Engaging Appalachia: Digital Literacies, Mobile Media, And A Sense Of Place

Objectives: To provide students with an opportunity to explore the intersection of digital and civic engagement through project-based learning; to develop digital literacy skills through critical media practices. Rationale: While it has become a commonplace of sorts to assume that students who have grown up in a period of widespread access to web-based resources and mobile devices will have well-developed digital literacy skills, a growing body of knowledge would seem to suggest that so-called “digital natives” are by no means generationally united in their ability to critically engage in new media practices (Selwyn, 2009; Davies, Halford, & Gibbins, 2012). To compound matters, our classroom practices often tend to stress the importance of critical thinking as it applies to reading the media, with less emphasis on producing media objects. But as Jenkins (2006) notes, “Just as we would not traditionally assume that someone is literate if they can read but not write, we should not assume that someone possesses media literacy if they can consume but not express themselves” (p. 170). Project-based learning provides an opportunity for students to produce media objects as a means of reflecting upon theoretical concepts. As Thomas (2000) notes, in project-based learning, “projects are central, not peripheral to the curriculum” (p. 3); in addition, the projects should enable students to explore critical course learning outcomes through an application of these concepts to “authentic (not simulated) problems or questions” (p. 4). Lee, Blackwell, Drake, & Moran (2014) note that while project-based learning has become fairly well- established in K-12 reform, higher education has been slower in adopting project-based methodologies, even though an emphasis on experiential learning, and a liberal education model informed by the related, Deweyian concept of problem- based learning, are by no means novel concepts on college campuses . . . This activity, and all of the other projects in this course, required students to critically engage in the region in which they found themselves going to school – Southern Appalachia.