Chair: A Series of Documentaries

http://vimeo.com/38932115

Teaching Idea

A teaching idea for our units of instruction, inspired by the Buckingham reading seems like it should come more naturally than what I’m finding to be the case. Part of that is I feel like Buckingham just reiterates what Hobbs says, but just in a different way. So I’m going to take my inspiration from Buckingham in the fact that the different facets of understanding the media she talks about are present inside the teaching idea in one way or another. Those aspects she says we ought to focus on include: production, language, representation and audiences.

Our unit of instruction is focusing on storytelling through different media. One idea I had for this would come early on in the structure of the unit. Have 5 different media bits placed in different areas of the room (this can include a two minute clip from a podcast, a 2 minute portion of a music video, a photo essay, a written creative brief, non-fiction essay and a newspaper column). Have the students get into groups around each media. Give them a few minutes to just purely encounter the media, telling the students they only need to read the media and not necessarily delve any deeper than that with this first look at it. Then after everyone has looked over their specific medium, ask them to look at it again, only this time talking to each other about what makes this medium unique from other types of media. Have them write some of their findings down on a piece of paper for the group or a group worksheet you provide (tell the students they will report their findings to the class). Have the students look at their media again and this time talk to each other about what they think the story being told is and what the message of that story is. How does this medium tell the story specifically? Who is it for? All of these things are written on the worksheet. Have the students come together and share their media and findings. After each presentation, ask the students in general this question: How is performance a part of the way this medium tells its story? I think this connection needs to be partly made because it is a theatre class and the final goal would be to get the students to create their own story told through some sort of medium with a performative element (this goes along with the idea that you’ve talked about the fact that you can construe many many different things to be performance, writing an essay is a type of performance).

This teaching idea supports the ideas of representation and language and audience. Audience is found in the question of “who is this for?” language is present as the students investigate how the story is told specifically in the medium. And representation is maybe the trickiest, but I think it is most prevalent in the asking the students how performance is present in the creation and the actual product of the medium. How does the author represent himself in the piece? How is it a performance of the author’s identity or her perception of others’ identities? Those really are the most interesting questions to me inside of a secondary theatre class. But it would require quite a bit of background knowledge

Critical Questions and Authorship in Theatre

I think the critical questions Hobbes gives about authors/audiences, messages/meaning, representation/reality, go right along with creating and otherwise participating in theatre. I think these questions can be asked in a classroom after reading a script or as students perform scenes for one another or even as the class devises a piece of original theatre. In the first instance, the questions could help students engage critically with the script and give them permission to not look at a written play as some sort of gospel that you can’t argue with. It also helps to contemporize scripts that may feel removed from the students’ time and place (which will be most of the work you study in a high school setting). What I mean by contemporizing the script is that it helps the students see they can engage with an older script just as they could with a newer script. The questions would also be a helpful thing to use after students perform for each other. Using the critical questions will help student audience think more critically and deeply about their peer’s work, again giving permission to think critically about theatre. It also will help the student actors become more responsible, deliberate theatre practitioners, as they realize that their work will need to be able to stand up to the questions in those three areas. This responsibility is exactly what would make these questions useful when devising a piece. Taking a moment to self-reflect on the theatre the class is making, using these questions will help them know if the story and message they are wanting to portray is being communicated.

I may modify the questions about author and audience. I think the question given “Who is the author and what is the purpose?” is a fine question and would be useful for reading theatre but perhaps it also needs some clarification for adolescents. You can look at several types of authors in theatre: there is the playwright (which is one kind of author, perhaps the original author of a written play), the director (who writes the full vision of the world of the play), or you could say that a designer is an author (i.e. the costume designer is a co-author of the visual world of the play and the characters) and you could argue that actors are authors of characters as their choices bring to life the person on the page. Perhaps for Hobbes, the most useful author to look at would be the playwright but I believe that thinking about these other people in theatre as authors as well is rather an interesting and potentially powerful thing. It’s important to see that maybe it’s not so cut and dry when it comes to authorship, especially when it comes to theatre, which is so collaborative in nature. So I would make sure that we created a working class definition for which author we’re looking for when we talk about this question. Is it different in a written piece than performed? Professional vs. amateur? Does it depend on what we’re studying at the moment?

I think I could use Retrospective in my classroom to discuss media analysis/evaluation in a theatre classroom. It is one way to begin a conversation about how we analyze the visual elements of a production and how that may affect the message/meaning of the play just as much as the words. This particular piece is also interesting look at evolution of a project. I could begin a devising project by looking at these photos, analyzing them and then talk about how when you devise, things change over time. Then the photos and the class analysis of them could be used as the basis or inspiration of a devised piece.

