use
technology. “How will my students be able to
use iMovie—I don’t know how to use iMovie.
What if I can’t help them?” The artists helped
teachers feel supported in the instance of a
tech meltdown—an expert who could swoop
in and troubleshoot when software got stuck.
But more than that, the artists were able to
model in real time that tech meltdowns do
happen, and the ability to play with a tool
to figure out what went wrong and how to
move past it is a far more important skill
than “How to Use iMovie.” (There are plenty of iMovie tutorials that walk you step-bystep how to do almost anything. Also, so you
learn iMovie—it will look different in five
years, if it even still exists. What will you do
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then?) We found that students are far more
comfortable doing this than their teachers
are. Once teachers began to trust the artists
and trust their students, they began to trust
themselves that they could continue to incorporate media into their classrooms without
fear of technology.
In many ways, young people are already
media experts. In a 2011 study, findings
showed that young people of color spend
an average of 13 hours engaged with media
every day (Rideout, Lauricella & Wartella).
Clearly access isn’t an issue. But what kind
of media and what kind of engagement? For
many young people, “media engagement”
means watching television or playing video
games: consuming media that someone else
produced.
But more and more, young people are
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taking advantage of the 3.0 capabilities of
the media in their world. They’re making Minecraft videos and posting them to YouTube
and Facebook. They’re writing game reviews
and mixing their own beats. They’re remixing
and retweeting. They’re liking and sharing.
They’re voting and signing. They’re posting
and protesting. They’re participating.
What’s revolutionary is that it’s impossible to do just one of these things at a time
these days. Everything is so enmeshed and
entangled that media users fluidly move between multiple modes of engagement within a single action, often without consciously
changing courses. Navigating this transmedia
landscape is a new form of literacy, one that
we’re still struggling to understand as a society, much less master. How do we support
teachers in incorporating this new brand of
literacy into their classrooms, to intentionally design learning experiences that take
advantage of this new media to increase rigor
and relevance?
The answer, surprisingly, is the Common
Core State Standards.
When we categorize the kinds of things
one does with digital media, three main
strands emerge:
• Consume: watching, reading, listening,
subscribing, playing;
• Create: filming, designing, writing, photographing, editing, mixing, recording;
• Connect: posting, sharing, liking, tweeting, commenting, replying.
Again, there are many areas of overlap
among these three categories, but this sorting is helpful when thinking about how digital media can be defined and integrated into
academic settings, especially as we consider
the Common Core’s definition of literacy
strands (reading, writing, speaking and listening), where we start to see that they require the same skill sets.
With a 21st century approach, we must
expand the definition of text to encompass all
media forms, including pop culture and mass
media. These critical-thinking skills that
teachers work to develop in their students in
regards to written text can translate easily to
media texts such as video, images, and music.
In fact, students who struggle with decoding
are often left out of high-level conversations
about literary texts, but when asked to interpret song lyrics or analyze a Nike commercial,
these same students are engaged, informed,
and insightful. The same goes for writing.
Students who balk at the length of a research
paper assignment can wax poetic through the
lens of a video camera.
Critical Consumers
Too often, teachers ban pop culture from
their classrooms, dismissing it as a low form
of culture and a waste of time. It’s not unusual for teachers to admonish their students by
saying, “Why do you watch that crap?! It rots
your brain!” In doing that, they build a wall
between in-school and out-of-school, missing
out on an opportunity to create a more stu-
dent-centered, interest-driven classroom.
Have you ever sat down with a kid who’s a
fan of a movie or a TV show? They know that
world inside and out, they spend time talking
with their friends about the characters’ decisions and relationships, they reenact scenes,
they ask questions, they try to stump other
fans, they seek out more information from
multiple sources, they predict, they make inferences. In other words, they’re doing what
we say good readers do. They’re nailing the
Common Core standards for reading complex
text. And most kids can do this—not just the
“good students,” or the strong readers. When
students can access text—when they’re not
tripped up by problems decoding or trudging
through dense prose—their ability to analyze and synthesize is improved. When they
care about the text, when there’s familiarity
and purpose, students are incredible critical
thinkers. So why do we only count it as reading if they’re looking at words written on a
paper, especially since the vast majority of
what young people “read” are non-text media images and messages? Why would we not
help our students unpack the media messages they’re receiving in their real lives (not just
the short passages in their standardized tests
and de-contextualized textbooks)?
