This is the last post. So last. The lastest. So last.

Buckingham sure has a lot to say, doesn't he? Most of what he says is good for a new teacher trying to learn how to approach media literacy in the classroom, but I also think that he has a way of writing that makes it seem like he is the know-all end-all of this subject area. Maybe I am alone in this, but I was a bit nettled as I read. If he is trying to teach this to people that do not know much about it, perhaps he should keep his tech vocabulary reigned in more, and I disliked how he was always telling me what students "should do" in order to learn ________.

Tone aside, I got some ideas from this reading, and the one I am most interested in is one about language in media. You see, where I am from in Washington there are no high schools with a film program. At least if there are I have not heard anything about it. In my drama class we touched on it a little bit, because it was drama and not theatre specifically (though the focus was obviously on theatre, because it's the best). I am planning to teach a unit on film in my own theatre class and I feel like it is a great way to tie in all of those language questions he mentions. The language of film has always been an interest of mine. It is a language most of us know subconsciously now; it is one that most people do not put much thought into understanding - you just do. When you grow up with a language, you don't really ponder too much about how you understand it or why it is the way it is. It just... is. So I intend to have my students really think about the language that the cameras speak, and I want to bring in commercials and news reports into it.

For my film unit I plan on opening with clips from different genres of movies and asking the students to identify what genre it is based solely on the few screen shots or segments of the movies they see. The conversation will turn into a discussion about what clued them into what genre each clip was. I am hoping that an in-depth discussion will occur about the different messages each camera angle, lighting choice, and music track sends. This activity would bring in the bullet points he creates with genre, conventions, choices, and codes. The thing I have in mind most right now is the final assessment of the unit, and the actual lesson plans would be created in order to reach that. My idea is that my students would have to create a short film (which would bring in audience and production ideas that he mentions). This film will be like a TV show on Hulu; it must have at least 1 commercial interruption, which the students will create and place on their own.

I am simply excited to be able to work with students using various forms of media. I use media in my lessons all the time anyway, so I don't know if I will want to have a unit focusing on media literacy. I plan to lace it all over my lessons, taking time to explain certain media creators (such as Photoshop, Garage Band, etc.) only when it must be explained for a project. I am guessing most of my students will be able to use a lot of the things I will teach them to use either way. I am looking forward to learn more about different types of media as they become available so that I can tie it directly into my curriculum.

Ideals

I watch students use media in their projects and in the writing of their papers and it makes me very nervous. They have grown up with cell phones in their hands and internet access at their fingertips. This is a generation that expects information to be conveyed succinctly. The media knows this, and opinions are gobbled up as facts because of that cultural impatience, it seems.

I did not grow up with all of this technology. My family was very careful with what we viewed, and I did not really learn to use the internet until I was in sixth grade. When I did learn how to use it, it was drilled into my brain that I was not to take everything I read on the internet for granted. TouTube had not yet been developed, so we had to usually search for news sites in order to get our information. We had to read articles on online newspapers in order to get a story.

Now we have a culture in which our students create and use media constantly. They usually know much more than their teachers when it comes to the use of technology for the receiving and transmitting of information. It seems that most of their information comes from media, and their opinions are shaped by the opinions of others.

When reading Hobbs this week, I noticed that she talked about the way politics has become a dirty word and that our students aren’t really taught that much about them and they dislike learning about it. I personally think that this comes not only from the fact that the media makes it such a sticky mess, but also from the fact that students want their information now. And, for as much as they complain about not getting their own voice or not being able to form their own opinions, they seem rather content to let decisions be made without them unless it has to do with their social life or the limiting of media consumption. The media they consume, however, seems to be mostly about (as Hobbs states) Brittany’s latest boob job or other such subjects. In the consumption of this media, our students are fed images and messages about “the ideals” and are pushed to conform, while at the same time being told that they should be themselves. The media confuses and manipulates more than it informs, I think.

My job, as an educator of media in my classroom, is to make sure that my students know the real uses of media for creating messages of their own, and how those messages can be a real way to express their own opinions after analyzing what the media messages really are. I want to make sure that my students know that I am their advocate more than I am an advocate of societal norms. I know that many of my students will find societal norms to be greatly important, but I will try my hardest to at least help them see the real messages those media sources that create “societal norms” are sending them. Then, as many of the passages in Seeing and Writing do, express their feelings about what they have found in a creative use of the technology available to them.

