Suzanne Miller’s “English Teacher Learning For New Times”
describes how urban preservice teachers and practicing teachers implemented a
digital video design unit for grades 5-12. Throughout her description of this design’s effectiveness to
enhance multimodal skills and inquiry, Miller argues that “traditional
schooling and literacy are not adequate for the 21st century public,
civic, and workplace spheres.
Significant changes will be needed in schooling, in teachers, and,
especially, in educational beliefs about the status/design of non-print and
print-mixed modes as ways of knowing and communicating (p. 63).” She contends that teachers (and in this
context, English teachers specifically) need various professional development
opportunities to learn how to use technology such as digital video design
before we may be able to teach our students the same process.
Digital video composing allows orchestration of visual, kinetic and verbal modes of learning. We’ve been discussing multimodal learning extensively in this course, thus, I appreciated how Miller framed this idea to Lankshear and Knobel’s (2003) notion of performance knowledge. Giving students more facility with technological tools enhances performance knowledge: knowing how to find, gather, use, communicate and create new ways of envisioning assemblages of knowledge. Along with this, design is how people make use of resources available to “realize their interests as makers of a message/text (p. 64).” When our Urban Education class last semester delved more deeply into technology, we used the word “design” to characterize our practices, and Miller’s article gave me context to better understand why we used “design” as opposed to any other word.
The digital video composing unit undeniably allowed multiple modes to orchestrate together for productive learning, and engagement for students like Justin who were “floundering.” As reiterated in an earlier class discussion, incorporating different modes of learning beyond the traditional-linguistic form acknowledges our LD and alternative learners. Since I myself took a Film class in high school that taught me how to use Final Cut Pro (video editing software), I wondered if this kind of unit would be better suited as an integration with another design or film class. The English teacher and Film teacher could align curriculum such that students can learn recording and editing techniques in film, and the project for that class can be a prompt that relates to English class. Off hand, I’m thinking of a film project that asks students to respond to literature.
The DV class group that responded to Marge Piercy’s poem “Barbie Doll” and addressed the negative impact ads have on female body image seemed extremely powerful to engage students in the content, but how do we facilitate this? One of my concerns, which teachers in Miller’s piece echoed is the lack of equipment at school and difficulty with adjusting instructional time for the digital video design piece. I highly agree that educators need to use multimodal literacy practices to become change agents in spaces beyond the classroom, however, I think that school’s infrastructure don’t have professional development opportunities (not any mandatory ones, at least) that are technology-oriented. Without a basic foundation of film, for example, figuring out how to implement this kind of unit design can be overwhelming for a teacher who has to negotiate his or her regular responsibilities. If teachers have this responsibility, they themselves need as much scaffolding and support as possible!
Digital video composing allows orchestration of visual, kinetic and verbal modes of learning. We’ve been discussing multimodal learning extensively in this course, thus, I appreciated how Miller framed this idea to Lankshear and Knobel’s (2003) notion of performance knowledge. Giving students more facility with technological tools enhances performance knowledge: knowing how to find, gather, use, communicate and create new ways of envisioning assemblages of knowledge. Along with this, design is how people make use of resources available to “realize their interests as makers of a message/text (p. 64).” When our Urban Education class last semester delved more deeply into technology, we used the word “design” to characterize our practices, and Miller’s article gave me context to better understand why we used “design” as opposed to any other word.
The digital video composing unit undeniably allowed multiple modes to orchestrate together for productive learning, and engagement for students like Justin who were “floundering.” As reiterated in an earlier class discussion, incorporating different modes of learning beyond the traditional-linguistic form acknowledges our LD and alternative learners. Since I myself took a Film class in high school that taught me how to use Final Cut Pro (video editing software), I wondered if this kind of unit would be better suited as an integration with another design or film class. The English teacher and Film teacher could align curriculum such that students can learn recording and editing techniques in film, and the project for that class can be a prompt that relates to English class. Off hand, I’m thinking of a film project that asks students to respond to literature.
The DV class group that responded to Marge Piercy’s poem “Barbie Doll” and addressed the negative impact ads have on female body image seemed extremely powerful to engage students in the content, but how do we facilitate this? One of my concerns, which teachers in Miller’s piece echoed is the lack of equipment at school and difficulty with adjusting instructional time for the digital video design piece. I highly agree that educators need to use multimodal literacy practices to become change agents in spaces beyond the classroom, however, I think that school’s infrastructure don’t have professional development opportunities (not any mandatory ones, at least) that are technology-oriented. Without a basic foundation of film, for example, figuring out how to implement this kind of unit design can be overwhelming for a teacher who has to negotiate his or her regular responsibilities. If teachers have this responsibility, they themselves need as much scaffolding and support as possible!
Thoai,
ReplyDeleteYou (and Miller) make a great point about how teachers really need to be more educated about technology themselves before assigning digital work for their students. I'm grateful for what we're doing in this class for that reason, but I know there is still much more I need to know before I can successfully implement digital projects and assignments in my classroom, so I will be hoping for continued work through professional development in the future. For the time being, though, I still think there are a decent number of skills we have as teachers and simply as adults that we can already begin working on developing in our students as well, and until we get to a point where our knowledge base about educational technologies is great enough to facilitate projects like the ones mentioned by Miller, I believe we will just have to do our best with what we know, establish clear learning goals for our students, and help them reach those goals through proper scaffolding of work that makes sense for us, our students, our classes, and our schools.
Oh man, I just lost a half-hour of response writing because when I clicked "publish," my browser redirected me to Cal Net authentication. So, now I'm a grump. But let's try this again.
ReplyDeleteThoai, first of all, I, too, appreciate Miller's framing of multimodal learning as performance knowledge and design learning. I'm glad you were able to make the connection between this concept and Jabari's class, and I think you're absolutely right that what Miller is writing about is exactly what Jabari wanted us to explore. Maybe he should assign Miller's article as context for his design learning assignments.
As far as the concerns you raise about available wherewithal - whether intellectual, financial, technological, temporal, or energetic - you have a solid point. These issues, though, as you suggest, demonstrate the very value of interdisciplinary collaboration. Nowadays, most campuses - even the lowest-resourced schools - have some sort of tech person on faculty or staff. Whether a digital animation teacher, a graphic design teacher, or a video production teacher, these people can become vital resources in planning such projects for our students - and not just as support, but as truly collaborative contributors. Maybe a non-ELA teacher is teaching a set of skills (like video animation, photography, or film theory) that could enhance, expand, and deepen our students' engagement with their English materials. Perhaps they are even teaching materials that could overlap with the content we are teaching. Those teachers might have some great ideas about a multimodal design project for our English class; thus, it is important we consider them in the planning stages of such projects. Technologically, we don't have it all, but someone else in our school might.
As far as tying a DV project into the material of our classroom, I've thought up a list of possible ideas (which I posted on my own blog - http://thefutureofclassroomsistechnicolor.blogspot.com/2014/04/project-2-digital-feedback.html). In addition to that list, your blog post made me think of the possibility of a unit which is entirely focused around critical media and film literacy, in which students engage in deep "literary" analysis of a film (which could be an adaptation of a book/play or not) or a news broadcast or commercials. Then, as a final assessment, they could employ the lenses they have been developing over the course of the unit to create their own DV project, complete with reflective analysis of their own stylistic and structural "literary" decisions.
Just some thoughts.