Counting What Counts

lightbulbI am an eager learner, critical thinker, and sensitive communicator with a fervent desire to do work that matters. I believe in the value of inter-disciplinary collaboration for building, remixing, and extending theory, and constructing comprehensive, practical responses to multi-faceted, real world challenges. My methods are mixed, my style is collegial, and my aim is to support youths’ development.

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.

Change Through Laughter

Viola Spolin and kidsIn the early 1940s, social worker Viola Spolin developed a suite of theater games to stimulate creative expression and build community among Chicago’s diverse immigrant populations. Spolin’s son Paul Sills, founder of legendary theater The Second City, offered up his mother’s games to his comedic ensemble; and ever since, improvisers the world over have played them in order to hone their craft.

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.

Expertise

Child development:
I earned my Master’s degree in Child Development from the prestigious Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development at Tufts University, specializing in children’s media.

Over the course of my career, I’ve worked with children of all ages in multiple contexts. I taught pre-school for 3.5 years, conducted research with 1st grade English Language Learners, taught summer enrichment programs to 5- to 9-year-olds in India, studied 6th and 7th grade girls’ instant messaging and social aggression, facilitated after-school programs in new literacies and improvisation for high school freshmen in Los Angeles (Felt, Vartabedian, Literat & Mehta, 2012), and designed a social and emotional learning + new media literacies curriculum for 15- to 21-year-olds in Senegal (Felt & Rideau, 2012).

I understand how children’s cognitive, physical, social, and emotional development occurs over time, and appreciate how this development informs youths’ capacities and preferences in terms of play, study, and communication.

Games and learning:
I work with Henry Jenkins, one of the nation’s foremost experts in participatory culture and learning. Our research group, PLAY! (Participatory Learning And You!), has implemented several professional development initiatives oriented towards supporting students’ rich learning (Vartabedian & Felt, 2012; Reilly, Jenkins, Felt, & Vartabedian, 2012; Reilly, Vartabedian, Felt & Jenkins, 2012).

I am a co-founder of USC Impact Games, a cross-campus working group that unifies theorists, designers, engineers, and investigators from sundry disciplines. I also consult with Laughter for a Change, a non-profit organization that uses theater games in order to teach members of its workshops about “Playing agreement. Risk taking. Spontaneity. Changing perspectives. Opening up to moments of discovery and surprise. Making active, not passive, choices,” among other things (cited in McFarren, 2011).

I understand how games teach, and how good games can make a profound impact.

Social and emotional learning:
I’ve studied social and emotional learning theoretically and practically in multiple ways, such as by writing a 25-page analysis of empathy (Felt, 2011) and creating curricula that seek to scaffold interpersonal and intrapersonal competence.

I understand the components of social and emotional learning and am passionate about incorporating them as both means and ends of educational experiences.

Overall:
I am uniquely qualified to function as a bridge-builder and translator, helping members of multiple specializations to leverage other fields’ findings and best practices, with the goal of constructing the highest-quality, most impactful product possible.

The Power and Importance of Play

Today I had the honor of participating in a conversation organized by DML Central‘s ConnectedLearning.tv about the power and importance of play. The featured guest, Nirvan Mullick, is the innovative filmmaker behind Caine’s Arcade and Caine’s Arcade 2, and architect of Imagination Foundation and Global Day of Play, among other things. His groundbreaking work — sharing the creativity and passion of a young Angeleno boy’s cardboard arcade, leveraging its mini-viral popularity, creating a scholarship foundation for Caine, and building a global movement — is inspirational to say the least.

This conversation was organized by Jon Barilone, Community Manager of DML Central, moderated by Tara Brown, Technology Director of DML Research Hub, and enriched by contributions from Isaiah Saxon of DIY.org and Monika Hardy of the be lab. Of course, chatty ol’ me also said a thing or 10. And I would have said more if I was following the webinar’s LiveStream chat! Great backchannel conversation.

The webinar’s collaborative document listed the following as key quotes:

  • “This was lightning in a bottle in my world. This tremendous opportunity, but also this tremendous pressure to try to make the most of it.” – Nirvan
  • “There should be a seamless gradient from their naive play to what adults would recognize as work.” – Isaiah
  • “We have to create a culture where play is not only acceptable, but valued. Where we’re demonstrating that we care about play and creativity.” – Laurel
  • “Making/playing is a platform for kids to have the confidence to try a new skill they don’t have yet.” – Isaiah

———————-
For me, interesting points of the conversation include (but are not limited to): playing vs. making; values vs. rewards; capacities vs. checkmarks; practice vs. philosophy; today vs. tomorrow.

