Participatory Culture Reflection

“If it were possible to define generally the mission of education, it could be said that its fundamental purpose is to ensure that all students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in public, community, [Creative] and economic life.”

-New London Group (2000, p. 9)

     Throughout the history of the United States the central purpose of a public education was to help make our citizens better informed, and effective critical thinkers.   The belief was that if citizens were both informed and able to think critically they would be more able to participate effectively in the young representative democracy that the founders created in the late 1700's following it's revolution against Britain.  

     Over the past 40 years, face to face social participation has dramatically declined.  Jenkins, for example,  discusses the decline in collective activities such as league bowling.  So are we bowling alone, or just evolving in the way in which we interact and participate as a result of new media and technology. 

     This new participatory culture can be used in the classroom to speed up the interaction between teacher to student and student to student.  This blog for example allows the participant to respond to and reflect upon the ideas and writings of the teacher and the other students in the class.  I think that the main benefit of this new participatory culture is mentioned by Jenkins early on in the article, where he defines participatory culture "as 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."
     Although I am not as immersed in this new form of participatory culture as my my niece or nephew are, I still see the value in it.  I have used different modes and felt much more confident and at ease with  "speaking" than I would be in front of a live audience.  We are all not public speakers, and some of us are not as confident as we'd like to be.  Participatory culture allows more to have a voice that can be heard.