Partnerships for developing digital and media literacy in schools: reflecting on my own experiences

Mariana Ochs
7 min readOct 13, 2020

An assignment for URI Seminar in Digital Literacy | EDC 532

When I first started working in schools, a few years ago, I was charged with integrating technology into the curriculum and pedagogical practices. My role was perceived very much as an Ed Tech specialist, and I was expected to recommend tools and teach educators and administrators how to use them. Coming from a media background, however, and after a career working with ever changing tools and technologies, I did not see much point in focusing on tools that would soon be displaced by something newer and better; rather, I sensed it was much more important to develop the digital fluency of students and staff alike, in order to learn to access a wealth of information in new and exciting formats, collaborate with people near and far, and publish to real audiences in a variety of creative ways — in other words, to take advantage of the phenomenal learning opportunities afforded by a digital society.

Eventually I designed a project called MediaMakers, which was selected for the Google Innovators Academy. It involved mentoring teachers in the exploration of new narrative formats (both as mentor texts and possibilities for student output), as well as coaching them as they activated student’s design and journalism skills for innovative media creation projects in the classroom, finding and exploring a range of easy to master and accessible tools as dictated by the project itself and by student’s own individual goals.

This week’s readings highlight the importance of cross-disciplinary partnerships in developing reading comprehension. They resonate with my experience in a number of ways, and corroborate some of my observations during my school experience:

1. Collaboration and team-teaching across disciplines and backgrounds are essential if we want to broaden our understanding of what literacy is nowadays and support students as they gain proficiency.

Developing literacy, information literacy and media literacy in the convergence culture (Jenkins, 2006) requires a broad range of skills that have been, until now, spread across different professions — teachers, librarians, designers and journalists. As well as developing a shared vocabulary (Moreillon, J., 2008), co-teaching allows us to model new skills and strategies not only for the students, but for each other as well:

“Team-teaching is job-embedded professional development practiced with actual students, with the taught curriculum, and within the supports and constraints of our everyday work environments.” (Moreillon, J., 2008)

Modelling media design and co-creating projects with elementary school teachers (Eliezer Max school, 2019).

Time and again, teachers have told me that what they want the most from professional development experiences is the opportunity to engage in hands-on, messy learning — much like the experiences we want to afford our students:

“Co-teaching can also help us recover our own sense of discovery and joy in learning and find support for taking risks.” (Moreillon, J., 2008)

Some of my most successful co-teaching experiences involved modelling information literacy and design skills for the benefit of both the teacher and the students, such as when we made time to explore web site architecture and non-linear reading during a digital portfolio project with 7th graders, or image search strategies and copyright while making digital collages to retell Homer’s Odyssey in 6th grade.

7th grade students explore web site architecture and the notion of non-linear reading in the course of a digital portfolio project; while the Portuguese teacher explored the writing skills and media formats to be highlighted in the portfolio, I was given a couple of class periods to teach about web site architecture and develop our own portfolio site. (Eliezer Max school, 2015).

2. Developing multiple literacies is key to tapping into much more complex and multidimensional comprehension of our world’s social and natural issues.

As a media and technology specialist, my role sometimes overlapped with that of a contemporary librarian. In the absence of a teacher-librarian culture in Brazil, much of my work at the school consisted in curating content around which to design reading, inquiry and media creation projects. I encouraged teachers to go beyond the textbook and explore texts in a range of different formats, including audiovisual, interactive and immersive, sourced from digital news sources, cultural or scientific institutions, and even social networks. I was struck by the American Association of School Libraries (AASL) emphasis on the importance of multiple literacies (visual, digital, technological and textual), as stated in in their Reading Toolkit document, What Every SLMS Should Know about Teaching Multiple Literacies Strategies:

SLMS can make a positive impact on students’ engagement with texts and reading development by working with other educators to integrate multiple literacies into the classroom curriculum. These literacies are critical learning objectives for 21st-century learners. (AASL, SLMS Role in Reading Toolkit)

A multimedia text set created to help develop multiple literacies and allow students to explore topics around the refugee crisis (EducaMidia, 2019).