Transmedia and Theatre

I focused on the sections focusing on transmedia navigation and networking. An important thing to point out first is the idea of convergence culture, or in the terms of this article transmedia. This deals with the fact that no one thing in the media is happening in a vacuum. Different media influence each other and come together to create one larger sort of work of art or cultural experience. An example of this is the idea that you can read Harry Potter, then watch the film and then log onto a fan website and comment on the ending of the seventh book and then log onto another site and create your own works of fan fiction. One phenomenon has many portals for participation and invites that participation in many ways; it’s not just about passively absorbing a piece of media any more.

This leads me to the first thing I think is important for teachers to take into account and use in their classrooms. In this convergence culture, students are not just consumers, they are also participants who have an effect on the course of the conversation between these media and potentially the outcome/product of the media. That is potentially very empowering. As a teacher, it is important to first acknowledge that many of the students will be participating in the highly interactive transmedia conversation and can easily move from one medium to the next with comfort and are used to being creators as well as consumers. Second it is important for a teacher to recognize that although the students may be used to the highly participator nature of a convergence culture, they may not have the tools to discover or create meaning from that participation. It is important to harness the first and as that empowerment is harnessed to simultaneously teach the students media literacy and responsibility skills.

A way to simultaneously teach responsible media use and media literacy skills and harness the students’ abilities and comfort in the convergence culture is by creating a project in class that combines the two. The drama III class is working on Shakespeare scenes. They are required to read and scan the scene from a paper script and then write about their findings. They will also perform the scene for the live audience of their peers but part of the assignment is to come up with a partnering use of media for their scene. This could look like a blog in the voice of their character or a blog that turns into a forum of ideas of how to present the scene or posting a filming of their scene on youtube or creating a mediated version of the scene as well (perhaps they have a character in their scene on second life and an actor works that while the others do a live performance or they put on a play in second life or sims). The project is a way to connect two traditional forms of theatre media with some newer media and start a conversation about how the convergence culture affects theatre and how the students performed. It is also a place where you can talk about the implications of so much media available and how to navigate the mediated waters responsibly and intelligently.

MLE + ThEd Standards=BFF

The Media Literacy Education standards would be useful for theatre educators because many of the aims of MLE are the same or are closely related to the national theatre education standards. Any theatre education lesson plan based on one of the national standards could be benefited from using MLE inside of the teaching because theatre is a form of media. Theatre practitioners/consumers (which is what we are helping to students to become in one way or another) need to be visually and aurally literate as well as script literate (because it is a different kind of reading when you’re reading a script) they also need to be literate in “non-traditional” texts, such as the human body and non-verbal communications. These all coincide with an idea of MLE because they are found in all sorts of media. If the students learn to be literate in these different facets in theatre then they are also being taught how to read these things in film or radio or on a web-page. It’s more about then helping your students explicitly link what they’re learning to read in theatre to what they read in their moment-to-moment lives as they interact with different media.

One very important standard overlap between theatre education and MLE deals with meaning making. The National Theatre Education Standard 7 for 9-12 proficient is “Analyzing, critiquing, and constructing meanings from informal and formal theatre, film, television and electronic media productions.” This coincides with MLE standard 6: “Media Literacy Education affirms that people use their individual skills, beliefs and experiences to construct their own meanings from media messages.” As a theatre educator helps to teach his/her students about how to analyze a piece of theatre they’ve seen and how to articulate what they see, it would also be important to emphasize or at least talk about where we decide the meaning comes from. This brings in MLE standard 6. An example of this could be that a drama 3 class may have a discussion about a filmed version of Hamlet they viewed as a class. As students share their critiques and analysis a conversation could be started about why the students think what they think. After the students defend their answers, perhaps with evidence from the visual (which includes camera angles as well as lighting, costuming and set which are all aspects of both theatre and media literacy) and spoken text, the teacher may bring up that we have different opinions because we all come from a different paradigm. That part of meaning making in theatre or any other media is acknowledging that what we think is based in what we ourselves know and have experienced, either in our lives or vicariously through another medium (novels, films, play etc.). The discussion could include the idea that the fact everyone makes meaning based on his/her own experiences is fine but it sometimes needs to be explained in order to make yourself understood to others who do not have your same experience. The whole analysis of a filmed version of Hamlet also should be taken back to the fact that the students’ skills in analyzing this particular piece can be applied to both theatre and other types of media because it straddles that line. It is a film adaptation of a play script.