Project Literacy Among Youth
(PLAY) is a not-for-profit project that began in 1999 by
Vanessa Domine during her dual stint as a media and technology consultant
for the
Media Workshop New York by day and an NYU doctoral student in Media
Ecology by night. She named her work PLAY
to encapsulate the creative yet critical ways in which young people
can and do use a variety of media technologies. More than a decade
later, our research, teaching and public service can be traced back
to Dr. Domine's experiences in the daily lives of students, teachers
and principals in the New York City Schools.
Our PLAY-ful approach
to media, technology and education is firmly anchored in the theories
of social
constructivism and symbolic
interactionism. Social constructivism essentially rejects the
traditional assumption that the student mind is a blank slate. It
instead offers a perspective that the mind constantly adapts to
new information. We reject the popular “media
effects” movement and instead ascribe young people as active
meaning makers and media producers: Meaning does
not reside in the text itself, rather students overlay the media
text with their own experiences. The classroom is therefore “knowledge-in-action,”
where the individual student experience is inextricably connected
to the meaning making of others.
As teacher educators, the PLAYers
strive to prepare professionals who know how to use media technologies
to make good judgments within a social and political democracy.
We acknowledge that teachers are confronted on a daily basis with
social, political, economic and technological realities that are
inherently bureaucratic in nature. Thus, a major question that guides
our teacher education research is: How can educators reconcile
the tensions and contradictions between the democratizing potential
of new media technologies and the bureaucratic realities of public
education?
Media Workshop New York by day and an NYU doctoral student in 
does
not reside in the text itself, rather students overlay the media
text with their own experiences. The classroom is therefore “knowledge-in-action,”
where the individual student experience is inextricably connected
to the meaning making of others.
program
