Weekly Response 6
My experience in the field this week was yet again another week full of a lot of learning experiences for my students and myself. I was able to go to the Arts Academy at Benjamin Rush twice this week, Tuesday and Wednesday, but Monday was a holiday (Columbus Day). I also visited the Science Leadership Academy on Thursday for two American History classes. This week I helped with a mock interview lesson, continued working one on one with students researching for their stories, and learned how to design two American History unit plans that actually allow students to create multimedia projects that are community based. The week went well, however, there were some bumps in the road which should be expected on any new journey you take.
One of these bumps actually relates to one of the seven great debates in the media literacy movement. It occurred after both of Louis Mazza’s classes and our prep time discussions on Tuesday. During Mazza’s lunch he allows students to use the Mac lab to work on other class work or anything else they need to do on the computer. He had to step out at one point and I was left to watch the students for a few minutes. I recognized one of the students from the Narrative Filmmaking class and decided to talk to him about his work in the class. Unfortunately, this young man saw my idea of a friendly and helpful conversation as a way to complain about the class. He claimed that he was frustrated with the class because the description had been solely based on producing films and not learning film history. Mazza had decided to introduce the history aspect of the course to show the students different ways that Hollywood has made films and as a collaboration with another teacher’s history class. I tried to explain this to the young man, but he ranted about how disappointed he was with the structure of the course which included a film history test that was given last week. A few minutes later Mazza came back in and the young man decided to switch his attention to him. I decided it was probably my time to leave.
This young man’s frustration is similar to one of the debates about media literacy in Renee Hobb’s article, The Seven Great Debates in the Media Literacy Movement. The debate that I am referring to is whether media production should be an essential feature of media literacy education. In this instance the young man claims that he only signed up for a production based course, but Mazza wants to have students watch older films and read material about its history to help analyze them more deeply. I had not even considered that my discussion with this student had been related to this debate until I came to class on Thursday. I was glad that I tried to explain the importance of the history side of the course to the student because I think it is just as important as the production aspect. His frustration proves to me that most students chose a course for the production possibilities rather than the chance to talk about media literacy content. However, I do think there can be a happy medium between the two and I am trying to help Mazza with that right now. I also believe that a course could work just as well with one over the other. Yet I still believe the ability to give students an opportunity to produce their own multimedia projects is very essential in helping them understand not only how to create it, but the potential messages behind them.
After reading David Cooper Moore’s article, Asking Questions First: Navigating Popular Cultures and Transgression in an Inquiry-Based Media, I am hoping that Mazza will be using popular culture influenced films in the course. Since he is using very old films from the 1940s to show the students, I would really love it if we could find clips from a recent film that plays with either the same film techniques or hidden messages for the students. Since he wants to show the entire version of the older films, I think smaller clips of new films that the students are familiar with will work nicely into the course. I guess I also got this idea from reading about Larissa Pahomov’s experience as an English teacher using popular culture to help students understand older, romance texts (Romantic Love is a Myth, or How to Unpack a Genre). I may even suggest this idea to make websites–instead of the young man’s dreaded test–to Mazza. Since this is an elective course and not every student is completely into the idea of making films, this would be an alternative assessment for the history aspect of the course.
As for my experience at SLA this week, I actually walked in on the beginning of two benchmark projects for the two American History courses. One is about students creating a multimedia ad campaign to promote voting in America and the second is getting students to research and learn about the history in their surrounding neighborhood. I am really excited to see how these projects turn out and the latter I am going to be providing assistance to students for their research and potentially production stages. It’s great to actually be able to see and be a part of a unit that I would like to one day teach my own students.
Overall it was a week packed full of new experiences for me, ones that I will use to help me through the next several weeks. I am still afraid of the timeline for completing the projects at Rush. However, I am staying optimistic and hoping for the best.
Works Cited
- http://mediaeducationlab.com/pub/asking-questions-first-navigating-popular-culture-and-transgression-inquiry-based-media-literacy
- http://www.medialit.org/reading-room/seven-great-debates-media-literacy-movement-circa-2001
- http://digitalis.nwp.org/resource/2763
Lisa: Impressive work!!!!
Thank you for sharing this wonderful experience at Rush. i loved the way you connected it to the david cooper moor’s article.Please remember to put a citation in APA format and reference at the end pf the blog.
Yonty