Reading in a Participatory Culture

Building on the groundbreaking research of the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media & Learning initiative, this book crosses the divide between digital literacies and traditional print culture to engage a generation of students who can read with a book in one hand and a mouse in the other. Reading in a Participatory Culture tells the story of an innovative experiment that brought together playwright and director Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, Melville scholar Wyn Kelley, and new media scholar Henry Jenkins to develop an exciting new curriculum to reshape the middle and high school English language arts classroom. This book offers highlights from the resources developed for teaching Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and outlines the basic principles of design, implementation, and assessment that can be applied to any text.

Book Features:

• Models a new approach for teaching reading in a participatory culture, which has been field-tested in six different classrooms.
• Considers how 19th-century authors, such as Herman Melville, participated in the literary culture around them.
• Includes links to a complementary online digital book, Flows of Reading, which shares the many videos produced by Project New Media and models the application of these core concepts to a range of other texts, including The Lord of the Rings, The Hunger Games, and Flotsam.

Henry Jenkins is the Provost’s Professor of communications, journalism, cinematic arts, and education at the University of Southern California. Wyn Kelley is senior lecturer in literature and comparative media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“This book is one of the most exciting and breathtaking works on English education ever written.”
—James Paul Gee, Arizona State University

“An inspirational approach to democratizing the cultural canon and restoring classrooms to expansive educational purposes grounded in a participatory ethos. It explains in clear, accessible, and practically informative terms the New Media Literacies philosophy of reading and writing to prepare today's students for the world they must build—together, collaboratively—tomorrow. Reading in a Participatory Culture provides rich descriptions of experiences and perspectives of readers and writers, teachers, and learners who understand Moby-Dick as itself an instance of cultural remix and, in turn, a living creation to be remixed by all who take delight in it—especially those who can come to take delight in it by being introduced to it as part of their education.”
—Colin Lankshear, Adjunct Professor, James Cook University, Australia