Playlist-Centered Professional Development

Session 4

Paul Allison, Grace Raffaele — New York City Writing Project

Room 1069

Playlists-Centered Professional Development (PCPD) is an innovative model that the New York City Writing Project is beginning to use to bring connected, digital media learning into NYC schools. Our goal is to increase the number of youth who have access to high-quality connected learning in new media arts by working alongside teachers in NYC schools, helping them to build online curriculum projects (playlists) and digital portfolio assessment systems (badges). We are helping teachers to integrate digital media learning into their academic curriculum, which allows us to meet youth where they are: in classrooms during the school day.

We have found a fit between the NYCWP and LRNG in that we are both open, networked organizations. With LRNG we are able to give teachers and youth the ability to use playlists (curated sets of digital projects) from around the country on the platform. The NYCWP uses LRNG to give us the flexibility and capacity to collaborate with a shared platform rather than creating within our own silo. Another important value that NYCWP shares with LRNG has to do with who builds the content. Educators and youth not only use the projects on LRNG, they are curriculum creators as well. And LRNG’s capacity to support educators and youth to become curriculum creators and assessors is at the heart of this work of the NYCWP: we are developing a professional development framework where the NYCWP will work with teachers to craft playlists rich in digital media learning for youth in their schools.

Conversational Practice

After a brief orientation to the New York City Writing Project and our work in NYC schools using Youth Voices and LRNG, we will show a couple of playlists and the work on Youth Voices as examples. Most of the time will be given to educators and youth in our workshop to create an XP (digital learning experience) then share it with others with the idea of fitting them together as a playlist. This should lead to plenty of conversation.