First Year: 2006
In late August of 2005, just two short weeks after graduating with a
master's degree in professional writing, I found myself standing on the
other side of the desks at the same institution where I had been a
student for many years. This was it. My dream of teaching at the
college level had finally become a reality.
I was both thrilled and terrified.
I struggled with establishing credibility--not only playing the
part, but looking the part, and coming to terms with my own authority
in the classroom. I felt ill-prepared, and on the really bad days, I
even felt ill-equipped to command the position that I held in such high
regard. I recognized the importance of my role as instructor within the
realm of higher education.
I was aware of the impact I could make, and the heavy
responsibility of raising my students to the higher-level thinking not
only required by institutions of higher education, but also indicative
of conscious, critical, responsible global citizens.
I want to give my students the opportunity to delve deeper
into the mass media that inundates their lives. I want them to stop
swallowing blindly the multiple texts within our consumer-driven
society. I want them to be thoughtful consumers, and even more, I want
them to be reflective, deliberate producers. This was the foundation of
my graduate work in composition and rhetoric. More than anything, I
want to redefine literacy skills in my classroom, and give students the
chance to evaluate and produce texts that demand their attention and
captivate their imagination. I am determined to use multimedia and
technology to reach these goals and to successfully integrate the texts
of today with the rhetorical traditions of the academy.
Early in my graduate career I became interested in the theories of
digital literacy and use of technology in the classroom, not only as an
apparatus of instruction, but as a mode for the analysis and production
of multimedia student texts. As a result of these interests, I was
naturally drawn to KAIROS, the peer-reviewed, online journal dedicated
to issues in "Rhetoric, Technology and Pedagogy." It is there, in the
spring 2003 volume, that I found Daniel Anderson's multimedia,
multimodal conglomeration entitled "Prosumer Approaches to New Media
Composition: Consumption and Production in Continuum." It is a
brilliant and innovative academic publication, representing the
non-traditional discourse propelled by KAIROS.
Using multimedia applications on a Mac, Anderson produced a pedagogical
piece that integrated fixed and scrolling text, interactive links,
digital video, music and still frames. It is a busy, thought-provoking
text in design alone, but Anderson goes further by demonstrating his
success in allowing students to analyze, produce and edit digital
videos as part of the composition process. He successfully argues that
in production of multimedia texts, students become more conscious,
critical consumers of such texts. I was instantly sold. I knew that I
would use digital video production in my own classes, but I was not
sure how.
It seems appropriate that I would return now to KAIROS for
answers about the use of digital video in composition studies. In "
Review of Digital Video Production in Post-Secondary English Classrooms
at Three Universities," published by KAIROS in the fall of 2003,
Melissa Meeks and Alex Illyasova interview compositionists who are
using digital video production in their classrooms; these instructors
validate production of digital video as academic text and raise the
pedagogical implications of this practice by highlighting the need to
explore new avenues of literacy:
Where we don't hesitate is
admitting that alphabetic literacy is not enough anymore--for our
students or for us as teachers. Although we don't know all the answers
to the questions these new media raise, we recognize that digital video
has the qualities we are looking for to engage students in combining
design, production, and literac(ies) in the classroom . . . digital
video allows them to use more than alphabetic (text-based) literacy in
their compositions; their familiarity with film, television, and
image-saturated culture means that more of what they bring to the
classroom counts. Digital video is a challenge we welcome. (1)
In the same article, Cynthia Selfe's use of iMovie and
VideoWave in her undergraduate Adolescent Literature class is examined.
Selfe uses these applications to "give students a basic introduction to
composing in the literacy of movies," and "the goal is to get students
playing, thinking, and communicating in different modes" (5). This idea
of play, critical thinking and composing in different modes is what
draws me to the use of student documentaries in my classroom. Selfe
offers valuable advice to instructors embarking on this mission:
.
. . try and maintain a great sense of humor. Unless you are un-humanly
lucky, things will go wrong. Part of her success she attributes to her
willingness to learn, observe, practice, and try things out. (Meeks and
Ilyasova 6)
In reflecting on my first year teaching and using
digital video production in my composition classroom, these are
comforting words, indeed.
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Image by James F. Clay