Media Production Experience: Fictional Narrative Production

Cramming an "introduction" to shooting a scripted narrative into even one term would feel crazy to me.  Trying to cover it in just a couple of weeks, while necessary, has felt largely inadequate.  There's just such a lot of elements that have to come together with reasonable proficiency in order for a finished product to begin to look even moderately polished. We briefly covered a few of these: scripting, shot-lists and shooting scripts, 3/4 point lighting, continuity, 180 degree rule, and dialogue editing.  I felt that an overview of on-set and pre-production roles would have been beneficial, as well as possibly a more thorough introduction to on-set-protocols.

We've all had a difficult time trying to assess the best ways to choose the best concepts to teach in a youth classroom setting in order to provide the best value to students.  The narrative unit could easily fill an entire course, though it's highly unlikely that a non-CTE teacher would have access to cameras, lighting, editing, and sound equipment needed to really illustrate these processes to a class. (Especially a large class, where hands-on-experiences with equipment and software become more problematic).



Allowing for these limitations, I've found that most of the lesson-plan material I come up with is not best suited for a public secondary-school setting.  I'm not familiar with those environments and I am a poor judge of what would work well in them.  However, a lot of what I am able to devise would probably work well in a private or charter-school setting with a smaller class size and access to resources, or in a home-school/co-op environment.  It would also be well-suited to extra-curricular environments where the rubric becomes less of a focus and it is easier to assume that students are motivated to engage with the material.  Any of these conditions would allow for a more favorable teacher to student ratio, as well as better likelihood of being able to access the equipment and software needed to do this kind of material justice.

While I've tried to foster media-creation in my home, I'm finding that the processes involved in narrative production are too complex and require too much simultaneous enactment for me to teach with any brevity to the ages of children I have ready access to (1-8 years).  I'm not yet confident judging at what point a child would be ready to recognize all of the elements of narrative production in action at the same time.  But the impossibility of illustrating shooting for continuity without also going through the editing process is a good illustration of how complex it becomes to try to teach a single concept.  Continuity shooting requires involvement in pre-production, shooting, and post-production in order to be quite clear.  Trying to illustrate this in a hands-on-way requires some forecasting skills from a student that even many high-schoolers may find evasive.

Links for Media Literacy, Pedagogy, and Access

Videos I highly recommend, and personally found relevant for this week:

David Foster Wallace "This is Water" Commencement Speech: 

http://bit.ly/1cXe0Rs

I would have loved to have had a discussion about how this relates to Freire's "Explaining to the masses their own actions."  As well as his concept of the oppressed realizing that the status quo is limiting them from reaching their potential.  Plus it kind of worked with the educative vs banking dichotomy.

Tavi Gevinson Ted Talk, "A Teen just trying to figure it out":

http://bit.ly/JbdqS9

I was fascinated by the way access interplays with her entire project.  A part of access (I think) that we didn't get to discussing in class is access to voice, or a way of communicating in a public forum when we have something to contribute.  (I think this was perhaps implied/included under "access to dominant mode of communication?")  For a teenage girl to take this kind of initiative, both creatively and organizationally is impressive to me. I'm always really interested in people who don't wait for permission to do what interests them.  I personally performed really well under the banking model of education, and it conditioned me to think inside the box to the point where it would never occur to me to do what Tavi has done.  

A little teacher ode from the New York Times, "Mr. Wright":

http://bit.ly/1cNM2I3 

So, this is admittedly designed to be an emotional piece, but I felt like it emulated a lot of the characteristics that both Freire and Dewey extolled.  Plus I find it helpful to try to visualize what this ideal teaching might look like.  Here is a science teacher, totally willing to engage in that type of teacher-student/student-teacher relationship Freire was talking about, clearly full of love and genuine concern for his students.  I see lots of Dewey's "conjoint activities". He's willing to engage in conversations with them that put him in a vulnerable (rejectable) position, but which clearly communicate earnestness.  Mostly I just found his emotional integrity and vulnerability to be stunning.  I think Freire would like him.  Probably Jesus too.

