On November 30, 2022, I was invited to present “Fitting In, Standing Out, and Building an Identity: Middle Schoolers and Media Literacy” for the Media Education Lab’s on-going series, Media Literacy Across the Generations.
As the session unfolded and participants added their ideas, I appreciated the ways in which our initial chat conversation brought about a list of “verbs” in which middle school students might engage, including:
- Being Curious
- Being Entertained
- Connecting
- Copying
- Creating
- Dancing
- Emulating
- Entertaining
- Making Friends
- Participating
- Playing
- Recreating
- Relaxing
- Scrolling
- Sharing
- Showcasing
- Watching
As we consider the ways in which we might invite our middle school learners to bring their digital literacy practices into the classroom, we then went into a structured breakout room conversation that imagined what four fictionalized students could be creating — fan fiction, gaming, Tik Tok-style videos, and vlogs via YouTube — and how these practices might inform other academic work that they could do. Here are the session slides with embedded links to resources, the “view only” digital handout, and the recording embedded below.
Feel free to repurpose these materials for your own professional development sessions or contact me if you would like to talk about workshop and webinar opportunities.
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