Pop culture is a complex product of our
own society. In using pop culture as text in a
classroom, educators can make connections
to big ideas like power, conflict, hegemony,
wealth, and justice. Giving students the
tools and scaffolding to critically analyze
the pop culture they consume, builds habits of mind that they take with them out
in the world. Suddenly the five hours a day
our students spend watching TV becomes
five hours a day they spend engaged in critical literacy. Sure, they may not be reading
Shakespeare, but wasn’t Lady MacBeth the
original Real Housewife?
Creators and Connectors
When we surveyed CPS Tech Magnet schools,
we found that most teachers were comfortable bringing media into their classrooms.
What we didn’t find, however, were students
using the technology to create works of their
own. This is consistent with the traditional
banking system of education, where students are the receptacles of information, and
a traditional 1.0 broadcast view of media. We
rarely found opportunities for students to
publish and distribute their work to a wider
audience. But to teach “media literacy” without incorporating these pieces is to perpetuate an outdated version that will not prepare
young people to participate in their world;
one could argue that it wouldn’t even count
as literacy.
One of the main affordances of digital
media is the ease with which young people
can create and distribute new work in order to
contribute to a conversation beyond their immediate circle. But just because young people
can do this, and have the access to do this,
doesn’t mean they know how to do this effectively. In order to use these media creation
and sharing tools effectively, students must
master skills that are inherent to traditional
writing and the Common Core’s speaking
and listening standards: craft an argument,
use evidence to support claims, write with
an audience and purpose in mind. These skills
are just as important whether you’re making
a podcast, responding critically to a post on
Facebook, or writing a research paper. In fact,
these skills are more important with social
media, since their work and thinking will be
public and open to criticism.
We see young people falter in these
realms constantly: getting brainwashed by
advertising, oversharing on Facebook, posting inappropriate videos on YouTube, doing
basically anything on SnapChat. But because
we have built boundaries between school and
social media, we’ve rendered ourselves useless in helping our students make better media choices. If we can break down those barriers, our classrooms can become safe spaces
for young people to explore social media as
a means of amplification, empowerment,
and impact. Educators can serve as mentors
for using these tools in positive ways, rather
than relegating social media to the domain of
the cyberbullies, sexters, and haters. We can
guide our students to tap into the rich diversity of resources in the world beyond school.
We can coach them to talk back to the media,
and to do so in such a way that makes a difference. This is how we define media literacy:
the ability to effectively and critically participate in the world.
Biography
Liz Parrott Radzicki is a Chicago-based educator with over 10 years of experience working with young people. With a practice and
philosophy anchored in arts integration, Liz
has been a teaching artist, classroom teacher,
museum educator, program manager, and instructional coach in schools and communities
in Providence, RI; Austin, TX; and all over the
city of Chicago. Before working with Convergence Academies, Liz spearheaded TEAM:
Transforming Education through the Arts
and Media, which paired Columbia College
professors with middle school Chicago Public Schools teachers to develop units of study
that weave together academics, art, technology, and media literacy. Liz has presented
her work at conferences and professional developments all over the city, focusing on the
Convergence model of 21st-century literacies
and the impact that media integration has on
student learning. Liz has a B.A. in Education
from Brown University and a Masters in Arts
Management from Columbia College Chicago,
with a focus in Arts in Youth and Community
Development.
References
Jenkins, H. (2009). Confronting the challenges
of participatory culture: Media education
for the 21st century. Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press.
Puentedura, R. R. (2009). SAMR: A contextualized introduction.
Rideout, V., Lauricella, A., & Wartella, E.
(2011). Children, media, and race: Media
use among White, Black, Hispanic, and
Asian American children. Evanston, IL:
Center on Media and Human Development, School of Communication, Northwestern University.
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