David Bruce and Suzanne Miller
If you teach English, this webinar is well worth
watching. Presenters David Bruce and
Suzanne Miller share how they extend the concept of teaching writing into
teaching composition, which they do through the use of digital video
composition in their classes. Here is
how they define composition:
Essentially, they are presenting a transmedia approach to teaching poetry. They offer two examples of student-produced videos that
demonstrate composition of a poem. In
both cases, students created a video of a famous poem that included still
images, moving video, spoken audio of the text of the poem, music and ambient
noise.
One video was of William Carlos Williams poem "The Red Wheelbarrow":
The other video was of former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins' poem "Introduction to Poetry";
In addition to the final video
product, they also asked students to use a “Reflection Heuristic” to explain
their intentions as they created their video.
So, instead of reading a written poem and answering
questions or writing a literary analysis, students are asked to create a video,
which is essentially a multimodal analysis of the poem. The reflection is an important part of the
assignment, and students will need explicit instructions on making intentional
choices relevant to the text. The samples provided in this webinar demonstrate a high level of metacognition, and would be well worth sharing with students as an example. Here is a slide from one student's reflection:
This webinar provides a blueprint for engaging in transmedia
activities in the classroom. The
examples here focus mostly on poetry being translated into video, but the
concept of writing or thinking through video could be applied in a variety of ways in any
number of content areas. I am certain I could use the ideas here for teaching poetry, but I can also imagine having students doing a close reading of any passage in literature by creating a video and doing a reflection of the choices they made in creating it.
