Documentary film

You can watch my documentary film at http://youtu.be/YAk4gAPQTpI or hopefully here as well

Documentary Modes-Game Night

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOQux9Tw2Qw

The Poetic Mode documentary that I created is an abstract film in which I experimented with the power of focus. The theme of this video is how hard it is to focus on what is truly important when one is bombarded by loud voices and interrupted by unwelcome visual images. There is no concrete story to this film because I wanted it to be more about feelings and thoughts. I think that this mode is a great way of expressing ones feelings without being boxed in by a set storyline. However, poetic mode can cause problems to arise when it comes to making evident the filmmakers intended theme.

The Expository Mode documentary was about a game called Betrayal at House on the Hill. I chose to narrate the different aspects of the game while it was being played. I tried to be as factual as possible so as to help anyone who doesn’t understand how the works. The theme of this video was simply to instruct on how to play a specific game so as to persuade my audience to want to play it. The difficulty with using this mode with this theme is that it doesn’t really express how I feel about the game—it doesn’t really persuade anyone to play the game. It was also difficult to explain all aspects of the game within the time constraint that was given. However, this video was very effective in its instruction because it couples spoken language with visual images so as to help the audience better understand the game.

The Observational Cinema Mode documentary was of my friends and I playing Monopoly Deal. The camera is more focused on the cards on the table then on our faces because that is where the game is played—where events unfold. I wanted to show how my friends and I play this game and how fun it can be. However, because my friends and I knew that there was a camera there it was harder to behave as we would normally. We are affected by our surroundings and therefore cannot pretend a camera isn’t there if it truly is. This caused me to have to cut out several strips of my original film. Thankfully when the camera was set down on the table we were able to focus more on the game and therefore act more naturally. I think that this mode of film is a great way to show the way people do things and go about life without “hamming it up for the camera”.

The Personal Voice Mode documentary was done from my point of view about how fun playing games can be. I think that society has turned from being physically active to being technologically active, and that technology is the source for everything—fun, news, etc. I was able to better convey the theme of persuading my audience to play games, to go and do something. However, my view are not facts and can seem “snobbish” which may cause many to not want to watch it.

Audition Simulation

I was intrigued by the section on simulation in the reading. We use simulations a lot in theatre lessons because the easiest way to understand something is by doing it (this can apply to a variety of subjects). For example, simulations could be used in lessons about the audition process and casting. Before doing this lesson make sure that all the students have a general gist of the story and the characters for the play you are working on in class. Also make sure that every student has done research on a monologue they would recite for this audition (something they know well enough to not have the paper glued to their nose but not necessarily memorized). Start the class by selecting four students to simulate a panel of judges casting for the show Much Ado About nothing (or whatever play you are working on). During the audition process be a director (teacher in-role) and after every monologue, or couple of monologues talk to the judges and ask them what they think and why that person would be good or not in the show. Rotate through judges and auditioners—you can switch after every four monologues or so. At the end of the simulation you can have a really good discussion about the auditioning process, students fears, and the difficulties of casting a show, especially when those who are auditioning are people you know. You can also analyze what is most important about the auditioning process for each student. The next class students could bring in media works (blogs about auditioning, pictures, videos, etc) that could help to solve some of the problems that were mentioned in the discussion the previous day.

Open Your Eyes

I really liked the lesson plan at the end of chapter six as a way of teaching my students disciplinary tools they need when it comes to the media. What I’ve learned over my years as a media user is to never trust just one source or sight. You have to pull information from all different resources to really create your own informed opinion on a subject. In addition, I have learned the importance of sight blockers. There are things that people put online that are not in line with my morals, this doesn’t mean that I want to force my morals on my students but they do need to understand the consequences of their actions. The subject of porn is a risky thing to teach students about and I am not quite sure how I would bridge that topic. It is something that I believe needs to be addressed when media becomes an integral part of a class. The more a student, or any person for that matter, is exposed to the media the more they are prone to be prey for pornographic websites. Students need to know what they are up against. I think it would also be beneficial to do what Hobbs suggests and “disrupt students’ pleasure with advertising and popular culture” by showing how media is a form of manipulative persuasion.

Overall, I think that the best disciplinary tool that really encompasses all others is self-discipline. I can tell my students all day that pornography is bad and that not all media is good media, but unless they understand for themselves and gain their own self-discipline all I’ve taught them would amount to nothing. Students need to understand the importance of self-discipline, but I’m not sure how to go about teaching them this. I could maybe use art or a theatre activity such as mime to teach the effects of self-discipline—how art is born out of it. It would be a risk, but it might end up helping my students in more ways then one.

