Today, we are thrilled to release the latest publication from the Families and Media Project at an event at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Diverse Families and Media: Using Research to Inspire Design,  by Amber Levinson, Sinem Siyahhan, Briana Pressey, and Katie Headrick Taylor, is a casebook and design guide to inspire educators, practitioners, and designers who create media and programs for children and their families.

Diverse Families and Media was created as a response to a call from practitioners, designers, and producers of children’s media and programs who seek to apply research to their work, but often have difficulty accessing it in specialized journals or because the nature in which the research was conducted or presented may be directed mostly toward academia.

The guide presents case-based design challenges drawn from Families and Media research conducted with families in different regions of the country including New York/New Jersey, the San Francisco Bay Area, Phoenix, and Chicago. Our research focused largely on Latino families, who are the fastest growing group in the U.S. and are projected to make up more than 29% of the nation’s population by 2060. The cases center around topics including fostering learning experiences among siblings, designing for family language learning, learning across different physical settings, engaging the whole family by connecting to heritage culture, and creating on-the-go learning opportunities.

In addition to the design challenges, which can be used in a number of ways (e.g., as a basis for a team or class discussion, to brainstorm and prototype solutions), Diverse Families and Media also includes new design recommendations based on Families and Media research as well as design principles from The New Coviewing: Designing for Learning through Joint Media Engagement (Takeuchi & Stevens, 2011).

Today’s events will kick off with two panels on designing for diversity and connecting home and school with technology. After the panels, a group of designers, practitioners, and producers will team up to discuss the case-based challenges and brainstorm ways to refine existing products and programs, or create new ones.

Stay tuned for a follow-up blog post that will recap the panel and design workshop discussions of the release event.

We’re very excited to announce that Tap, Click, Read: Growing Readers in a World of Screens, a new book by Lisa Guernsey and Michael Levine,  is now available for purchase online and in bookstores.

In Tap, Click, Read, Lisa and Michael argue that in order to build strong literacy skills for all young children regardless of their family’s socioeconomic background, we—the adults around them—must fundamentally rethink how a child becomes a fluent reader, and provide the best support that we can.

This means not shrinking away from the world of technology and the ever-growing presence of screens. We can no longer pretend that today’s children will learn to read—or grow up—in a world that is not dominated by digital media.  The authors are not suggesting that technology in itself has the magic answer. Instead, they ask, “How can we take advantage of the devices that are so appealing to young children, and make them tools that teach valuable skills?”

We’re thrilled that the AAP has just softened its long-held stance of “no screens” to supporting parents engaging with their children around screen media. Tap, Click, Read offers research-based insight on:

• How parents can help their kids get ahead and become stronger readers
• What teachers need to know about technology and reading
• Support that policy makers need to be giving their community
• Making a smarter app store
• How to fix the literacy gap
• What the literacy gap means to the American economy

The book was inspired by the work of the Campaign for Grade Level Reading, a national network of more than 150 cities focused on improving literacy in their communities, and funded by the Pritzger Children’s Initiative.

For more information about the book, please check out tapclickread.org, follow the #tapclickread hashtag on Twitter, and “like” our Facebook page.