This document summarizes a presentation on increasing the authenticity of English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum through the use of media. It discusses challenges with current ELA standards and curriculum being outdated and irrelevant. It defines media and authenticity, and how schema theory supports using modern media forms to make classic texts more relevant. Examples are given of merging classic literature with modern media like music and video games. The conclusion is that ELA fundamentally involves media design, and curriculum must evolve alongside changing media to engage students through forms they commonly use.

1. 2010 Global Education Conference Session
By Terry Heick

2. English that Matters:
Increasing ELA Authenticity
through Media

3. Agenda
1. What’s wrong with the ELA that we’ve got?
2. What underlying assumptions support these ideas?
3. What exactly are “media” and “authenticity,” and what do
they have to do with ELA?
4. What is schema, and how does it fit in here?
5. What does a “reformed,” media-driven ELA unit look like?
6. Questions

4. Thesis
While we focus on the minutiae of education, we're
forgetting the inseparable social components—or
social arena--of authentic learning.
The process of innovating an increasingly
irrelevant ELA curriculum can be initiated
through a focus on the art and science of media
design.

5. Current Challenges
1. Increasingly awkward, dated, and irrelevant
standards.
Common Core, Grade 8: “Acquire and use
accurately grade-appropriate
general academic and domain-specific words and
phrases; gather
vocabulary knowledge when considering a word or
phrase important to
comprehension or expression.”

6. Current Challenges
2. Accordingly numb curriculum and curricular
resources.

7. Current Challenges
3. “Professional Learning Communities” that
“unpack” said uneven standards to ensure
“proficiency” on end-of-the-year exam.
This renders institutionally-centered learning, not
authentic, student-centered learning.

8. Current Challenges
4. Intervention models to “support” students to
“master” a model of school that remains sterile and
non-authentic.

9. Conclusion
Educators must be fluent users of complex and
modern media, and seamlessly merge those media
forms into rigorous, student-centered learning experiences.
Not Technology. Authenticity.

10. Moby Dick is Dead.
"A classic is
something that
everybody wants
to have read
and nobody wants
to read."
-Mark Twain.

11. Fortunately….
Modern media can also
effortlessly bring “classic”
(read: culturally detached)
media into focus.

12. “Intelligence is diverse, dynamic, and distinct.“
Sir Ken Robinson
Are our schools?
Is our Curriculum? Our instruction?
Our methods of measuring success in schools?

13. Defining Authenticity
Broadly, Authenticity refers to differentiated work that
meets the needs of learners. This can be in regards to
curriculum, curricular resources, instructional strategies, or
social and physical environment.
More specifically, let’s consider a framework.

15. Ten Underlying Assumptions of a
21st Century ELA Curriculum
1. Authentic learning should result in personal and/or social change.
2. Our current system of education is inadequate.
3. ELA—roughly put as “reading and writing”—provide foundational skills and
concepts within any system of learning.
4. ELA should therefore provide leadership in innovating curriculum.
5. The legacy of ELA is tied to works and thinkers that have been dead for
centuries, and/or that is written in single-media forms not commonly or
“seamlessly” consumed by modern learners.

16. 6. While new forms are undoubtedly necessary, it will likely
require reform to get there.
7. Rich ELA curriculum is media-centered.
8. Changing forms of media are a byproduct of rapid technology
progression and innovative user adoption.
9. Media now has significant social dynamics.
10. Merging classic and modern media forms to mine their
considerable potential can not only improve learning, but
provide scaffolding for ELA educators as we seek out new forms
of learning are sought.
Ten Underlying Assumptions of a
21st Century ELA Curriculum

17. Existing Forms
R e f o r m
New Forms

18. Examples of Merging Classic and
Modern Media

19. Sample Prompt
Robert Frost was very clear about the need For spaces in
life—both physical and emotional. In some works, he
explored the grandness of solitude, while in others
emphasizing the interdependence of the human
experience. If he were alive today, Robert Frost
would not “like” facebook.

20. Sample Prompt
As a modern pop star, one could say that Lady
Gaga symbolizes the intellectual superficiality
and bankrupt morality of our culture. If she
were alive today, Emily Dickinson would not
have Lady Gaga on any of her iTunes playlists.

21. Sample Prompt
Wendell Berry, perhaps our nation’s greatest living
writer, was known to criticize what he called
“dispossessed living.” With this in mind, Wendell
Berry would have no problem shopping at his local
Wal-Mart.

22. What is “media”?
Media: A vehicle enabling the intentional communication
of a thought or idea; a showcase for a message.

23. ELA = The Art & Science
of Media Design
The science of powerful communication lies in using
specific “components” that can be independently and
interdependently manipulated.
The art lies in design decisions of how to effectively use
these components, often in innovative ways to convey a
compelling message to an intentional audience.

24. Technology constantly evolves
the interdependence of media.
(single media multimedia social media)
However, media is media;
one supplements,
detracts from,
challenges,
ignores,
or builds upon
the next.
This is the fertile ground of a 21st century ELA curriculum.