Additionally, some links to things (ahem, TED Talks.... I apologize.  I spent 18 months watching 2 or 3 Ted Talks every.single.day.  I will probably pull things from them in the future, hope nobody is strongly anti-TED) that came up in our discussion.  I know nobody likely has time to watch all of these right away, but I'd say pull one up whenever you find yourself with 15 minutes:

Brene Brown: The power of Vulnerability:  http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability.html

Brene Brown: Listening to Shame:  http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_listening_to_shame.html

Ken Robinson: How schools kill creativity:  http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution:  http://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_bring_on_the_revolution.html

Ken Robinson: Changing Education Paradigms: (SUPER RELEVANT TO ACCESS):  http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms.html

Ken Robinson: How to escape education's Death Valley:  http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_how_to_escape_education_s_death_valley.html

ALSO:

Sugata Mitra: Children can Teach themselves: (ACCESS, AGAIN):  http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html

Kiran Sethi: Kids, take charge:  http://www.ted.com/talks/kiran_bir_sethi_teaches_kids_to_take_charge.html

Theory into Practice Reading Response 1

(For TMA 690)

            Literacy, pedagogy, and access combined made for a pretty broad scope within one week’s focus, but I was able to find considerable material for reflection.  I anticipate that a large portion of my application for course content will be in providing education, training, and resources for parents to use to increase media literacy in the home.

            The Core MLE principles are a fantastic springboard for beginning conversations with parents about the need and relevance of media literacy.  I hope we will be covering these principles in more depth in this course, I hope to accumulate more resources for promoting these principles and concepts.

            Democracy and Education (chapters 1 &3) touched on all 3 topics of interest this week, but I felt its most valuable and sizeable contribution to the dialogue was in its encouragement to pedagogically enlist students’ own interest and effort in increasing their (relevant) education.  Calling this “educative results of teaching,” a student who is gaining practice in critical thinking gains a long term tool for increasing their scope of understanding and processing information, rather than just accumulating information.  There was also support in this document for balancing formal and informal approaches to education and especially for conjoint activities  that allow for “full participation” from students and encourage exploration and a mastery of the context and properties of the explored medium.  This reminded me a lot of Montessori methods of education, which promote child-led learning.

            Pedagogy of the Oppressed (chapters 1&2) was a little trickier to make direct correlations through for the first chapter, though most of those I did find were linked to access.  The second chapter was more directly applicable with pedagogy, especially encouraging learning that can only occur in an environment of trust and mutual respect between teacher and student, both willing to learn from each other.

            The overarching message of the pedagogical content of the reading was the need to assist students in developing critical thinking skills, as opposed to shorter-term, more measureable ends such as test scores or accurate regurgitation of information.   This can be especially challenging for parents who can’t so easily organize their interactions with their children to always remain cognizant of the learning and teaching opportunities afforded them.  The formal/informal teaching balance mentioned in Democracy and Education becomes a valuable concept here.

            Friere’s concept of trust in the teacher/student relationship has myriad applications to parent/child relationships as well, especially in trying to empower media users rather than just protect them from undesirable content.  His principle of encouraging real dialogue has tremendous potential in a family setting, as well as some additional challenges that may not be present in a classroom setting.

            Addressing access, I’m always terribly interested in dissecting the social injustices that slip almost unnoticed into the fabric of cultural socialization.  Most people that I’m able to interact with have pretty consistent access to media and technology via the internet, but often don’t know where to find voices that resonate with their life experience or lives that look like theirs in media that still has meaning and creates engaging, relevant narratives.   Rather than access to the medium, the struggle becomes access to material relevant to their view of self and lived experience.  I think this struggle is particularly relevant for those feeling ostracized across issues of gender, disability, and unconventional interests, or even precocity.  I have a dear friend whose 7 year old daughter is a genius.  She’s qualified to skip grades and reads novels far above the age appropriate reading level. (Compared to my 7 year old who is still learning to read)  She’s more often than not found wearing her Darth Vader helmet, and she loves building with Legos, all while wearing pink tulle skirts.

She has a really hard time accessing a media reality that accommodates the parameters of her experienced reality.  She doesn’t fit anyone’s marketing demographic, and she feels it.  Luckily she has a mother who engages in precisely the kind of dialogue we are promoting here.  This is most fortunate as they are together working to counter the unhealthy undercurrent of dieting and body-image culture that permeates grade school girls in her area.    (Likely in most areas)