Workshop Introduction & Rationale

Introduction to Workshop:

From an early age, children are able to make astute inferences from the things they see and interact with in the media. But even well before that developmental stage occurs, youth are endlessly bombarded by images, sounds, and representations that they might absorb and internalize, sometimes without their awareness, that can have lasting impact on them. Stories are an important part of learning essential lessons about the world and about oneself, and they largely make up what is streamed, programmed, uploaded, and viewed virally everyday. Storytelling is an innately human ability, and when it is at its most effective its powers appear like magic, able to conjure earnest emotional responses or shifts in worldview. Though their ingredients are less toe of newt and more word choice and syntax, their ability to conjure insight and wonder is still every bit as captivating. 

This workshop unit explores podcasts and its many approaches to storytelling within an afterschool tinkering workshop context. By engaging elementary-aged youth to experiment and construct their own narratives within the confines of audio-based storytelling, children will learn about their necessary components and how to maximize their ability to inform, inspire, and entertain. Starting with a research phase and exploring how existing podcasts, episodes, and creators use aspects of writing and the psychology of storytelling, students will next decide on a topic or story idea of their own and begin the work to craft an episode or more of their own podcast. Students will conduct the necessary research or writing to produce their primary recordings, supplemented by interviews and given texture with use of additional recordings or found audio, and will collaborate with peers by sharing feedback and shaping their episodes. Through the recording and editing process, youth will come to understand and engage more deeply with concepts like audience awareness, persuasiveness, and commercialism. The unit will end upon the completion of at least one episode of their podcast and files will be shared across the group and within the wider community of the afterschool program and Clubhouse space so that youth will also engage with feedback and experiences of being a content creator in a way that maintains safety and stokes reflection. By offering a firsthand experience of constructing a consumable artifact for “public” entertainment, youth will develop a better sense of how digital media utilizes foundational, maybe familiar, tactics to convey a message or theme and to attract an audience. These experiences have the power to become a core component of how youth develop literacy and creativity alike when it comes to the allure and pervasiveness of stories in the media they consume.

Grade Levels:*

Grades 3 - 6

*Tinkering Afterschool also employs near-peer mentors, who are transitional age youth/adults between ages 16-24, and early career educators that co-facilitate activities and projects for youth.

Duration:

1.5 - 2 hour sessions at 8 - 12 workshop sessions total

Vocabulary:

Language arts and dramaturgical concepts: perspective/point of view, allegory, metaphor, characterization, trope/convention, conflict, climax, dialogue, idiom, myth, protagonist, resolution

Technical and digital media concepts: consumer vs. producer, audience, aesthetic, ethics, foley, engineer, intellectual property, prototype, remix, primary recording

Context & Rationale:

The context of the educational setting in the field of education is located in the afterschool space, generally in community spaces or museums but just as often in classrooms or libraries. I am the Manager of Youth Tinkering Programs at the Exploratorium, a science center/museum in San Francisco that first began in the 1960s, and run a longtime program partnership called Tinkering Afterschool between the museum and a few community-based organizations, among them the Boys & Girls Clubs and the YMCA. The program is a research-practice collaboration that works on three levels: 1) as a series of weekly workshops for elementary-aged youth around the tinkering/making pedagogies that the Explo had a large part in creating (it is very Piaget-Constructivist in nature) in the afterschool space, 2) as a professional and leadership development program for early career educators / transitional age youth, who co-design activities and co-facilitate them and are themselves “alumni” of the programs, and 3) as part of a learning laboratory culture of the Exploratorium that investigates the dimensions of learning and on the different formats of education across both formal and informal contexts through research, exhibits, public programs, and residencies. Learners in the context of this unit are elementary-aged youth between grades 2-6 that are the active participants in the weekly workshops. 

The youth that make up the core audience of Tinkering Afterschool are young, and because of that it is a challenge implementing some aspects of media literacy, especially those that by nature dwell on notions like risk and safety. Instead, the aspiration was to use forms of media that children are already consuming to develop understandings around how they relay and construct messages and meaning. Deconstructing media, like podcasts, would allow students to parse components of stories, themes, and messages in ways similar to grammatical dissections of a sentence, and how sounds are edited together to form a syntax of narrative. Because tinkering defines the pedagogy and practice of the program, inviting youth into making their own podcasts and narratives also allows for this entry into media literacy to satisfy a number of other needs, namely the experiential aspects and pursuit of tool explorations that community partners expect. Situating students to also work collaboratively, by sharing their in-progress podcast episodes and offering feedback (or direct contributions in the form of interviews or acting parts), addresses the social significance of media literacy and project-based learning, too, making this unit a compelling harmony of needs and interests. Tessa Jolls of the Center for Media Literacy would agree, writing, “Media literacy, with its emphasis on critical analysis and media production, lends itself well to designing and organizing new curricular resources utilizing overall frameworks that support connected learning” (Jolls, 2008, p68).

Through the playful learning of tools that support audio recording and playback, as well as with ways stories can be constructed through word choice and tonal inflections in the voice, students will be building upon their traditional literacies around language that also allows them to colorize their narratives with pop culture references, commentaries from their home, familial, or cultural heritages, even social dynamics in places like school or the playground, or the Clubhouse.