25. Tone
Theme
Diction
Literary Devices (Irony, Metaphor, etc.)
Persuasion and Propaganda
Mood
Author Purpose
“What’d they say and how’d they say it?”
Literary Elements (setting, characterization, etc.)

26. Thinking about Media Patterns
Complex Thinking about Complex
Media
Complex Thinking about Simple
Media
Simple Thinking about Complex Media
Simple Thinking about Simple Media

27. Media: Static and Dynamic
Static (Silently Interactive) Dynamic (Overtly Interactive)
Novels
Poems
Graffiti
Essays
Letters
Murals
Signs
Speeches
Editorial Cartoons
Television & “Web 1.0” videos
Photographs and Posters
Paintings
Timelines
Music
RSS feeds
Videogames
Websites
Blogs
Glogster
Interactive Timelines
Youtube videos (annotation,
comments)
Discussions
Twitter stream
Facebook newsfeed
Emails & Text Messaging
Zune/Ping/playlist.com
Word Clouds/Tagxedo
iTunes store
Stumbleupon, Digg, etc.

28. The current trend of media is one of convergence and
interactivity. This makes modern media a gold mine for
extracting and showcasing current national standards and
tangent initiatives (ACT, SAT, Common Core, P21, NCTE)

29. Convergence of Media

30. from the Appendix: Selected NCTE/IRA Standards for English
Language Arts Pertaining to 21st Century Literacies:
1.Students read a wide range of print and non-print texts to build an
understanding of texts, themselves, and of the cultures of the
United States and the world.
A strong case could be made
that this is not a single
recommendation of 12, but
the heart of ELA.

31. Why does Media matter?
Schema.

32. Schema
Schema refers to a cognitively native framework for
making sense of ideas.
Roughly put, existing old stuff we already know
helps us to make sense of new stuff we don’t.
By using native media, we’re using “stuff” they’ve
seen before so that they might master skills and
concepts they haven’t via transfer.

33. Media leverages existing learner schema.

34. Schema

35. Schema

36. Integrating Authenticity
How?

37. “Integrating these skills when deep into the
curriculum mapping process is a natural way to
ensure their genuine development in the
classroom.”
Heidi Hayes Jacobs
Upgrading the Curriculum,
Curriculum21’s “Essential Education for a Changing
World”

38. Standards
Curriculum
Instruction
Forcing authenticity

39. Literary Music Videogame
“Everything Rises Must
Converge” (F. O’Connor)
Lil’ Kings (Frank Walker X)
"I Have A Dream" (King)
“I Hear America Singing”
(Whitman)
"I, Too, Hear America Singing" by
(Hughes)
“Let America Be America Again”
(Hughes)
“The House on Mango Street”
excerpt (S. Cisneros)
"America" (Nas)
"Black Zombie“ (Nas)
"This Ain't Livin" (2pac)
"Po Folks“ (Nappy Roots)
“Brown-eyed Girl” (Van Morrison)
“American Pie” (Don Mclean)
“The Invisible Man” (Public Enemy)
“Southern Man” (Neil Young)
“Sweet Home Alabama” (Lynyrd
Skynyrd)
Grand Theft Auto 4
The Sims
Fallout 3
Metal Gear Solid 4
Websites, Blogs & Apps
The American
Experience
Non-Fiction
http://tiny.cc/wordclock
http://www.google.com/trends
iTunes music store
“Racism and the Economy”
(Wendell Berry)
“Dreaming America” by (J. C.
Oates)
“Dreams of my Father” (Obama)
“The Souls of Black Folk”
(Dubois)
Podcast Video Social Media
http://tiny.cc/NPRPodcast
“This American Life” podcast
series
“The American Dream” (G. Carlin,
youtube)
Niko Bellic, Grand Theft Auto
http://tiny.cc/appalachiafb

41. Conclusions
1. ELA is, fundamentally and perhaps unwittingly, the art
and science of media design.
2. Media is diverse, dynamic, and social.
3. Media leverages schema, encourages transfer, and supports
meaningful differentiation.
4. Technology constantly evolves media. ELA, therefore, must
evolve in parallel.
5. This is not an either-or proposition of technology-based
media versus novels and poems. Because of the schema,
media can endorse and otherwise bring into focus
seemingly irrelevant, dated single-media texts as we seek
out new forms of learning.

42. 12 Next Steps
1. Close examination of media forms
2. Deconstructing the “21st Century ELA Framework”
3. “Personal & Social Change”: A Closer Look
4. Common Core standards in a 21st Century Classroom
5. Media-Culture relationships
6. Technology and Self-Directed Learning Models
7. “Education Reform” vs. New Forms of learning
8. The Media-Supports-Assessment Model
9. Project, Problem and Inquiry-based learning
10. Media Best Practices
11. Barriers to Media Adoption
12. Rethinking Differentiation

51. Questions?