Cultivating Intellectual Curiosity with Digital and Media Literacy
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By Renee Hobbs, Curriculum Connections--School Library Journal Cultivating Intellectual Curiosity with Digital and Media Literacy I've been thinking a lot about intellectual curiosity these days. It's a habit of mind that is characteristic of the best learners and teachers, and today it seems natural to wonder how the Internet and social media may support, enhance, or even degrade intellectual curiosity. In Nicolas Carr's book The Shallows (W.W. Norton, 2010), he shows how, over the past 30 years, a variety of computing tools have fostered multitasking, skimming, and browsing to the detriment of careful reading and reflective thinking. But he doesn't say a word about how these tools may affect our disposition to be curious. All forms of mass media, popular culture, and digital media have long been a stimulus to my curiosity. But I notice that my students don't necessarily use media and technology in the same manner as I do. I know that many students flit from this to that, using Tumblr or StumbleUpon looking for fun or novel ideas, images, or videos based on their interests in music, sports, or popular culture. I wonder how recreational exploration like this may shape people's thinking, learning, and self-expression. How can how the confluence of popular culture, mass media, and the digital tools for information gathering and creative expression cultivate and deepen the kind of intellectual curiosity that goes beyond simple engagement and leads to lifelong learning? Cultivating Respect for Student Voice Respect for student voice is easy to value in theory, and much harder to realize in practice. Even the term, "student voice," is one that may seem a little pompous and overblown. After all, who could be opposed to student voice? Unfortunately, educators don't always respect students' questions or their interests. We don't always ask good, open-ended questions that engage learners—or give students time to share their own ideas. Often, we ignore or deflect student interests that don't fit into our pre-existing content-centered paradigms. These actions may interfere with implementing the types of student-centered learning activities that support the development of students' intellectual curiosity and sense of themselves as authors. Connecting Popular Culture to the Classroom The teacher asked his students to share their knowledge about the reality TV and invited them to consider whether it could be called "drama" in the English-literature sense of the term. Without any prompting, students debated the different meanings of the word and applied it to their experience as television viewers. What questions did students have about reality TV as a genre, he asked. Some questions included: The questions were so robust that the teacher used them to develop a class research project, modeling the inquiry process from start to finish. By scaffolding the process of developing keywords, finding and evaluating information, and engaging in the practices of summarizing, paraphrasing, and direct quotation, students gained a heightened awareness of "what counts" as knowledge. They were encouraged to search for high-quality information and for information that was less trustworthy and believable and arranged their evidence in a vertical display ranging from "excellent" to "awful." That's why support for intellectual freedom is so vital for the school and the community. When we value intellectual freedom, we support intellectual curiosity wherever it leads. By inviting students to become equal partners in the inquiry process, our expectations for students as thinkers and learners are elevated. UNESCO Coordinates International Media and Information Literacy The new literacies are taking the world by storm! At the recent National Association for Media Literacy Education conference, held in Philadelphia on July 22 - 25, 2011, Alton Grizzle, a UNESCO program specialist, unveiled the new curriculum resource, Media and Information Literacy Curriculum for Teachers. Based on the convergence of radio, television, Internet, newspapers, books, digital archives and libraries into one platform, this media and information literacy curriculum presents specific approaches for integrating access skills, critical analysis and multimedia composition into the formal teacher education system around the world. This article originally appeared in School Library Journal's enewsletter Curriculum Connections. Subscribe here. * = Required information
The use of popular culture, mass media, and digital tools for information-gathering and creative expression may cultivate and deepen the kind of intellectual curiosity that helps students become lifelong learners.
In The Filter Bubble (Penguin, 2011), Eli Pariser writes that intellectual curiosity occurs when we recognize an information gap: when we sense a deprivation in our knowledge that we want to satisfy. He believes that online personalization tools (filtering that uses our existing preferences to offer us new information) may strip away the surprise of the truly unexpected, delivering more of what we already know or have read, and trapping us within our existing worldviews.
For those of us interested in supporting students' digital and media literacy competencies, it sometimes feels like all the attention is on the new tools. And there are so many of them: search tools, widgets, social media apps, and collection tools all presenting exciting possibilities for teaching and learning. Mozilla has a suite of tools that help youth play with online digital code by remixing their favorite websites. It's possible that such playful work builds a deep understanding of the constructed nature of online media and promotes a sense of oneself as an author. But it may also just reinforce the gee-whiz gadgetry ethos that's pervasive in our culture today.
In making wise choices about curriculum and instruction for digital and media literacy, we must consider the relationship between student voice, the author-audience dialectic, and the cultivation of intellectual curiosity. That can be especially challenging to those of us who are focused on helping students master knowledge and skills in the humanities, arts, and sciences.
Actually, most of us are challenged to respect our students' intellectual curiosity and their sense of themselves as authors every day. It takes work and skill to create an environment where their perspectives and interests are truly valued. Educators who respect students' fascination with urban legends, UFOs and ghost stories, tattoo art, nutritional supplements and diet fads, controversial athletes and over-the-top celebrities, capably demonstrate these skills. Those who denigrate student interest in popular culture maintain outdated hierarchies of knowledge, viewing academic knowledge and world knowledge as separate and distinct.
Whether celebrities, movies, television, videogames, music, and social media are something that interest us, they are the highly visible artifacts of contemporary culture that both reflect and shape personal and social identities. For adolescents, this is the stuff of meaningful pleasure that defines everyday life.
When teens get an opportunity to dig into some of the pleasures, paradoxes, and contradictions at work in popular culture, they learn more about themselves, their values, and their society. The process nurtures intellectual curiosity, encouraging students to use what they already know to generate their own questions, exploring that gap between what they think they know and the unknown.
Since it's normal for adolescents to take risks in pursuit of experience, we recognize the need to respect their online exploration and self-expression even at its most controversial. Doing so supports the process of self-discovery.
Many educators make efforts to strengthen students' identity as authors, by inspiring and motivating active participation, bringing out the quiet voices, toning down the loud ones, creating diverse opportunities for self-expression, and promoting critical thinking in ways that support student learning.
In my new book, Digital and Media Literacy: Connecting Culture and Classroom (Corwin, 2011), I provide examples of teachers who honor their students' intellectual curiosity. After recognizing the similarities between reality TV and melodrama, one high school English teacher created a space in the classroom where students could explore the connections between reality TV shows (including the MTV show 16 and Pregnant) and Arthur Miller's classic play, The Crucible. All it took was the courage to open the door.
This assignment allowed everyone (teacher, librarian, and students) to discover that expertise is not exclusively found in peer-reviewed articles. Plenty of quality information is available on blogs, commercial websites, and other sources that can be ignored when research skills are taught with a too strict focus on academic resources.Renee Hobbs is a Professor of Communication at Temple University in Philadelphia, where she founded the Media Education Lab. She is one of the nation's leading authorities on media literacy education. Her latest book Digital and Media Literacy: Connecting Culture and Classroom was published by Corwin/Sage in 2011. In January 2012, she becomes the Founding Director of the Harrington School of Communication and Media at the University of Rhode Island.
Reader Comments (5)
Posted by Elizabeth Lawrence on September 6, 2011 01:32:10PM
Posted by Elizabeth Lawrence on September 6, 2011 01:32:10PM
Posted by Elizabeth Lawrence on September 6, 2011 01:32:11PM
Posted by Elizabeth Lawrence on September 6, 2011 01:32:11PM
