Review of “…MySpace as a Contemporary Framework for Literary Analysis”

              Elizabeth Lewis’ MySpace study examines how two experienced teachers, Caitlin and Barb, asked their English students to create a multimodal literary analysis of a character via a print-based MySpace page (back in 2007!).  Of course, MySpace isn’t trending like it used to be, and its analog – Facebook – might cease to trend in the near future.  What this study brought to light is not so much the importance of MySpace as the placeholder-digital tool but the pedagogical risks that English teachers take when they engaged in transformed practice (transfer and recreation of Designs of meaning from one context to another).

             What immediately struck me with this design is that because the school district blocked MySpace as a website, Caitlin and Barb asked students to create a print-based version of a MySpace page.  To their surprise, students retained an “academic voice,” which they presumed had to do with the pen and paper association of school, and digital devices with their personal lives.  At first, I thought it was clever that the instructors used the digital practice as a springboard to adapt the assignment.  That way, they could still contain project work in the class, and didn’t have to move students to a computer lab, if available.  This study is a good example of what gets “lost” with transformed practice, especially when the redesign is not a digital-to-digital transformation. 

    
             Back to the topic of trends, I think we have to be careful that we’re not implementing assignments just for novelty’s sake.  For this reason, it might have been difficult to dissect whether students were more engaged because they got to employ a “new” literacy, or if it was because they had a reprieve from more traditional assignments.  Of the pedagogical tensions that stemmed from this study, I thought it was intriguing that the instructors did not learn to navigate MySpace themselves, as they assumed all students had facility with MySpace.  Whether an instructional practice is digital or paper-based, it’s critical that English teachers become versed in the format before asking students to use the form.  

             With this said, I appreciate how Lewis characterized MySpace as a “digital diary/self-portrait/communicative “device.”  Adolescents are going through a developmental phase where they think everyone is concerned about them, so they are especially interested in the “profile.”  In this way, social media platforms (whichever one is most trendy at the time) might be useful for character analysis assignments.  I’m not sure though that I would ask any of my students to use something as personal as their actual Facebook account to complete an assignment.  This article did open my perspective to adapting digital tools for work that does not require computers.