“English Teacher Learning for New Times: Digital Video Composing as Multimodal Literary Practice” (Miller)

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 21^st 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…”