Media Resopnse 3

I saw this film as part of a collection of international award winning films for kids from ages 4 to 8. What's Wrong With This Picture by Jeffrey Travis is listed as an American comedy. Travis' website says that the film has been in over 30 festivals and won "multiple" awards.

This is the blurb from the DVD insert on the films:

Millions of children each day are left alone with crayons and paper—the vast majority of whom gleefully animate without loss or injury. There are those precious few, however, who must bear the weight of wax-gone-bad. Three-year-old Aidan may have followed all the rules, but in a moment of carelessness, his own creation will go horribly wrong.

• Heart of Gold International Film Festival
• Tribeca Film Festival
• SXSW Film Festival
• Seattle International Film Festival

This two minutes of home video and stickman animation is award winning because people must be identifying with it. I think I'm at a disadvantage because I don't have any children (although the intended audience to children between 4 and 8), but for what it's worth, I did think the PADD organization idea was clever.

There are three separate moods in this film. The beginning feels like a public service announcement for something horrible, but it's over the top nature makes it an apparent joke. We are set up and prepared for the pay off.

The music changes drastically to a happy upbeat tune during the animation. It's fun and cute. I was happy to see the "stickman" get something to eat and drink.

The films gets interesting for me when Aidan returns and is very upset. I could use this film as an example of the ethical treatment of actors. Was Aidan aware that he was even in a film? The camera doesn't move when he is on camera, making it appear as though it's a hidden camera.

Aidan may just be a convincing actor, but even if it was real for him, it is unethical? In the credit, Aidan's last name is Travis, so it would be fair to assume the director is family, perhaps his father. It's also hard to consider taking juice away from a child torture, but is it exploitative to take his reaction and turn it into a short film?

Media Resopnse 1

I've recently rediscovered this film because of the Sunday school lessons so far this year.

Oddly enough, when viewing this film in the past I didn't spend much time framing the film to me. This reminded me of our discussion on overt direction and critical framing.

What I have in my head as a clear theme and what the students understand from a visual example may not be the same.

This isn't their fault, there are countless themes and elements to pull from single images. By setting up the clip, we can direct the students to the see what we were intending them to find.

Reading Response 3

I cannot get it out of my head: motivation. The description from the articles of using Zora, or other civic engagement simulations, and blogging (in great detailed examples) all caused me to cringe (and never be quite satisfied) about the motivation that youth have in gaining a civic attitude, civic skills, etc. MTV puts it in these terms: “it does seem that the majority of young people are convinced that supporting a social cause is something they should do. However, there is a strong disparity between interest and involvement, an ‘activation gap,’ and there is significant room for growth” (98).

It is this disparity that has me personally concerned. The creation of such fun, interesting, and civic experience software like Zora is very interesting (even for an entire article that says, “look what I created and what it can do” – now, mind you, I believe you have to do that sometimes so I’m not “put out for it”) and “seeing” the interaction between youth of varied ages is really cool (I am all about discussion) but how do you get them to care to do it in the first place (what’s the motivation?) and then, as both authors stressed, how do you get them to do it in a forum that is real, outside the online environment?

Truthfully, I do not have an answer, nor am I necessarily satisfied with either methodology. Ber says that “Zora’s design and infrastructure provides a bridge between…civic education, focused on helping children become better citizens by teaching them civic attitudes and skills…and…approaches focused on internal motivation to support the development of morally responsible individuals…” (149). I’m not convinced. I do, however, like what Ber had to say on the subject: “Listening to what young people care about is the necessary first step in enlisting their enthusiasm” (104). Based on our in-class discussions, I would say that is a big, fat “duh.”

This is where Rheingold has greater interest to me; he’s talking about how to use what youth already like and care about and helping them learn (this would definitely be a part of literacy) how to actually make their voice heard through skills that work the media technologies they like using. He focuses on blogging primarily and branches out into “citizen journalism” which is really quite cool to discuss. I’m not a formal teacher, but the ideas have a great deal of merit. But, I believe we need to not only put together these tools that Ber and Rheingold have (because it facilitates growth and learning) but we absolutely need to discuss how to motivate our youth to engage with these methods. This, to me, is imperative if we are going to even begin approaching what The New London Group is trying to suggest with regard to designing social futures where our youth are prepared to be workplace adults and have skills necessary to be great there. It is bridging the gap that must happen between wanting to be involved and actually being involved - and finding the motivation within youth to do it. Heck, I don't think enough adults are involved (myself included)!

reading response 3

I'm taking undergraduate Technology and Engineering Education (TEE) classes concurrently with our MA pedagogy class. The main difference is scope. My TEE classes (so far) focus solely on the classroom (motivating students, disclosure documents, lesson plans, etc.) and the emphasis seems to be on making it seem...not easy, but doable. There is a lot of confidence building. Whenever a fear or anxiety is brought up, the phrase "Don't worry, you'll be fine" is tossed out at some point after addressing that concern.

Our class is not incredibly different from my TEE classes. I'm still learning what I can do in a classroom, but now the ramifications flow in and out of the classroom.

