September 2011 M-Passioned Member: Rebecca Herr-Stephenson

Rebecca Herr-Stephenson

Name: Rebecca Herr-Stephenson

Title: Research Fellow

Organization: Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop

Currently, I’m a research fellow with the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, an independent research and innovation organization focused on digital media technologies to advance children’s learning. Our research is designed to better understand how digital media can support  learning both in and out of school for children ages 5-13. My work over the past year has focused on new approaches to teaching with media (including pedagogical techniques and industry approaches to making media for young people), as well as understanding technologies like e-readers and the ways in which they can be used to support parents and children in reading, playing, and learning together.

My latest media literacy project is a co-authored book (with Catherine L. Belcher) called Teaching Harry Potter: The Power of Imagination in Multicultural Classrooms, just released last month by Palgrave MacMillan. The book examines teachers’ experiences as they share the Harry Potter texts with their students and provides a critique of the constraints on literacy instruction in contemporary public schools. While conducting the research for Teaching Harry Potter, Catherine and I worked closely with three expert teachers who were using the Harry Potter series in different classrooms, including a second grade bilingual class, a middle school special education class, and a high school language arts class in an urban charter school. In addition to the teachers’ stories (told mainly in their own words), we provide background and commentary on various elements of educational practice and policy, including teacher training, retention, and the uses of digital media and popular culture in the classroom.

Our intention with the book was to give readers a sense of what teachers experience when choosing to incorporate “unauthorized” and (in some contexts) controversial popular literature in public school classrooms. We wanted to help readers understand the process and politics of choosing to teach Harry Potter in the contemporary educational climate.

Potter is, in my humble (if not slightly biased) opinion, a perfect topic for discussing media literacy. Not only is the series an example of a property that has crossed multiple media formats (e.g. books, films, video games, fan communities, etc.), but the stories themselves have much to say about learning with, through, and about media. As we discuss in the book, learning to access, interpret, and critique media (and the structures of power behind media messages) is an enormous part of what Harry and his friends must do to defeat Voldemort and restore peace in the Wizarding World.

I think media literacy is an essential skill for living in a media environment that is nothing short of overwhelming. Media literacy gives a flexible set of criteria for making choices about media and offers options for “talking back” to media messages, both of which I think are important coping skills for contemporary life.

I’m most excited about seeing an increase in media literacy research that examines participatory culture. I think that the media that is being produced by “regular people,” especially youth, are fantastic indicators of cultural and technological change.

I became a NAMLE member in order to join the community of scholars and practitioners working in media literacy. I attended my first NAMLE conference this summer in Philadelphia and am looking forward to many more conversations and collaborations with people I met there. The media literacy community is truly amazing in its dedication to the education, citizenship, and well-being of youth and adults, and I am happy to be an “official” part of it.

Category: M-Passioned Members