How I got here is an easy story to tell. My loving parents, both caregivers by profession (dentist father, social worker-turned-housewife-turned-social worker mother), raised my two siblings and me in a town populated by “have’s.” While there were and still are richer folks financially, few have access to our community’s social capital – at least, that’s what both Reverend Jesse Jackson and then-President Bill Clinton said during their separate visits to my high school during my senior year. Later, as a college freshman enrolled in a sociology course entitled “Social Inequality: Race, Class, and Power,” I read Jonathan Kozol’s landmark book Savage Inequalities (1991), which pitted the privileges enjoyed by students in my town against the deprivations endured by students in East St. Louis, where schools couldn’t afford toilet paper. This made an impression. So too did my realization that, beyond creature comforts and access to power, I was given emotionally responsive contexts, both at home and at school, in which to grow safely and love freely. I became a Social Policy major because I knew such gifts were not my right, I was just born lucky; or perhaps such gifts are everyone’s right, and “luck” should be taken out of the equation.

For the past 10+ years, I have designed, delivered, and assessed curricula to support youths’ learning; importantly, these curricula facilitate not just cognitive development, but social and emotional development as well. With the support of my polymathic advisor, Dr. Henry Jenkins, and diverse university institutions — e.g., USC Joint Educational Project, USC Institute for Multimedia Literacy, USC Annenberg Innovation Lab, USC Shoah Foundation, and USC Impact Games — my interdisciplinary, community-focused work has been applied to educational settings in Los Angeles and around the world. My specific research interests include:

• Empathy and social and emotional learning;
• Interactive, inquiry-driven pedagogy and assessment (e.g., connected learning, participatory learning, experiential learning, participatory action research);
• Productive problem-solving across no-tech, low-tech, and high-tech contexts (e.g., media literacy, new media literacies, digital citizenship); and
• Powerful play (e.g., impact games, experimentation and improvisation for discovery).

Because I care about both maximizing the effectiveness of educational interventions and richly understanding program-related change, assessment is incredibly important to me. Twenty-first century skills, which I have identified in my publications as new media literacies (NMLs) plus social and emotional learning skills (SELs), are what I have sought to theorize, teach, and assess (see Felt & Rideau, 2012; Felt, Vartabedian, Literat, & Mehta, 2012; Vartabedian & Felt, 2012). Recently, I adapted the NMLs from a list of 12 discrete skills to a list of 6 paired skills, and then identified which NML pair plus two SELs collectively represent a characteristic of digital citizenship (see www.laurelfelt.org/skill-composites). The programs I have co-designed and evaluated (e.g., Sunukaddu 2.0, Explore Locally Excel Digitally, Summer Sandbox, PLAYing Outside the Box) outreach to educators and students via professional development and developmentally-appropriate curricula, respectively, and utilize both participatory learning strategies and media-making to enhance 21st century skill proficiency.
I always use mixed methods to study impacts, including pre-mid-post surveys, ethnographic field notes, interviews or focus groups, and analysis of participants’ works.

But for the past two years, I also have expanded my assessment toolkit in order to recognize traditionally overlooked data, which my co-authors and I have termed “cultural beacons” (CBs). CBs are culturally-embedded, user-defined measures for understanding communicative meaning(s), components, and sites of change; they illuminate (as beacons do) unique features of people and places (Felt, Dura, & Singhal, in press; Dura, Felt, & Singhal, 2012). Detecting CBs requires researchers’ sensitive listening and informed observation, made possible through respectful community partnerships and participatory methodologies. Accordingly, I embraced participatory action research with the PLAY! project, and am using this approach for conceptualizing my dissertation, “A Face is Worth a Thousand Words: Using Badges to Train Teachers in Non-verbal Sensitivity and Improvisation.” This dissertation investigates if/how training novice teachers in non-verbal sensitivity and improvisation impacts both the proliferation and management of “teachable moments” — critical points when students are poised to meaningfully learn because they perceive a connection between their studies and their lives. Crucially, this teacher training will be administered online via an original curriculum that uses digital badges to impact social and subjective norms, support community-building, and celebrate the journey.

