|
Articles Conference Reviews |
E.31 Student Video ProjectsE.31 Sex, Lies, and Student Video Projects: Shifting Relations in Digital Literacy and Composition The three speakers on this panel met at Cs 2010 in Louisville and put together this year’s panel to share their students’ video projects, which, when coupled with some of the panel’s technological glitches, bring up valid questions of feasibility for writing teachers. Ethna Lay’s presentation, “When the Essay is the Gloss: Other Ways of Making Arguments,” centered around two students’ video projects, a “quest” narrative that reflected the students’ learning of fairytale conventions in Lay’s class. Lay relied on the concept of “re-mediation” to explain how the students, who are immersed in non-textual media in everyday life, nevertheless create fitting responses to the assignment (the quest narrative) without text. According to Lay, since the students privilege video over speech, she asks them to use a “genre” common to videos, the director’s cut, for the reflective component of their projects, which is text-based (i.e., spoken). In providing this kind of commentary to accompany their video, students have the chance to articulate their writing process and rhetorical choices. However, the commentary is somewhat disappointing, as the two students deny understanding their work and are “reticent to commit to their own choices.” Pointing a finger at the students’ “hypermediacy,” Lay admitted that while the students do a good job with film by telling an engaging story and showing some sophistication with storyboarding and editing, they are still “grossly insufficient” at articulating the composition. Lay chalks this up to a “failure of commitment, not intellect.” To her, the students seem complicit in their generation’s deferral to visual/video and resistant to cognition or reading and writing. Kristine Killejian’s presentation, “Collaborative Digital Commentaries: DVD Interfaces, Critical Reflection, and Composition,” also focused on the use of video commentary for reflection. One of her goals in conceiving the commentaries was to move beyond a tired pattern she noticed in her students’ reflections, which accompany end-of-the-semester portfolios: “I came, I saw, I conquered Comp 101.” She believes that she has found more authentic “gems of reflection” in the students’ video commentaries since students are very familiar with the available formats: 1) Charlie Rose-style interview; 2) director’s commentary; and 3) camera person interview. While Killejian concedes that not all the reflections are totally successful, she believes the commentaries give students “new points of entry into reflection.” After watching an example in which a student delivers a long, unedited diatribe, some audience members voiced concern over the informal diction and tone, a lack of any planning or organization, and the student’s veering into self-reflection (rather than reflecting on his writing). Killejian acknowledged these concerns and concluded with some recommendations for shaping the experience of video reflection:
The final presentation by Heidi Skurat Harris, “From Texting to Textual to YouTube: Students [sic] Literacy in Mixed Media,” featured using video assignments as the products of research, rather than reflection. Unfortunately, this presentation was dominated by technical trouble. While Harris and the other presenters calmly and jovially dealt with the glitches (no audio, file not opening, borrowing an audience member’s flash drive, computer shutting down), a question arose from an audience member who is reluctant to incorporate technology into her teaching because of her lack of know-how. Harris remained confident that technological logistics shouldn’t deter teachers from considering video/visual projects since students “really do just figure it out on their own.” Plus, according to Killejian, students are often great “techie resources.” In this case, another audience member served as techie, and, at six minutes past the session’s end time, Harris was able to screen an impressive and provocative video in the style of a Nike ad, which addressed the research question: why, in the wake of a horrible running injury, did the student “push through the pain?” Incorporating music, photos, and textual collage to present her research on student-athlete injuries and pressures to perform, the student’s video was a very convincing example of the possibilities (and, to be honest, limitations) video assignments afford writing teachers and students. |