The Seeing and Writing article “Regarding the Pain of Others” really touched my heart. It made me think and analyze what it is that I am looking at when staring at a magazine. Hobbs mentioned the impact of the media as a type of superpeer, but I would like to unpack that peer and show what it is really made of. There is this video that a teacher once showed me of a model who took a few photographs for a magazine. The video began with her showing up onset, then the added makeup, and later the added computer work to make the model look like the end product—the magazine cover model. I remember the impact that that particular video had on me as a high school student. When the façade is revealed the audience’s eyes finally open—I could see for the first time that beauty wasn’t all society made it up to be. I think that doing this same thing for my students would be really helpful, and serve as a way for them to better understand the media and it’s goals. Namely, to advertise and sell products or ideas to those who are willing to listen. I want to impact my students in a way that will give them a critical eye in the future, which is what I believe Hobbs to be trying to help teachers to do. We need to inform our students so that they don’t blindly follow what is presented, but rather that they should desire to know for themselves if something is true or real.

Never forget to question!

It is important to shape critical questions around core standards for your subject. I liked how Hobbs did this with her the critical questions in the chapter. It is important to remember the core standards, and that our lesson plans should be centered on them. If it is hard for you to think of critical questions look to the objective of your lesson plan and the core standards to prompt you. Classroom conversations are about promoting self-learning—not about the teacher rattling off all they know about a certain subject. Hobbs addresses the fact that we should not use closed questions. I think that is a very important point to remember when thinking of critical questions to ask your students. I always hated it when teachers would be driving for a certain answer to the question they were asking that I knew I wouldn’t get right. After a few feeble attempts the class would go silent expectantly waiting for the teacher to give everyone the “right” answer. The answers to these questions were about learning what the teacher wanted you to learn so that you could past the test—there was no learning for learnings sake.

When reading through Hobb’s five critical questions I kind of felt that they were those questions that sought a specific answer. When a teacher asks what the purpose of a text is it makes it appear as if there must be a specific answer that the teacher is seeking. There are only so many meanings one can derive from a text—at least in the minds of youth. At least that is what I felt growing up, even though I have learned otherwise in my college years. The thing that caused me to open my eyes to the possibility of a multiplicity of answers to the question “what is the purpose of the text” was the encouragement I received to seek my own understanding. Instead of asking what the purpose was my professors would ask what I understood the purpose to be or what the messages were that I saw. By incorporating the students into the questions you open students up for critical analysis, for student centered learning. This idea of student centered learning is what I desire to promote in my classroom.

To achieve this goal I will seek to only ask questions that open ended and that will cause my students to really think about what we are learning. For example, if we are working on characters for a production I can ask my students questions like: “why would Millie move to the big city? What would cause you to make that change? How would you be feeling in a new place? What does freedom mean to you?” These questions can help students to connect with the characters they are portraying onstage, and can help them to understand that characters all have reasons behind what they do just like people do. The question about freedom could be an essential overarching questing that I am trying to teach my students through this play. Thoroughly Modern Millie is a play about being able to do anything, the freedom to be whomever you want to be—students might get other meanings from the play and that is great. I can still use this theme of freedom to help my students to think about what freedom is and what it means to them.

Speaking of freedom, let us turn our attention now to what has come to be known as the American Dream. Scott Sanders essay entitled “Homeplace” revolves around this idea of the “American Dream”. The American Dream is to have the perfect car, house, spouse, and kids. People move from place to place looking for this dream life that simply isn’t attainable because they have lost sight in what America really means. This blindness is caused by the influence of the media that shows more and more eye appealing gadgets and gizmos that everybody “has to have”. People continue to think that life will get better if they can just buy that new car, but for some reason life doesn’t improve people simply fixate on another thing that they must have. This is just my own opinion but I do want to see my students input on this idea of the influence of media on the America Dream. I could rely especially the questions Hobbs presents under the “representation and reality” section of “Analysis in Action”. Students can analyze media over the ages to see how the American Dream has changed. Students would be put into groups and given an era to research media on and then each group could present their findings to others in the class. I really would like my students to be able to think about media in a critical way, for students not to be citizens who follow but rather citizens that lead. Student’s need to be informed of the power of the media so that they don’t become controlled by it—so that they can use it to their advantage. By analyzing and evaluating the power of the media students can break free of the mold and become like those stubborn Millers in Sanders essay—people who love what little they have.