Creation in the Classroom

When I am asked to create something in class, I expect to be able to really create. I would want freedom to choose, but I would want structure behind the assignment as well. In order for a project to be fun for me in an educational setting, I would want it to have a definite purpose and be tied in some way to the subject area. There have been a couple times that I have been given a project to do in a classroom without much of a purpose behind it. I remember it bothering me every time it happened. When I asked my teacher in one instance what the purpose was of the assignment, the teacher seemed shocked, as if he was surprised that I would be the one (out of all the other students) to ask such an impertinent question. However, from my point of view, it was a completely valid question. I did not want to put my effort into making something with no purpose if I had other things I could be spending my time doing.

This experience has shaped my view of what a teacher’s role should be in the creation process within the school. The educator should present a definite plan for a project with sure expectations, should create this plan based on a learning objective for the subject area, give freedom of choice to the students (be that in choosing between certain topical material or choosing mediums with which to present the material), and continue to be a resource to the students throughout the project. As a theatre and English teacher, being this type of educator is extremely important for my career, as I will be facilitating a lot of creation in my classroom.

Some of the things that Hobbs brings up as challenges are good points. One of them she mentions is the fact that grading tends to be skewed to the more visually fantastic. I have observed this before. I have never liked it, because I was from a family that did not invest in the latest technology, and our high school was relatively cheap in their resources as well, so I never did have a fantastically brilliant layout to my technological projects. I may be a facilitator of creativity, but I am an educator first. My way of looking at this problem is simply to look past the layouts and at the content. I do this as a student critiquing my peers’ work already. The challenges I am actually more concerned about (and have thought about many times) are those that involve the students using “inappropriate content” in their projects. This is a tricky subject for us theatre teachers because theatre is a reflection and study of life. If the students’ lives have awful stuff in it, then it is only expected that they would wish to voice those things. I suppose the way to make sure this is kept in check in order for me to keep my job is to create, from the very beginning, a classroom in which the students know that what they have to say is extremely important, but that the content must be tactful. I mean this in the sense that a play that a student writes may have characters that drink or do drugs, but the moral or point of the play should never be in advocacy of that behavior. I still have to work on how exactly I can go about making sure this happens, but I really think it is reliant on my classroom’s rules and policies. If there is a mutual respect between my students and me, I am hoping that this will not be too much of an issue.

I really did enjoy the series by Martin Parr from Seeing and Writing. The idea of taking pictures of others taking typical pictures makes me laugh. The perspective is new and refreshing. I might show this to my students before asking them to do something creative.

Accessibility of Knowledge

The word "access" in a public school setting means to me that the students are given the resources for information as well as the instruction on how to use each resource. Many people know of different ways to get information (such as encyclopedias, webpages, magazines, etc.), but many of them do not know how to go about finding the information they want from it. In her book, Hobbs includes a quote that states that "students typically use information that finds them, rather than deciding what information they need." It's not just students that do this, that's for sure. I believe that it is our job, as teachers, to provide the knowhow to our students. I do not believe access to knowledge is achieved unless there is an understanding of how to use resources to find the information that we are seeking rather than simply accepting what sketchy information we get with broad web searches and one glance at a page in the encyclopedia.

For the most part, I loved the example that comprised chapter 2 of the reading. I know that we spent most of our class time dissecting Jenkins and being told to keep dissecting readings, but I really don't have too much to dissect about Hobbs' writing. Her points were valid, and her arguments seemed well thought out. I noticed all of the many different sources for opinions she went to and integrated them into her writing as any English teacher would instruct his or her students to do in a research paper. The only thing I was not particularly fond of was her frequent use of personal opinion as fact. During this chapter, however, it was largely focused on the story of a man making media literacy accessible to the students as well as creating access to the lessons of The Crucible. This integration of media literacy and a famous work of literature was a great example as to how we can provide access in our classrooms. I especially liked how Mr. Fisher monitored his students as they began their searching online and noticed their incompetence in a proper Google search, jumping on the moment as a teaching opportunity. I plan to use this in my own classroom, but not just in web-based searches. If I am careful to monitor what is happening in my classroom, I hope to be able to pick up on what students need help with and address it as a learning moment.