In terms of my career, I am committed to keeping my mind and options open, for life (I hope!) is long and the world is ever changing. Because I love teaching and conducting research to enrich educational programs, I could remain in academia. I also could continue to provide consulting services for organizations domestic and foreign, based in the West, Far East, and Global South, who register as non-profit, for-profit, and governmental. To 20+ organizations over the years, I have delivered: curriculum and assessment development; training and professional development; program evaluation; media literacy for children and families; children’s media research; and impact game consulting. As long as we care to better support our children’s healthy development and expand their opportunities, there will be work for me to do, and I will want to do it.

But here in Los Angeles, since the founding of non-profit Laughter for a Change (L4C) in 2007, these games have returned to their original context and purpose: helping to build confidence and meaningful connections among residents of underserved communities.

During 2011-2012, L4C founder/director Ed Greenberg ran an after-school workshop with a dozen predominantly low-income, Latino high school freshmen; a trained improviser/doctoral candidate acted as a participant-observer during this year. Through analysis of ethnographic fieldnotes, surveys, and interviews, they found that improvisational theater games provided a no-tech context to practice skills vital to media literacy, such as negotiating trust and exploring identity. As articulated by Felt and Rideau (2012), developing these skills, even in no-tech contexts, prepares learners to apply them in mediated contexts.

In terms of products, participants reported less shyness, more self-confidence, increased comfort with public speaking, greater participation in academic classes, a broader view of teamwork, and fun. L4C’s use of games may help to explain its educational effectiveness. According to USC’s Project New Media Literacies, play “supports constant learning and innovative responses to our surroundings” (Reilly, Jenkins, Felt & Vartabedian, 2012, p. 6). Positive affective climates such as L4C’s also predict such educational boons as greater academic risk-taking and increased motivation (Meyer & Turner, 2006).

L4C’s website claims, “Laughter is powerful. Laughter heals. Laughter builds community.” This study’s findings suggest that L4C’s pedagogy is powerful too, and might help to leverage formal and informal educational settings for healing challenged communities.

Thus, schools should facilitate access to a verb, not a noun – that is, they should enable the process of learning rather than proximity to artifacts of knowledge.

Participation and play are the modes by which to realize this (re)vision of learning.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Formative research with the University of Southern California (USC)’s service-learning program, the Joint Educational Project (JEP), suggests that this training shortfall increases the likelihood that volunteer teachers will fail to leverage “teachable moments” (Havighurst, 1952). According to Pacifi and Garrison (2004), teachable moments occur when space opens for students to meaningfully connect with their studies. Because students better recall lessons that engage their emotions (Immordino-Yang & Damasio, 2007; Meyer & Turner, 2006) and strike them as relevant (Lave, 1996), and teachable moment-related learning does both, it is important to make the most of each teachable moment. Leveraging teachable moments requires teachers to be “completely present” and, with their students, “creatively explore imaginary possibilities together” (Pacifici & Garrison, 2004, p. 126).

Being completely present suggests a teacher’s attunement to the activity and energy in the classroom; such a teacher would notice, for example, various students’ non-verbal communication and engagement levels. To leverage teachable moments, this teacher also would correctly interpret these signals in order to detect when and where spaces open for meaningful educational connection. Finally, this teacher would have to feel sufficient self-efficacy in improvisation to abandon a pre-formulated lesson plan and extemporaneously, creatively explore imaginary possibilities with the student(s) in question.

This presentation will present results from the next phase of formative research, specifically survey data, classroom observations, and one-on-one interviews that illuminate JEP teachers’ non-verbal sensitivity, recognition of students’ signals, modes of response, and encounters with teachable moments. It also will outline the following phases in this dissertation project: 1) designing a media-rich, online module via BadgeStack to train JEP teachers in both sensitivity to non-verbal communication and proficiency in improvisation; 2) piloting the module with experimental and control groups during Fall 2013; and 3) analyzing outcomes.

To honor Valentine’s Day and again trot out one of my most beloved essays from ye olde blogge of yore, I share this inspirational and TRUE story…

What Would Josephine Do?

(originally published online 10/01/07)

Josephine was one big dating “don’t.”

She pushed too hard. She clung too tight. She regularly chewed her anus.

