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Photo #9. Landscape of "destiny" |
My previous
post looked at the general issue of infusing technology, and I promised to
subsequently explore a specific case.
A fellow blogger’s excellent advice gives us a start. In Limor’s
Storytelling Agora , on How to Handle
Characters Too Complex for Telling, August 25, 2012, she says: “It takes a couple of minutes listening
to a tour-guide, a teacher, a storyteller speaking about such a character to
figure out the problem – pathos, which is the outcome of trying to capture and
deliver something too complex turned national and monumental – if complex was
not enough.” Limor continues:
Problem: How can you relate to such a character?
Solution: By finding your reflection.
While Limor’s case study focuses on handling the story of a big political
figure, David Ben-Gurion, I’ll apply this to my students’ first assignment on
digital media production: introduce yourself. While our characters might not appear “too complex for
telling,” if we really look for our “reflection,” we may be surprised. In addition, the assignment especially
lends itself to looking at how infusing technology offers possibilities ranging
from skimming happily on the surface to diving for deeper meaning. Finally, I was motivated to push this
assignment past the surface-level introductions because I had found in the
previous semester of teaching that in order to teach from feel rather than from
the lesson plan, I needed to know my students much better.
In the Introduce-Yourself assignment, I want the composing to extend
past the superficialities that often characterize introductions: I teach at the
University of Maryland, love riding horses, drinking coffee, & eating
chocolate. Sounds pretty blah but
put it in digital media (see 1 Min Intro)
and shazam; maybe okay, even an A? The animation, color, music, and flow of digital media can
beguile; do we know when we’re being glitzed over? I don’t want to let myself or my students skate on the
surface without even realizing what we’re missing in terms of knowing ourselves
and each other. The digital media
might even help us construct better personal and social identities.
“A sense of identity combines
the individual, personal world with the collective space of cultural and social
relations” (Grootenboer,
Lowrie, & Smith). While
the integration of personal-cultural-social may look to make the task “too
complex for telling,” I believe the shift to identity construction promises the
right direction. After all, our
course is Good Stories: Teaching
Narratives for Peace & Justice, and our study leads us to engage our
evolved capacity for imaginative collaboration. I believe if we are to enact our capacity, it may well
depend on our constructing identities through the goodness of stories that we study
and produce, not fictions but true narratives powerful enough to stand up to the
troubles of our time.
Given that huge backdrop,
let’s look at the much more simple process. Based on the stories and journals we were already doing,
students were directed to compose or collect ten images (photos, drawings, or
other representations):
1 Photo of yourself
that you like
2 Photo of yourself
that you don’t particularly like
3 Community with
which you identify
4 Community of
aspiration but not membership
5 Drawing of the
stranger from the Kanu story with whom you are most connected/identified
6. Representation
of/from the “mature masculine” as related to stories
7 Representation for
the “daughter of the village”
8 Most important
story you’ve heard
9 Landscape/seascape/skyscape
of “destiny”
10 Image of
obstacle/monster/villain
I assembled my set of ten images to illustrate and to have a
feel for what my students might encounter. The first two images should be easy enough, I figured. We all have photos of ourselves and, if
not, we can snap them with our phones and laptops. Not a big deal, not until I started going through my photo
files because then I saw the range of images, a few I liked and a lot I
didn’t. They exposed a variety of
quality and significance. As Limor
directed, I wanted to find my reflection; and in probing more closely, I fell
through the shimmer of introduction and into the well of identity. That’s how our infusion of technology
offers more than the glitz surface; the lush visual resources also invite
movement into art, and perhaps on into Keats’ beauty is
truth.
While I certainly don’t
claim the grasp of truth, in looking at a few images, I realized that some reflect
what I consider more true about me than others. For example, the profile shot that I have up on my blog has
me smiling in a NWP cap.
The National Writing Project
does animate my being because it affirms the teacher’s authority about situated
learning and it offers a “community of practice” essential to sustaining
professional efforts to transform education into a paradigm of collaboration
instead of the existing crucible of external and invalid assessment. So that photo goes into the digital
media production, and notice how it’s already drafting the voice-over track.
In reviewing images, I decided
it would also be revealing to show a photo that isn’t liked, one that doesn’t
resonate nicely. I picked this one and joked with my students
about not liking the pants stuck in the boot, but I caught my insincerity or
lack of depth. This wasn’t really
contributing much to my construction of identity.
The opportunity with this
exploration of identity invites me to go further and to find a reflection that
is true and that I really want to see changed. It’s easy enough for us to snap a shot with tongue sticking
out in Photo Booth and use that for the “not-liked” requirement, but it doesn’t
promise to build the sense of identity needed for collaboration in social
justice. How can we use the gift
of technology that lets us see our reflection in order to reform, to begin re-constructing
identity.
So I thought more about the not-liked
image and recalled how an earlier project had been driven precisely by such a confrontation. The production process for On
Knowing worked in the “write-to-learn” tradition as the composing led
me through the embarrassment of seeing myself reflected in a study of failed
horsemanship that led to valuable insight. The resulting discovery opened, perhaps constructed, an
aspect of my identity involving a developing capacity to know by “feel,” the
hallmark of “true unity” in
riding, my favorite avocation (note Howard
Reingold’s on blogging about avocation in relation to Civic Life Online, p. 108).
I want to offer this to my
students. I want to challenge them
to go beyond introducing themselves into constructing their identities and our
identity so that we can collaborate.
And I want our infusion of technology not to take us further into la-la
land but to take us further in our quest for a world with peace and justice.
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