One sentence really stood out to me as I was reading because it struck at one of my core values of teaching. It was: "Media literacy education has long been understood as a mechanism to reduce the gap between the world of the classroom and the living room." I have always held firm to the belief that a classroom should not be an alternate reality; it should, in fact, be a way for students to explore more about themselves and their communities (whether that be societal or familial) and use what they learn in the classroom in those communities. This can be extremely complicated. As Mr. Fisher fretted, there are many different risks involved with creating sure access to different forms of media in our classrooms. Many teachers worry that if the principal or a parent were to walk into a classroom full of media what they would think. There was one teacher I heard about that had been showing clips from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in his classroom to illustrate something in the curriculum, and the principal walked in just in time for the raciness. However, I believe that these worries are inconsequential when the bigger picture is observed an analyzed. Of course, I never want to step on the toes of my students or their parents if it involves their views of morality, but I do not wish to teach in a way that would jeopardize that anyway, so I am hoping that it does not come up often if at all. This can be one complication in access being granted in the classroom. But, you know what? I would rather have my students connect and have fun and learn rather than to play it ridiculously safe and have my students be bored in my classroom and learn absolutely nothing.

Learning to Read Again

I had always planned on creating a classroom where all sorts of media would be involved with the learning process. I will be (as long as what I hope to happen pans out) both a theatre and an English teacher, so literacy is extremely important to me. That literacy would have to be the all-inclusive definition of the word that the reading pushes: visual and verbal (verbal meaning both words on the page and words we speak). For me, however, the idea of really separating these kinds of literacy is rather new. I have always seen writing as an example of both kinds of literacy, even if it is a long essay. The way an essay is formatted is something read visually, and it is brought into your reading before you even get into the verbal language written on the page. You cannot have one without the other. In the appendix we’d read, “On Reading Visual and Verbal Texts,” it illustrates this. Of course, it mentions it more in the poetry section of the appendix more than anywhere else because of the large part that formatting has to play in the meaning of a poem, but I truly do believe that any page’s formatting speaks levels. If I, as a teacher, received a book report that had one-and-a-half inch margins and was double spaced, it would speak levels about the writer when comparing it to a report that came in as single-spaced with half-inch margins in order to keep within the page limit. Reading “On Visual and Verbal Texts” helped me recognize that I can teach my English students how to read not only different types of written works, but how to read paintings and photographs as well.

Reading “Observing the Ordinary” gave me an idea. I loved the essay “Ode to an Orange” by Larry Woiwode. His prose is intoxicating and brings out the most amazing sensations of eating an orange. He even discusses ways to eat one that I have never thought about before, such as sticking a pencil into the orange and sucking the juice out before going in for the pulp. It is creative and a fun read that seems to sell oranges just by its masterful description. Then, when turning the page, there is an advertisement of a half-peeled orange and the words “Have One.” It gave me a teaching idea in which I could ask my English students, after studying the different types of literature and how to read them, to look at an advertisement of their choice (being school appropriate, of course) and to write an essay that sells the product in a different way than the ad. Another idea came from the series of telephone advertisements. I would ask my students to read ads for a product over time and ask them what differences in implications were in each one, and then either create advertisements themselves or write an essay on the differences in selling points that they saw. In “On Reading Visual and Verbal Texts” it gives great guiding questions that I could ask my students to make points on and therefore help in my creation of a grading rubric, such as “what is the viewer’s eye drawn to first in the advertisement?” and “What is the underlying ‘logic’ of the advertisement?” Guiding questions and rubrics have been a large part of the lesson plans I have been asked to make in the Theatre Education major, and it was great to have some there to help me teach a deeper lesson on how to read, no matter what kind of reading it might be.

I plan to teach my theatre students through the written word as well as through images. Reading this text has helped me understand all of the different ways I can tie different media sources together to help students better understand how to create something that can be read by any person as a quality work of art. I am exited to use the many forms of reading and creating in my classroom, no matter what subject I might teach.