Multi tasking and cognition

It is important for teachers to understand that the mediated world we reside in causes our students to have short attention spans. This diminished attention span does not mean that we have to entertain our students in order to keep their attention. It calls for teachers to stand up and learn how to engage their students. Students have been taught to “scan the informational environment rather than fix attention on a single element” (35). This means that their short attention span allows for students to focus their attention on a variety of things at one time. For us as teachers we must to teach our students when and how they need to pay close attention.

Teachers can accomplish the goal of focus their students in many ways. In order to achieve this teachers must first and foremost must reach their students level of understanding. In other words teachers need to understand that lecturing for an hour does not engage most students. Teachers need to use what their students know and understand to help students be a part of the learning process. In my future class I will rely heavily on the media to engage and focus my students because I know that the media matters to them. For example, I could give my students a picture of a balcony and ask them to create a short dialogue between two characters based off of this picture. Not only are they looking at the picture and trying to gauge some sort of meaning from it, but they are also writing down spoken language. Due to the fact that the work that is being performed is the students they can take ownership of it. It can engage them in what we are learning because they are a part of it. Not only that but it also allows for them to use their multi tasking skills to create a work of art.

I like the idea that Jenkins presents in the Distributed Cognition section of this paper, “intelligence is accomplished rather than possessed” (37). That is exactly what I have been taught from day one of my experience in training to become a theatre teacher. You cannot teach anyone anything all you can do is help those who desire to learn. I cannot force my students to retain the information I give them for time and all eternity—I cannot force them to be intelligent. What I can do is give my students goals to meet, and after succeeding in reaching said goal show them all that they have accomplished. People are not born smart, rather they are made into smart individuals, which is what I desire to assist my students in becoming.

Jenkins suggests that we teach students to “acquire patterns of thought that regularly cycle through available sources of information as they make sense of developments in the world around them” (). To aid students in actually doing this teachers must help them to use technology. Technology provides a new perspective in order to help students understand the concepts that teachers are trying to file into their brain. For example, If students are being taught about the Pythagorean theorem technology such as excel spreadsheets or even YouTube videos that others have created can help students make sense of it. Teaching is not about cramming as much into a student’s brain as possible in order to pass a test but rather to fill students brains with knowledge that they need and desire. This is not going to be easy to accomplish, but I feel that I can help students to use technology to increase their understanding.

Theatre and Media as one

CPMLE and the Theatre National Standards for theatre education are both a means to the same ends—both desire to help students develop “skills of expression” and to be “critical thinkers”. A teacher cannot hope to fulfill the content standards without the use of media, because media is a part of our culture, and “functions as a way of socialization and communication”. For example, when we tell students to study a play such as Much Ado About Nothing, they not only read the play, but also watch the film. The reason behind having students watch the film is to help them in their understanding. Sometimes it is easier to see words spoken in the context of a scene played about before you, rather than to read them on a plan black and white page. Teachers have been using media within their lessons for decades knowing full well that the media is sometimes the best way to help students to understand the point or message of a lesson.

Within the Theatre National Content Standards themselves is media. Content Standard 8 states that teachers must help students achieve an “understanding of context by analyzing the role of theatre and media in the community”. The more tools teachers use to strengthen their students understanding of the world around them the better prepared students will be to face that world. The whole point behind why teachers teach theatre is to help students attain a higher level of thinking and understanding. We perform Hamlet as a class not because Shakespeare wrote it but because through this play students can achieve a greater understanding of the world that they live in. "Media Literacy Education develops informed, reflective and engaged participants essential for society." It would be a shame if theatre teachers didn’t use every tool within reach to assist in the goal of creating more enlightened students. There isn’t just one way for theatre teachers to achieve the understanding they seek their students to gain, and that is what the media is here for.

I will use CPMLE as an aid for my students in fulfilling the Theatre National Content Standards. I would like at least one aspect of every lesson or unit to incorporate media in some way, especially in my student’s performances. A fellow student gave me the idea of recording each student’s performance on a tape and letting them look over it on their own so that the student can discover new ways to improve their work. They can take notes on their performance (how they felt about their efforts) before seeing the tape and after. Then at the end of the year they can have the tape with all their performances on it and see how they have grown over the course of the year. I think this idea will help students to fully complete each content standard because they will be able to understand them better. Content standards 1-8 for kindergarden-4^th grade all talk about acting or visualizing performance in one way for another. For example, content standard 1 discusses “recording improvisations based on personal experience” which fits into my idea of recording my student’s work perfectly. I know that I can help my students to fulfill the National Content Standards through CPMLE in a way that will help them on the road to becoming lovers of learning.