The One Where I Stop Complaining

This week's reading was delightfully practical for me, and either the reading is getting easier or my brain has finally switched on (though as I read through this posts, its disjointed nature makes me think that it hasn't switched on entirely...), because at the end of this reading I'm left feeling hopeful for education's future and new media's potential to improve our culture rather than feeling upset.

As I read, I tried to think about what this all means for me. Though I found the two articles really interesting, and I LOVE the podcasting assignment flow in the Rheingold article (really, I just loved the Rheingold article) enough that I'm trying to think of how an altered version of it might look in my classroom, I initially thought, "Well, this is really cool for a social studies teacher, but what does it mean for a media teacher like me?" Then I remembered a quote that Amy uses (for which I should probably get the full reference...) to get our Hands on a Camera teachers thinking about how Hands on a Camera affects the lives of our students:

By civic engagement we mean exercising personal agency in a public domain; and we assume that becoming civically engaged is a developmental process characterized by growing facility with ideas, situations, skills and awareness." (New Student Politics Curriculum Guide, emphasis added)

As the Rheingold article mentions, being civically engaged doesn't only mean something political; so, in helping students to think more critically about media, and to produce media of their own, I am preparing them to exercise their own personal agency in the very public domain that I'll just call the media-sphere. And that's something.

In the Multiliteracies book, I thought that the chapter was a nice synthesis (introduction?) of the various concepts that we've been discussing. I think that the distinction between language and Design is wonderful, primarily because it indicates that reading is always an active process. I also appreciated that the authors considered the various designs that we need to have an understanding of in order to negotiate our mulitmodal mediated world.

So here are some things that I take from the reading that can potentially improve my practice:

1. I need to be more intentional about adding overt instruction and critical framing into my lectures with my students. I do a lot of situated practice (my classes are hands-on, low end production kind of classes), and I think that students have a bit of a chance to transform knowledge, but I'm not always great at being overt about why these assignments are relevant for the future teachers, or at putting them in a larger context of media literacy education.
   
2. "It is...important to stress that listening as well as speaking, and reading as well as writing, are productive activities" (MUL 22). This is why we include media literacy lessons along with production lessons are important--we are always creators, even if we're not creating products from scratch.
3. The practice of making a documentary can be even more civically engaging than we are currently making it. We might want to consider giving the students a little more instruction as to the purpose of their documentaries (if Hands on a Camera could become a semester and a half program like I REALLY want it to, maybe we could do a more structured documentary followed by a more open-ended assignment...).
   
4. Focusing on Non-fiction production seems to fit more into the post Fordist economic model, where one student is in charge of many different roles (as opposed to the highly specialist-driven areas of fiction production. I know how to dress sets really well, but don't ask me to schedule your film or direct actors...).
   

So...that's that. I liked this week's reading a lot because the authors offered potential answers to their own questions. Maybe I'm just lazy and I don't want to have to work through tough processes in order to find answers, but it was refreshing to have someone say, "Here's the issue...and here's what we can do about it!" If/when I write something like this, I want to have some possible answers in hand. Not all the answers, but at least some.