For example, my TEE classes suggest a direct line of confidence. If you do this, then this will happen or if that doesn't work then try this and remember this. My goal is to establish my own language and teach it to the students I may have in my classroom.

Our text says this of its own pedagogy:

Neither immersion in Situated Practice within communities of learners, nor Overt Instruction...necessarily gives rise to this sort of critical understanding or cultural understanding. In fact, both immersion and many sorts of Overt Instruction are notorious as socialising agents that can render learners quite uncritical and unconscious of the cultural locatedness of meanings and practices.

The four components of pedagogy we propose here do not constitute a linear heirarchy, nor do they represent stage. Rather, they are components that are related in complex ways. Elements of each may occur simutaneously, while at different times one or the other will predominate, all of them are reatedly revisited at different levels (New London Group, 32).

This is a product of learning the Cha Cha and the Paso Doble at the same time.

One particular sentiment that I gained from our readings that I want to incorporate into my young pedagogy is that there isn't one standard. Students "are simultaneously members of multiple lifeworlds, so their identities have multiple layers that are in complex relation to each other" (NLG, 17)

Our readings are pushing me to understand that I have a responsibility to integrate learning compatible with their work, citizenship, and lifeworlds in the present and near future. The earlier I can incorporate such integral facets of learning into my language, the more concrete it can become.

As a side note, the final section of the article A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies titled "The Internation Multiliteracies Projects" is perhaps the greatest summation I have ever read. I wish I had read it before reading the article. I hope this doesn't sound sarcastic because it is awesome.

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.

Since I will also be presenting this week, I'm going to follow in Timbre's footsteps and just discuss the Multiliteracies article here. So Gee is a member of the New London Group, yes? I was pleased to see the return of his Student's Bill of Rights in this week's reading, particularly as they expanded on what each of those ideas meant and I found my understanding of each principle being strengthened. That said, I will admit that while I'm beginning to get a handle on the how of literacy pedagogy, I find myself still very confused about the discussion of the what of literacy pedagogy.

If my understanding of what they presented as the Designs of Meaning is correct, they see Available Designs as the information that is already present, Designing as the process of using that information in the learning process and then the Redesigned as the transformed information. Is it just me or does that not sound like the how only in different language? Available Designs are the Critical Framing and Overt Instruction of the available knowledge/systems, Situated Practice is the Designing stage and Transforming knowledge is the last stage. Am I just oversimplifying here or missing something obvious? I suppose part of the explanation may be that they are saying look here is what multiliteracy pedagogy should look like and then this is how that looks in practice, but it all just seems needlessly complicated to me. I know Amy said we should be looking at not just the content of these articles but also how they are written and I'm stating that I found these the separation of the what and the how with different language to describe the same concepts kind of confusing.

Another aspect of the article that I found somewhat confusing was the introduction which talked about society's increasing privatization and the idea that "...market directed theories and practices , even though they sound humane, will never authentically include a vision of success and for all students." Only to go on and talk about how school's can redesign pedagogy to incorporate multiplicity and diversity and greater success for all students. It's not that I don't agree with their vision of what school's should do, I just don't understand how they got from their first conclusion into the rest of the article. Maybe I'm getting tied up in the practicalities when they're just talking about the theoretical and what should be and not what is, but I don't understand how we go from society has been steadily moving in this direction that favors students with access to schools can change the pedagogy of how we think of literacy so that every student has both access and engagement. I don't mean to be overly negative here because I know that just criticizing the system does nothing and that I'm hopefully playing a (small) part in actually making this vision of multimodal students a reality but it through me for a loop when they seemed to be going down the critical path only to suddenly jump in what to me feels like the opposite direction.

Sorry, I feel like I'm kind of all over the place with the article this week but hopefully you can make some sense of my rambling and I'm going to stop now.

Media Resopnse 2

5 minutes into the video posted below is a dinner scene from 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days. The focus of the scene is on the young blonde woman (Otilia). She is at her boyfriend's house for his mother's birthday. She is late to the party because she is helping her friend have an abortion, which is illegal in Romania. No one at the party knows what she was doing before coming to the party.

Just in case you don't speak Romanian, the conversation is rather frivolous. They ask her about her studies, they make some disparaging comments about the working class, the best way to make potatoes, young people are rude these day, etc.

This is a very rich scene with a lot of meaning in the context of the entire film, so if you haven't seen this film, then perhaps that isn't coming through, but that's actually okay for this post.

Do you remember playing this game when you were a bit shorter?



I think this game conditioned me to like the unique and have a desire to find that which isn't like the other. This seems like what teachers are doing daily. Finding that which is unknown to students and helping them see it, so that it changes the way everything is viewed. I love it when someone can change my mind.

This scene from 4 luni, 3 saptamâni si 2 zile will now always be a part of any editing lesson I teach. This is unique and different, but not wrong. It is very effective. The work that a particular student does may be different, but if the correct themes are there and effective: well done.