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Suzanne M. Miller, associate professor of learning and instruction, Graduate School of Education, is director of City Voices, City Visions (CVCV), a joint partnership between GSE and the Buffalo Public Schools that provides professional development for classroom teachers on how to use digital video (DV) composing as a learning tool in the classroom.
You were a classroom English teacher. Can you tell us when you realized the power of the DV medium?
There was a time when I was teaching a semester elective I developed called “Film Study.” We watched and critiqued films, talked about the power of the medium, looked at political ads and the distortions. Eventually, they wanted to make films. Even then, adolescents wanted to create, not just consume films. But it was hard. We used a hand-cranked editing gizmo with a secured razor blade you pushed down to cut 8 mm filmstock and tape it back together. No transitions, no special effects, no sound. When I first saw the movie-making software that is as easy to use as word processing—except that you drop and drag images and sounds—I was hooked on the potentials for student learning.
You've spoken about how we have an opportunity to take advantage of a change in the way our culture communicates that only occurs once in several generations. Can you explain your new communications model?
Lots of scholars are trying to capture this millennial moment we are living. One of them (DiSessa) says the emergence of the computer is a once-in-several-centuries innovation changing the way we live, learn, think and work. And he means that in a good way—something like the changes brought to the world by the printing press. One dramatic change has been a move from print only to visually centered communication. You only need to think of USA Today and Web pages to see how images dominate. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal don’t look the way they used to, even if we don’t go to their online versions that include streaming video. The visual turn doesn’t mean print is dead. It means print is now mostly mixed with images and often movement, music or voice narration. In our digital world, these different ways of representing and communicating meaning are mixed even more because new computer software makes it easier to create such things as music, newsletters, Web pages, blogs and digital videos.
Who should be paying attention to this? Does it matter beyond the edges of those working in technology?
It matters a lot. Several years ago, professional organizations dealing with reading and writing across grade levels came out with resolutions urging teachers to take note of what’s happening outside of schools and to bring or allow these “print-mixed” texts into the classroom. Graphic novels, Web pages, music mashes, video—all of these and more appear in students’ everyday lives outside of school. A growing body of research shows that these millennial students (meaning they’ve never known a world without computers and the Internet) develop all kinds of social literacy practices in these activities. The problem is, they know how to make sense of and to make digital texts, but most often don’t have opportunities to use those skills and strategies in schools. One scholar (James Gee) says these students have to leave all of this out-of-school learning at the classroom door, like guns in the old West. In too many classrooms, students are being prepared for the print-only industrial, clerical world of the late 1800s and 1900s. It’s probably no surprise that a 2006 national survey of students showed that only 28 percent of graduating seniors felt that what they learned in high school was meaningful and useful in their lives. This rate has rapidly declined over the past two decades.
Given the renewed emphasis on writing skills, how does a student's need and ability to write well fit into your communications model? How does print fit in?
Print will always be with us. Print is important in most modes of representing meaning. For example, in digital video composing, students make storyboards or write movie proposals, both with print-text narratives. They write and perform voice-over narrations. They focus the sensitive camera lens on print text in newspapers, magazines, signs and textbooks—blowing up a printed graph or a single word like “War” or “ACT” to the size of a movie screen. They use print text in color, size, font and movement to suit their meanings. They write reflections on the process of making and showing videos. They make written critiques of other students’ movies. What's more, we’ve found that making a digital video develops deep attention to and understanding of curricular content. Students focus so intently on the question, the book, the concept while they are planning, dramatizing, filming, editing and screening that the knowledge seems to be embodied in them. In their timed state graduation tests aimed at measuring their ability to interpret text and to write, they choose to write about the literature they made movies about. And they do very well on those tests. So digital video can also serve as a bridge to print essays.
Wouldn't an emphasis on video composing make books and writing less relevant in students' lives? How will they be able to use this model in professional, personal or civic contexts?
The CVCV project focuses on creating videos on academic content as a learning tool that integrates print text and writing. DV composing develops performance knowledge—knowing how to find, gather, use, communicate and create new ways of orchestrating knowledge, so useful in deciding how to vote, making a business plan, looking for a college, finding a vacation spot, engaging and persuading others. So useful for life. Last spring I was invited by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills to speak at a conference at Berkeley about DV composing. This large advocacy group of businesses, educators and policy-makers has been deeply concerned for several years that students in schools need much more than basic skills. Their standards for schools emphasize deep understanding, real-world tools, active engagement in solving meaningful problems and expanded means of showing mastery. It is easy to see why their student “Outcomes for Accessing, Processing, Managing, Integrating and Communicating Information” include calls for making digital videos as a persuasive communication that orchestrates the verbal and nonverbal, the spoken and the written, the visual and audio.
