| Seeds of the Possible: Education |
|The Evolving Nature of Families: Family Literacy |
|Addressing Homelessness | | New Media Literacy: Participatory Culture |
Each participant in NCLC 203 will choose to research one of the areas above. In the second week of NCLC 203, faculty will ask students to choose the social change literacy area which they would like to research throughout the semester. Thus, you should read the short explorations of each literacy area below very carefully. You should then decide which appeals most to your abilities, your passions, your interests and your ideals, and prepare to make the case for your inclusion in that research project group.
If you have any questions about the literacy areas, and what your involvement in researching each might involve, do talk to your seminar leader as soon as possible.
Good luck with your choice, and know that no matter which option you choose, you will complete the semester with greater understandings of the nature of our communities around George Mason University, of the relationships between academic research and social change, and of your own considerable abilities to act positively with others.
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Seeds of the Possible:
Transforming Education through the
Examination of Policies, Practices, and Experiences
“If children are the embodiment of our faith in a common future, if their instinctive optimism and appetite for experience represent unqualified affirmations of life, then by neglecting or mistreating them, we not only fail in our moral responsibility, we place that future at risk. We squander the seeds on which the garden of humanity depends.”
Paul Loeb, 2004, The Impossible Will Take a Little While
There is widespread consensus that education is the pathway to a host of positive outcomes for both individuals and society. Educational attainment is one of the most important determinants of level of employment, income, health, and housing. Yet people continue to fall through the cracks of the U.S. system of education as evidenced by high rates of illiteracy, high school dropouts, to name a few. Large differences in educational quality and attainments persist across income, race, and region. Even with major educational interventions, educational inequalities endure.
This topic will explore the roots of educational inequality and examine the effectiveness of interventions designed to improve educational access and success. This project may examine elementary, secondary, or collegiate educational policies and practices.
Potential Projects:
- Examine the effectiveness of family literacy and parent education interventions and provide data to better inform practice.
- Analyze policies related to college access and retention and suggest interventions to increase both (could focus on secondary schools, community college articulation agreements, transfer student experiences, etc).
- Explore Fairfax County’s approach to ESL and examine its effectiveness in comparison to other systems or models (use data to inform practice).
- Interview adult learners about their education needs and design/implement possible interventions (basic computer skills, GED preparation).
- Examine the effects of the educational reforms proposed for the District of Columbia.
- Deliberate the role of pre-schooling /early preparedness programs.
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The Evolving Nature of Families:
Learning about Family Literacy through Research and Analysis
“Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, and call it a family:
Whatever you call it,
whoever you are, you need one.”
– Jane Howard
In the last few decades, the conceptualization of what constitutes a family has changed significantly. The traditional definition of the American family has been a father and mother who live in the same home with their biological children. However, different types of family households have evolved because of divorce and remarriage, adoption, foster parenting, single parenthood, kinship care, and same-sex relationships. A mother and father living together with their children is now just one possibility among many. Here, family is defined as any group of people who live together, share with one another, work together, care and support each other, keep each other safe, and love each other.
Those focused on this topic area will learn to identify issues in family literacy and consider the many alternatives that exist to explain family-related events and family behaviors. In addition, students choosing this topic will investigate how communities and cultures affect families and learn to be critical of various sources of knowledge about families (e.g., personal storytelling, interviews, family theory, and multiple forms of quantitative family research). In doing so, students will have the opportunity to develop other important skills, including the ability to think critically, write coherently, speak articulately, and to collaborate with others about issues related to family literacy.
Potential Projects:
- Explore the differences and similarities in men’s and women’s values and decisions to form families and motivations to maintain relationships.
- Listen to the voices/perspectives/stories of different family members on a variety of family-related topics to understand family trends and changes over time.
- Consider ways people attempt to balance work and family and the implications these choices have on family dynamics and public policies.
- Study the positive and negative impacts of local, state, and national family policies on family formation and functioning.
- Research how economics and finances influence family formation, parenting, and family stability (i.e., possible variations across race, social class, ethnicity, religion).
- Conduct a content analysis of kids-directed television and examine its potential influences on some aspect of child development (e.g., aggression, obesity, learning outcomes, etc.)
- Examine how parents socialize the development of civic engagement in their children and how this socialization may vary across gender of the child, race, social class, ethnicity, religion.
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Addressing Homelessness:
Understanding the Systemic Nature of Social Problems
“People who are homeless are not social inadequates. They are people without homes.”
— Sheila McKechnie, Housing Activist
Understanding the causes of homelessness and evaluating the effectiveness of government and independent sector solutions requires a citizenry with literacy of socio-economic systems and how they work. In many cases the very systems that have been designed to support individual prosperity for some, are trapping others into a life of struggle that is difficult to emerge from. Such systems include our economic system, legal system, health care, education, government and many others.
A sociologist studying the causes and solutions to homelessness may understand the impact of the complex combination of these systems. A person who is currently homeless understands them too, but possibly in a very different way. Both perspectives are valuable and important to addressing the problem. This project will involve understanding homelessness as a national problem, but also understanding the local lived experience of homelessness, in order to inform the creation of supports and solutions.
Potential Projects:
- Review existing literature on the influence of social and economic systems on the continued problem of homelessness and the potential of these systems to end it.
- Interview local members of the homeless population to understand the lived experience of homelessness and inform the creation of solutions that have real impact.
- Partner with local organizations such as shelters and food banks to provide data that will better inform their practice.
- Analyze the impact and effectiveness of local and state policies that were intended to reduce homelessness.
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New Media Literacy: Creating Participatory Culture through
Critical Analysis and Inventive Thinking
“A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another.”
Henry Jenkins[i]
Social networking, individual broadcasting via blogs and video, and multi-purpose mobile devices network individuals, their needs and their passions, their media and their creations, and, of course, their knowledge and opinions into complex systems of information transmission and reception. New media literacy not only requires well-honed critical capacities to understand how media (of all types) influence our perceptions of the world and to filter dynamic flows of information for credibility, currency and applicability. It also requires inventive, lateral thinking to collaborate with others to achieve common goals and to choose tools, platforms and softwares that maximize intellectual endeavor.
And it demands a constant recourse to creativity to communicate information, knowledge and insights, to rally collaborators, resources and supporters, and to build functioning, mutually re-inforcing communities. Critical vision, innovative thinking and unbounded imagination enrich our interventions in the participatory culture Jenkins outlines above and equips us to collaborate with others to reach their full potential there.
Potential Projects:
- Discover what information and communication capacities young people need to guarantee educational success and how they might achieve these.
- Learn how young people of limited means and limited access to networked information and communication might excel in participatory culture.
- Explore what kinds of content individuals with limited access to networked information and communication need most urgently and how they and others might develop that content and gain access to it.
- Create a summer school curriculum (define your grade level) that would boost students’ success as participants in new media cultures
- Investigate how families might build bridges between generations and share common histories and new experiences through multi-generational new media collaboration.
- Consider how a specific community or interest group builds bonding and bridging social capital through involvement in participatory culture.
[i] Henry Jenkins et al., Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. The MacArthur Foundation, 2006, p. 3