Abstract
This chapter expands on previous notes in chapters focused on composing film as a way of extending opportunities for students to engage with storytelling through multimodal means. The work teachers shared includes written products as well as film-based compositions. The research presented in this chapter examines the classroom as a makerspace in light of recent studies and includes the possibility for storyboarding as well as composing film within layers of a variety of multimodal platforms. The use of film as a kind of mentoring process in authorial work is one area of focus, while the role teachers took as artist/authors in creating mentor texts is an additional area that is highlighted.
TopBackground
While films can be viewed, they can also be made. Mills (2010) suggested that teachers must use scaffolding when incorporating film as a teaching tool, particularly in the process of digital video creation; this scaffolding then supports the synthesis of stronger, more complex products from students. It might be the case that students have exposure and practice with the types of tools they would use for composition, but research suggested that this prior knowledge cannot be taken for granted. In some cases, teachers experience to vulnerability of learning new tools in new compositions practices, as well. While Mills (2010) wrote of filmmaking work with younger students, a similar process may be implemented with adolescents. Bull and Kajder (2005) discussed digital storytelling as a film-based classroom methodology. The digital stories were suggested for use in public classrooms, so long as they were based on the demands of curriculum.
Bull and Kajder (2005) recommended that digital stories be told from the perspective of the student, rather than a removed third person, incorporating elements of lived experience. This student-oriented work is a potential next step in the work presented in this chapter as teachers discussed their mentor film texts and practices; closer examination of student-created films would likely open additional possibilities for knowledge-building in the field and for analysis.
Key Terms in this Chapter
New Literacies: An approach to examining the ways that meaning are conveyed through multimodal and digital texts and platforms that extend beyond printed word-based text; according to Lankshear and Knobel, this sense of the new may be applied to either processes or materials.
Literacy Practice: Engagement/interaction with consuming or creating textual content, either at home or in the context of a classroom (or, in some cases, both spaces).
Phenomenology: A qualitative methodology that employs close attention to experience with particular phenomena through unstructured interviews and, when possible, observations.
Assemblage: A term that signifies a multimodal text that has been composed of two or more combined elements for meaning-making.
Filmic Representation: For this work, the ways in which the semiotics of film are employed in constructing views of self and the world.
Multimodality: The theoretical lens that guides examination of the ways that meaning is made across and within particular aspects/modes of a text.
Film: An assembled and recorded text composed and shared with specific intentions and purposes, either from authorial voices within or outside the classroom space.
Makerspace: A deliberatively conceived site of composing/creating wherein a variety of ways for making meaning and playfully constructing products are valued and invited; these spaces can be personal or pedagogical, or an interweaving of both.