3. Comprehension is driven by engagement, and we must seek to build on students’ own interests, give them choices, use authentic texts and allow them to craft real products.

Again, leading students in the exploration of a variety of text choices in different formats, as well as contemplating their own realities and cultural contexts, is key to engagement. This is well explored in some of our previous readings about the social-cultural component of comprehension, and also in the explanation of the role of engagement in the Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI) instructional model:

Motivated readers like to solve problems, ask questions, search for answers, and share the knowledge they gain with others. Motivated students are excited to read, enjoy learning new things, want to participate in school activities, put forth the effort needed to do a good job, and stick with a project until it is completed successfully. (Swan 2003)

Allowing children to have agency as they search and choose items to read is a major driver for engagement, and most library databases use search terms and screens that are not accessible to younger (or less information-literate) learners. By co-creating the library with their target users, the International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL) has addressed this by design — by offering visual search interfaces, and even search criteria (colors, feelings) that are meaningful to children. In fact, it is also built into their mission, which is

to select, collect, digitize, and organize children’s books and to create appropriate technologies for access and use by children ages 3–13”. (Druin, 2003)

Everyone learns from everyone: explorations on plastic pollution include a timeline, a story map, an interactive image and a PSA (Eliezer Max school, 2018)

One of the ways I found to give students agency while researching and reading, and therefore amplify their engagement, is to allow them to choose different aspects of a problem to explore. In this way, we can let their interest guide their explorations, and practice an “everybody learns from everybody” ethos as they present their various findings to their peers. A project we created on plastic pollution, for example, might have students investigating the history of plastics to display in a timeline, global plastic pollution hotspots to highlight in an interactive map, facts about marine life and pollution to present in an infographic or PSA.

4. Learning is social, never more so than for the digital natives; thus the ability to share, comment and recommend should be built into the reading experience to activate community.

“Engaged readers are socially interactive. They share knowledge and resources. Social interaction about reading leads to increased amounts of reading (Guthrie, Schafer, Wang, & Afflerbach, 1995, as cited by Swan, 2003); it also increases achievement in reading (Wentzel, 1996, as cited by Swan, 2003).”

In my work I addressed this by encouraging, for example, the construction of class-curated book collections in a Padlet, complete with student reviews and recommendations.

5. Finally, school libraries are central to giving the school community access to a variety of information sources, as well as supporting the development of media literacy skills, and should be given a leading role in the process of nurturing engagement and literacy.

In our country we do not typically have the role of teacher-librarian, and at the school I made every effort to build up our librarians’ digital and media literacy skills as well, so they could eventually fall into this role.

At EducaMídia we have recently taught a media literacy course for school librarians, with over 150 participants from all over the country, and our main goal was to encourage participants to see themselves in this leadership role. Many of this week’s readings inspired the course, and in the fourth and last real-time session we explored some of the trends presented in School Libraries for the Future: Five Trends to Watch (Hadler, 2016). Hopefully we can rally educators, librarians and policy makers around the important mission of building these very strategic literacy partnerships.

Bibliography

American Association of School Librarians, The School Librarian’s Role in Reading

Druin, A. (2003). “What can children teach us: Developing digital libraries for children and with children.”

Hadler, Pat (2016). “School Libraries of the Future: 5 Trends to Watch.”

Jenkins, Henry (2006). “Welcome to Convergence Culture”.

Moreillon, J. (2008). Position yourself at the center: Co-teaching reading comprehension strategies.Teacher Librarian, 35(5).

Swan (2003). Why is the North Pole Always Cold? In Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI): Engaging Classrooms, Lifelong Learners

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Mariana Ochs

Designer, educator, Google Innovator. Coordinator of EducaMídia. Exploring design, media and technology in education, and empowering youth in the digital age.