You said there are "a million stories" of students breaking through an educational barrier because of DV. Can you tell us one or two?
There was the 11th-grader failing English who came to life when his teacher introduced digital video along with a novel. His teacher said he finished his first book ever because he wanted to—so he could make a DV advertisement for it. His grades rose to 80 percent and he showed up before school, during study halls and at lunch to work on his production. This change continued into other novels, too, because he suddenly seemed to “get” that reading was making sense and interpreting. Here’s my favorite story: Two successful students designed a movie on Jim Crow laws in social studies class. Paige and Nicole researched on the Internet, analyzed their sources, wrote a narrative and enacted scenes at a water fountain labeled “whites only.” After much discussion, they used a few photographs of lynchings from the Library of Congress and searched for appropriate music. In the end, they decided on a song one of their mothers suggested, using Billy Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” as a soundtrack to their movie trailer, which they called “For Coloreds Only.” When the screening of their film was over, the class was stunned, silent. Later that week, the two broke up a fight about stepping on sneakers between two boys in the cafeteria. They said, “Don’t you know what people have been through so we can be here? You can’t fight about something like this!”
What kind of projects have the students done in CVCV? Is there one place where we can find some examples?
Early in the project, young teachers like Keith Hughes at McKinley High School helped develop the idea that video genres students already knew were a good way to go. They can appropriate these ready-made structures for use in their own DVs. So, for example, based on what they know about music videos, students make an iSpeak where they find an important text or write a text and use that as the narration for a video. They’ve used important historical speeches (e.g., “I have a dream”), Newton’s Laws and their own poems (“This is Just a Poem”) or personal narratives (“My Dad”). Students make “uncommercials” selling the elastic clause of the Constitution in the figure of a superhero, or selling symbolism: “Priceless.” Public service announcements persuade young people, for example, that love does not include abuse. Kelli Monaco Hannon’s students at Leonardo da Vinci school won two top national prizes on that topic last month. Movie trailers are popular genres: (“The Solar System—coming soon to a classroom near you”) with a written narration that focuses attention on the key elements of a novel (e.g., characterization, conflict, setting) or essential components of the U.S. government’s three-fifths compromise. The 20/20 news story (students call it “E!True Hollywood”) is more complex. It’s an inquiry focusing on a question about any literary, scientific, historical figure, event or issue. Videos vary from the real story of Huck Finn or Christopher Columbus to how people use math in everyday life. Students have created genres they call “reality TV.” That is the “confessional” part of those shows, where a person or character looks into the camera in a private place and says what’s really on his or her mind. An eighth-grader enacting the role of one of the gang members from “The Outsiders” splashes his face from his water bottle and cries, “I don’t want to go to jail. I’ve never even had a girl friend!” Or students become Lady MacBeth, the three witches and MacBeth, each pleading their case to answer the question: Whose fault is it? Joel Malley, another project teacher from McKinley, created a video quilt, with each student in the class having one line and one visual toward a theme based on writing in the classroom—written pieces on “Childhood is…” or social issues from student research papers. (Click here to access this video). Andy Carvin, Internet guru from PBS, saw us present on the CVCV project and captured the audience response to viewing this film. Click here to see other videos or our ongoing professional development and archived videos. Better yet, come to the City Voices, City Visions Film Festival. It will be held from 5:30-7:30 p.m. June 5 in the Market Arcade Film and Arts Centre, 639 Main St. in downtown Buffalo. We’ll celebrate the best films of the year with students, parents, teachers and community members. It will be free and open to the public.
What advice do you have for those of us intimidated or unfamiliar with digital video technology? How can we be part of the action, rather than watch the world pass us by?
Ask a child or a teen you know and let them teach you, or figure it out and learn together. You can find extensive tutorials online for software that comes packaged on computers—iMovie for Macs and Movie Maker for PCs. When we ask them, students always say, “It’s fun,” but when we probe, they talk about an almost total engagement in the processes of thinking and communicating something to a real audience—the class, the school, the Web. If you try it, I suspect you’ll like it. More than a few of our teachers have found that their students know much more about these things than they do. For them, making digital video is a high-status, real-world practice. One teacher brought a DV camera into class. Her desk was immediately surrounded by admiring eighth-graders. One said, ‘Sweet, you have night vision.’ She was smart enough to learn from them. In the classroom, they made DV poetry interpretations. After it was done, one of her students said she learned from her project that “poetry is everywhere.” As an English teacher, that’s an attitude I’d like to see in all students. I think DV composing helps give people new eyes to see with. That’s another reason to try it.