  • Playing vs. making

I’m interested in creating a Venn diagram for these two concepts, playing and making, because I find them to be interrelated and even overlapping at times yet not synonymous. Isaiah said that in order to make, one must play; I agree. But in order to play, one does not have to make — that is, unless we define “making” more broadly to encompass making narratives, making interpersonal connections, making characters, making decisions, etc. I feel that makerspaces and hackerspace are havens for tangible tinkering — taking an object and transforming it in some way. But by definition, play does not require any objects. In fact, my favorite way to play — improv — insists upon no props, no sets, no nothing.

Isaiah elaborated that to earn a Skill badge on DIY.org, one must complete at least 3 challenges that incorporate play. So play is in the DNA of making. But what is in the DNA of play? USC Dornsife’s Joint Educational Project will pilot a badge system in which service-learners can earn badges in play. Designing challenges that support play proficiency is on my To-Do list for — now-ish, I suppose :-), and by “now-ish” I mean NOW, since we’re launching this in February 2013. I’m looking forward to demystifying (and complicating) a process/concept we all thought we already understood: play.

  • Values vs. rewards

I characterized badges as expressions of values, ways to show community members what we care about. By recognizing Attendance Award winners, schools show that they care about kids coming every day. By letting a student walk to lunch first because she raised her hand without calling out, a teacher shows that he cares about turn-taking and orderliness. Do these rewards motivate and incentivize behavior? Perhaps, to a point — extrinsically. We all know that the value of such methods is limited and we do not want to create a generation of individuals who require external validation.

I care much less about people working for the reward, and much more about the symbolic value of giving time and attention to a certain set of values. I like what badges express. When an organization supports a play badge, it says, “We care about play.” When an organization connects a group of badges to its program, it says, “These are possible outcomes of your work. These are some goals we find worthwhile.” To learners — who may understandably assume that this learning context is just like the rest, and that their job is to sit passively and spit back the expected responses — it declares, “This time, it’s different.” Badges show what you can explore, do, become. “Welcome, current and budding Players, Zoologists, Engineers. This experience transcends an A in who-knows-what. This experience is open for you to grow.”

Maybe this sounds idealistic and naive. Maybe that’s my specialty. ;-) I just think we need to unambiguously show learners that the world is rich with possibilities, and have our learning contexts reflect and honor that richness.

  • Capacities vs. checkmarks

Educational standards have become (or were they always?) a dirty word. Our American educational system is not federal but wide adoption of The Common Core moves us closer towards national norms. Is this a hollow affair at best, a time-sucking or even sinister situation at worst?

It depends on what you believe standards do. From Monika, it sounded like she believes that standards superficially designate “good” and “bad” where such qualifiers don’t exist — there is just difference.

So far, I can only think of examples where I disagree… I’m struggling to play devil’s advocate with myself and find a case that will support her point. Perhaps I’ll get there as I  share my own position.

I think there are basic skills that allow people to play the game. If you don’t know how to dribble, you can’t really play basketball. You can make up your own game with different rules and not have to dribble at all, or only dribble in a certain kind of way. That’s fine. But that’s not basketball. Whether we want to transition to this new game becoming THE game and replacing basketball, that’s a separate issue. But this new game is not basketball. To play basketball, you have to be able to dribble.

So that’s what I think of when I consider standards. To be able to read, you have to understand phonemes. To be able to subtract, you have to understand the number line. Teaching these skills to children is an important task we give to schools. Standards articulate this expectation, this part of schools’ job description. By the end of the year, the students should understand X, be able to do Y.

Standards become problematic when the learning goals they outline are: 1) irrelevant; 2) beyond students’ zone of proximal development (either too easy or too hard); or 3) chained to inappropriate instructional methods. If/when any of these criteria describe standards, then the standards should be rewritten. But in my opinion, the phenomenon of standards should not be dumped all together.

I want our children to be able to engage with challenging texts. I want them to be able to express themselves so that comprehension is not limited by writers’ poor grammar but by listeners’ own willingness to engage. I want our children to be able to look at a pie chart and know what it means. I want our children to be able to calculate which carton of orange juice at the grocery store is a better deal per milliliter. And of course, I want our children to love themselves, treat one another with respect, and dream of what never was and ask why not (to borrow a phrase from the late, great Bobby Kennedy).

Isaiah said that his ideal middle school would consist of two required courses in character-building and five electives whose content would authentically integrate standards/basic skills. Amazing idea. To that integration end, I encouraged educators to identify the basic skills already embedded in creative projects, and to discover diverse subjects’ interrelationships, e.g., a social science standard within the scope of a science project.

