This article discusses the participatory potential of YouTube, a social website that allows users to upload, view, and share video clips. The author provides examples of how YouTube was incorporated into a course as part of a “mosh‐pit” pedagogy that involved both students and teachers in engaging with a variety of YouTube videos.

In this second part of a series on the use of the video‐sharing website YouTube (http://www.youtube.com), the author suggests assignments that can engage students with YouTube and support their classroom readings. The author also explains Creating a YouTube account The options and information that accompany each YouTube video Searching strategies Creating My Favorites and Playlists pages

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A cohort of secondary English preservice teachers was engaged in a series of articles designed to bring about a shift in their initial autonomous views of literacy toward a more sociocultural “Discourses and literacies” perspective. Students wrote an essay in which they articulated their initial assumptions about what literacy was and what teachers of literacy do. They were then introduced to a sociocultural (multiliteracies) theory of literacy, as well as to the important concept of literacy events, by reading, writing about, and discussing selected academic articles and chapters. To deepen their explorations of Discourses, literacies, and literacy events, students then analyzed scenes from selected films, noting how they represented a variety of literacy events. Finally, students designed a variety of literature and composition lessons that revealed the Discourses perspective on literacy that they had been exploring.

Teachers are often unsure about their critical position toward and knowledge about mass media. As a consequence, they are unsure about engaging their students in media analyses. To begin acquiring a new critical media literacy discourse and then introduce it to their students, teachers can read the many valuable accounts by other educators who have conceptualized, or engaged students in, critical media literacy projects. But teachers often do not have the time to read dozens of articles, book chapters, and books. The author of this column introduces another way into the discourse of critical media literacy—a way that involves learning and thinking about the media through critical documentaries that explain and critique them. Taking up such documentaries is not only less time consuming, but it is also as valuable an introductory experience as taking up printed texts on the subject.