Recently, participatory culture has become a key term for media literacy research. Henry Jenkins pointed to new media literacies within contemporary societies, which are closely related to participatory culture according to Jenkins. The present study seeks to elucidate how youth-orientated media literacy learning should be supported within Japan. To that aim, the paper focuses on peer-group workshops and proposes a means of facilitating new media literacies.

The study was conducted at a photography workshop program for high-school student members of photography clubs (shashin-bu) organized at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito, Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan. The program participants took photographs and discussed them. With the ultimate objective of holding a photo exhibition in Mito, the program consisted of six peer-review workshops and exhibition preparations.

The participant in the present study was a 16-year-old male member of the photograph club at X high school. The participant joined a group that consisted of a professional photographer, some amateur-photographer volunteers and some other high-school students. The participant made comments about both his own photographs and those of the other group members. The researcher made field notes of the interactions for subsequent analysis.

The objective of the conducted analysis was to describe the learning processes within the program. The analysis revealed the following three important stages:

Stage 1: Verbalization

Stage 2: Construction of a collective gaze

Stage 3: Discovery/creation of one's own gaze

In Stage 1, the participant was able to verbalize his values and perspectives through peer support. In Stage 2, he was able to share his experiences, perspectives, and sense of values as a member of the community and, thus, construct a collective gaze. Finally, in Stage 3, assisted by the collective gaze, the participant was also able to discover/create his own gaze. These findings suggest that peer-group workshops can help students learn and acquire the skills of a collective intelligence, which are core skills for media literacy within participatory culture.

From 1998 until 2006, The National Literacy Strategy Framework for Teaching was a practical tool to help teachers in delivering Literacy Hour classes. Although the framework clarified its objectives related to the specification and development of literacy skills, it also presented difficulties for some teachers in drawing together a range of objectives to create short blocks of work. To investigate how a good teacher delivers the framework, this study analyzes recorded data for some actual Literacy Hour classes given in Lancashire. Bernadette Wood was introduced to the researcher by the Local Education Authority as being the best teacher of Literacy Hour classes in Lancashire. She was the head teacher and also a class teacher at a primary school.

Within the unit using the “The Lady of Shallot” as its text, Wood focused on an objective related to “interpretation,” referring to entering into the story-world, and used an inspirational teaching method to stimulate the feelings and interests of the pupils. She also selected two other objectives related to “analysis,” as approaches to elucidating the story-world from the outside. Although these objectives are all from the same category of “Reading Comprehension,” the teacher did not locate the analyzing task between the interpreting tasks. That decision was motivated by her realization that the pupil's thoughts moving in and out of the story-world might suffocate her inspirational teaching methods for the interpreting tasks. In addition, she also selected an objective from the “Writing Composition” category, and located that task, of writing a poetry review on “The Lady of Shallot”, at the end of the unit in order to effectively integrate both the interpreting and analyzing tasks. In that way, Wood created a coherent short block of work.