I really appreciated this article for getting to the heart
of why digital literacy is so
important and how to go about
encompassing it within an ELA curriculum; it’s another one that I think would
be useful to read at the beginning of this class. Miller argues that pedagogies which stress new literacies
“are necessary because the new times of digitally accessible multimodality for
designing text is part of evolving social purposes and practices…facility with
interpreting and designing multimodal literacies will increasingly be required
by human beings to communicate, work, and thrive in the digital global world of
the 21st century.” I
know this has been the implication of most of the literature we’ve read, but
for some reason Miller’s argument that that is indeed the case seems especially
compelling. It’s true that
“students urgently need opportunities in schools to develop new literacies, performance
knowledge, and multimodal learning strategies required for new times and social
futures,” and Miller makes a good case for exactly how teaching those skills
through Digital Video Composing (DVC) falls under ELA’s domain.
I was struck by Miller’s suggestion that “the gap between multimodal literacy practices and print-based
schooling…helps to explain increasing student disengagement.” She mentions how traditional school
literacy practices foreground “the view of knowledge as propositional claims
held/provided by the teacher and supplied to the student to be committed to
memory” which is everything all of the theory we’ve read since beginning MUSE
has warned us against, but I never really thought about how technology could be
the perfect means of pushing back against “schooling.” Miller makes a pervasive point that
today, the most essential knowledge is “performance
knowledge—knowing how to find,
gather, use communicate, and create new ways of envisioning assemblages of
knowledge.”
Miller describes DVC as “a quintessential multimodal
literacy that allows orchestration of visual, aural, kinetic, and verbal modes
electronically,” pointing out that “digital video makes it difficult to stay in
the comfort zone of print-only texts.”
It is also “a composing activity, similar to writing text, but often
more engaging.” One teacher noted
that she “’needed an introduction, body, and conclusion. I had to proofread and spellcheck, sped
up some footage, slow down some other.
My process of creating a final product asked me to use a critical lens
on myself, scrutinize my work, spatially, musically, socially, emotionally, and
technically.’” This is really
quite awesome, as is the way in which flow is achieved and “knowledge is
created through the mental action of those involved in the high-demand work of
all the arts; its creator engage by ‘looking and thinking, seeing and planning,
viewing and responding,” and Miller moreover notes many incidences of flow
being achieved.
“Cool,” you might agree, or perhaps your interests are “in
technology’s utilitarian benefits;” you are still anxious that your “hard-won
knowledge about print-text is antiquated,” and you wonder “what should count as
English.” Well, I was quite convinced by one teacher who
“had trouble getting (his students) to be persuasive and authentic.” With DVC,
he was able to address what he (and I) feels are “two neglected and ‘essential
elements of savvy citizenry—media literacy and political/social awareness.” For
his senior class’s final unit, they “read short stories, studied the film Bowling for Columbine, and discussed
issues and problems in society.
They analyzed commercials, attending to the unifying concepts,
persuasive techniques, and characteristics of the genre.” Soon, Miller found that the
teachers in the class she observed “began to broaden their notions of school
literacy from only reading and
writing print to also composing
visual and auditory ‘texts’ addressing issues related to their readings of
literature.”
She also found that students were “drawing on their
lifeworlds as resources in their DV composing, but also critiquing those
lifeworlds, reframing neighborhood identities, and using their collaborative
work as a persuasive move aimed at change” and that in urban schools in
particular, “students often became ‘active designers of meaning.’” For me, it
was also very promising to learn that DVC fosters “student agency and
engagement as learners and higher
school achievement, including success on the state high-stakes writing tests” and
that “as students orchestrate visuals and music and printed text (on-screen and
in narration) in DV composing, the process creates and embodied link from print
to lived experience. In profound
ways, students may develop new eyes with which to see the world…”