Let’s help school enable, rather than prevent, education.

  • Practice vs. philosophy

What we believe is one thing; what we do is often another. How can we make our teaching reflect and support our philosophies? What can we DO? Fabulously time-strapped teachers legitimately ask for this concrete guidance; in many cases, educational advocates are preaching to the choir instead of giving them a hand. Of course teachers want to support their students; if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have gone into this (largely thankless) profession. But how are they supposed to get the job done? Even though I know better, sometimes I catch myself teaching in the same way that I was taught (didactially) and taught to teach (by the book/standard/standardized test). I need a model for another way; I need practical guidelines; I need an example. I think we all do.

In terms of a model, in today’s conversation I presented participatory learning (which is similar to connected learning). In a playful participatory learning context, educators surrender some classroom control in order to honor students’ self-directed learning and creativity, embrace technology and digital media even in the absence of personal expertise/mastery, and value process over product – that is, escape the tyranny of perfection (Vartabedian & Felt, 2012, p. 62).

In terms of practical guidelines, I shared the five characteristics of participatory learning (hereafter referred to as the “5 CPLs”). Our research from USC Annenberg Innovation Lab’s PLAY! project and, previously, from Project New Media Literacies, found that rich learning flourishes with the establishment of these values and practices:

The 5 CPLs

● heightened motivation and new forms of engagement through meaningful play and experimentation;
● an integrated learning system where connections between home, school community and world are enabled and encouraged;
● co-learning where educators and students pool their skills and knowledge and share in the tasks of teaching and learning;
● learning that feels relevant to the students’ identities and interests; and
● opportunities for creating and solving problems using a variety of media, tools and practices (Project New Media Literacies 2010; cited in Felt, Vartabedian, Literat & Mehta, 2012)

The following tool might help educators and their students to discern whether and to what extent their learning contexts qualify as participatory. Areas of weakness are simply spaces for development and innovation.

4 C’s of Participation Inventory

  1. How do we provide mechanisms to CREATE?
  2. How do we offer opportunities for media [which can be understood as messages and information] to CIRCULATE across platforms, disciplines and ages?
  3. How do we help learners to COLLABORATE and build upon others’ knowledge?
  4. How do we encourage learners to CONNECT with counterparts and establish productive networks?

(Reilly, Jenkins, Felt & Vartabedian, 2012)

In terms of a sample activity or curriculum, I suggested improv games. Improv establishes a context in which to develop essential and versatile skills, and improv’s respectful implementation helps to co-create a culture in which risk-taking is encouraged, “failure” is acceptable/impossible, collaborating is key, and gift-giving is just how we roll.

I think we’re still figuring out the HOW. But I think that getting down to these brass tacks, discussing practice rather than philosophy, is necessary in order to avoid old habits and move forward.

  • Today vs. tomorrow

A ConnectedLearning.tv community member shared a question via chat. While this query set off our riff about standards, it also inspired my final comment about who we reach out to and how we conceptualize our goals. We would be remiss if we focused exclusively on either today or tomorrow; we must consider both.

Exchanging concrete practice is very today-oriented, extremely here-and-now. The task of identifying standards across one’s teaching is also contemporary. It speaks to what’s currently on the books. For today, let’s do all we can to hack/mod the system, establish standards crosswalks, and connect our ideals with our realities. We can’t abandon today to rhetoric of tomorrow. And, institutionally, we can’t abandon formal education to the potential of informal learning. Our children are in school for many hours every day; I refuse to surrender that time and just invest in the outside. Nothing against the informal! But a formal does exist. Let’s dig in and fix a thing or two NOW.

In terms of tomorrow… We we all know that our educational system is sick. We all know that a lot of renovation is required. So let’s also reach out to the funders, architects, and contractors of that system — in other words, government officials and representatives, school board members, and curriculum developers. Let’s ask them to build school spaces that look less like factories and more like labs, libraries, coffee shops, and meeting rooms. Let’s ask them to write standards that are neither irrelevant nor beyond students’ zone of proximal development nor chained to inappropriate instructional methods. Let’s ask them to offer professional development workshops that model and encourage playful participatory learning.

Let’s work better today. And let’s build a better tomorrow.

I’ve embedded today’s webinar below and welcome the opportunity to continue this conversation on Twitter! Please talk back to me via @laurelfelt and/or hook this up with the communal discussion via #connectedlearning. Thanks again!