Josephine was a bitch – literally. 100% female dog.

If you don’t count the carnival fish or science class hermit crabs, Josephine was my only pet, the lone animal to capture my heart. Worms captured her heart, but that’s another story.

When it comes to matters of the heart, Josephine actually had a lot to teach. I didn’t appreciate this at the time, but now that I’m older and infinitely wiser, I can see Josephine for what she really was:

A love goddess.

It’s true. Don’t be fooled by the fact that she used to snarf her own turds – nothing more than a crafty ruse to throw us off-track.

Clever girl.

Josephine educated by example, both negative and positive.

NEGATIVE: Josephine used to bully us into giving up physical affection. She’d whine. She’d squeal. She’d bash me with her head, applying snout-as-lever force in order to send my hand arcing through the air and landing limply atop her head. Oh, how I’d dread her approach. Oh, how I’d bruise like a peach.

What’s the lesson in all of this? First, keep your elbows above muzzle level and always protect your extremities. Second, violence is no way to win love.

Today, when I find myself yearning for creature comfort (and know a non-blood relation who might consider giving it), Josephine’s teachings form the cornerstone of my strategy. I sideline my “grabby snout.” I put myself in my (hypothetical) boyfriend’s shoes by reflecting on what I would have appreciated: A reasonably worded rubdown request; a few upfront tit-for-tat pats. If Josephine had treated me with respect, I would’ve happily scratched behind her ears, and felt like a sweetheart instead of a servant.

POSITIVE: Josephine’s loyalty was limitless. True, her protective instincts could err on the side of excess. For example, there was the time that Josephine scared the neighbor’s dog so profoundly, it channeled its agitation by popping one of its eyeballs from the socket. The eyeball dangled free for a couple of hours, but that’s not the point.

The point is, if you look past that unfortunate incident, you’ll glimpse a lifetime of steadfast devotion.

Here’s the lesson: Get your crew’s back and show ‘em some love. In this era of multi-tasking and compartmentalizing, time and love are increasingly rare. Basic supply and demand, my friends —being rare makes them valuable. So don’t skip out on the socializing or skimp on the sentiment. Josephine never did.

During her later years, arthritis in her hips made stair-climbing difficult. Dad built her a ramp, complete with carpet squares and wooden braces. During her later years, incontinence made bladder control impossible. Dad built her a dog house, complete with supplementary space heater. Josephine never used the ramp, though, and she never ventured into the dog house. Why?

“Because she was dumb” would’ve been my answer several years ago. But now that I’ve uncovered Josephine’s love goddess identity, I’ve changed my tune. Maybe she rejected the ramp because she was eager to accompany us and the ramp would’ve slowed her down. Maybe she bypassed the dog house because she wanted to watch us and the dog house would’ve limited her vision.

Or maybe she was dumb.

Regardless, the lesson we can derive is still a valuable one: Love your loved ones, and then love ‘em some more.

It’s been five years since Josephine died. Gone are the fur clumps that used to choke the staircase cracks. Gone are the neon yellow stains she leaked onto my carpet and my carpet alone.

But the heart’s a funny thing. Every time I walk through my parents’ door, I still brace myself for Josephine, inwardly cringing as I anticipate her full-on knee-rush, paint-peeling breath blast, room-clearing fart gas…

For nothing. Because Josephine is gone.

So I hang up my jacket in the vacuum of eerie silence, breathe in the scent of antiseptic cleanliness, and am always, unaccountably, disappointed.

Now I’m on my own, looking for love in this brave new world. As I negotiate the perils of online and face-to-freak dating— trashing misspelled come-ons from middle-aged foreigners, meeting up with bleary-eyed belchers for a cup of 7-11 Big Brew—I find I’m at a loss. How should I act?, I wonder. What should I do?

That’s when I intone my trusty mantra: WWJD, What Would Josephine Do? And I act according to her enlightened example.

So maybe I am still “single” and without a “prospect” between “here” and “Kingdom Come.” But I swear, it’s not because of interpersonal incompetence. Thanks to the love goddess, my dating deeds are not one big “don’t.”

And someday, they’ll end in “I do.”