position ourselves to understand deeply rooted problems in urban edu-
cation environments. We got that at Bingham. But as it turns out, we got
something much more as well: Piles of multidimensional humanity.
Finding Humanity
What is multidimensional humanity? Certainly some denotative no-
tion of the fact or condition of being human, but in terms of multidimensional, the emphasis shifts to the plurality of being human. In this regard, Bingham was loaded. First of all, white students were the vast minority. Sec-
ond, the school was ethnically and culturally rich with discernable popu-
lations of Asian, African American, Latino, and international students.
Yes, there was plenty of multidimensional humanity at Bingham.
However, in the grind of the everyday practice of education at Bingham,
it was ignored. This act of ignoring was, to be fair, necessary to a degree to keep the institution functioning, but beyond that it bordered on unconscious.
Take our research work at the school, for instance. When we were
wrapped up in a task of some sort, we often found ourselves ignoring
instances of humanity. One day we tried to take four sixth grade kids
around the school to take pictures of various parts of the school. Their
Humanity
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multidimensional humanity was often more interested in getting into
childish mischief than in carefully composing pictures! In one sense, they
were just being 6th graders. In another they were not conforming to our
institutional expectations of them. Since we had very little time to spare
in getting the project finished—after all, we had college classes to teach
back at the university—there was no room to negotiate with their child-
ish humanity. In a way, this was a microcosm of what teachers with state-
mandated curricula—not to mention the twenty-five plus students
crowded into their classrooms—had to deal with every day. Who has
time for multidimensional humanity? The object here is not to place
blame or criticize, but rather realize that the system is in many ways set
up to ignore multidimensionality of kids’ humanity.
It is important to note that in applying the concept of multidimension-
al humanity to students, we are not talking about bad behavior or even
immaturity. Multidimensional humanity surfaced in many colorful, natu-
ral, and inventive ways in our experiences at Bingham. The problem with
it was that it was taking place in an environment that was not equipped
to recognize, accept, or support it, almost like taking a large dog on a
walk through a very small and densely stocked glassware boutique.
Our aversion to the multidimensional fabric of humanity, like that of
the majority of teachers and administrators we worked with, was further
aggravated by our privileged upbringing. Principle investigators of our
research team were raised in at least somewhat affluent, white suburban
school districts where a homogeneity of humanity was instilled and ex-
pected. We were all expected to conform to the model of good student,
and that model rested upon particular assumptions: that we had func-
tional support systems at home; that we shared very basic values and
views on the world; and that we all had the same chance to benefit from
education if we worked hard.
The basic problem with such an upbringing is that none of those as-
sumptions is or was accurate, and, therefore, the model of student that
we had constructed through our own educational experience—the very
model the Bingham School and its district were built upon—was misin-
formed and out of touch with students from non-white and non-affluent
backgrounds.
Because of this, our tendency in situations where education wasn’t
working well, not unlike the school administration’s, was to look at stu-
dents as the source of the problem rather than the source of the solution.
On a larger scope, work to revitalize urban schools is often based on
responding to external evaluation or expectations rather than the voices
within the community or the school building itself. Our research project
was designed to attend more carefully to those voices—particularly the
voices of young and prescient students—and to bring narratives of
change to the fore. Yet we were often tempted to ignore them in the
pursuit of order.
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Chapter 20
In the end the process of videomaking was a magnet for multidimen-
sional humanity, with the added benefit of making it clearly visible. The
4th, 5th, and 6th graders’ Picture Project proved a great forum for it. Even though every one of the ninety-plus students involved had to do the
same thing—take one picture of any aspect of their school that was signif-
icant to them—their uniqueness, call it multidimensional humanity,
poured out of their rich audio commentary that went along with pictures
they took.
It really was designed as a one-dimensional project. But when there
was an opportunity, however unintended, for the expression of cultural
identity, personal identity, artistic identity, the students seized it.
Many of the expressions of identity were based on the students’ per-
ceptions of what we as researchers, teachers, and administrators would
find socially desirable. We cued up each student’s photo, handed them a
microphone, and recorded their answer to the question, “What is this
picture and why did you take it?” For example, when a 6th-grade girl
Zinaria took a picture of two workers in the Bingham’s main office, she
recorded:
I took this picture of Miss Murphy and Miss Trifone, the school secre-
taries, because I wanted to show you who they are and what they do
here in the main office.
As a skilled student, Zinaria completed the project in just the manner in
which it was expected to be done. Task given, task completed.
The school district also hosted international students, including refu-
gees, exchange students, and immigrants. These students were often re-
ferred to as ESL (English as a second language) kids and, more often than
not, they spoke very limited English. Kemba was the only ESL student in
Bingham’s 6th grade class and completed the project without fanfare
despite the fact that he knew very little English. We often did not know
which students were ESL, so in terms of the assignment we treated them
all the same. Kemba took a picture of the school playground and re-
corded:
I took this picture because I love Syracuse playing outside.
Perhaps if we had known that Kemba was not proficient in English we
might have taken the time to make suggestions about his phrasing, gram-
mar, and mechanics for the presentation. But something about the natu-
ral way it happened and its pure and truthful nature added something
beautiful to the picture it would not have had without—call it the multi-
dimensional humanity of a boy placed in an American middle school
straight from Africa: task given, task made human.
Some children had difficulty in delivering socially desirable answers
to the question. Tyronne, for instance, struggled to mat
ch his response to
the grammar of the question.
Humanity
cxvii
The picture means to me because Miss Albert is the best (pause) teacher in the hall for doing what her job is to keep children from not fighting.
If his response was to be solely judged on its institutional, grammatical
correctness, all of the loving human elements would have been lost. Ty-
ronne’s response was built on his love of and respect for this hall monitor he saw every day at his school.
Plurality of Humanity
In line with the problem of school systems tending to promote a
homogeneous, good-for-all institutional code, David Buckingham (1993)
cautioned against the very practice engrained in everyday school life:
. . . a view of young people as a unitary or homogeneous social group,
with specific psychological characteristics. Most obviously, this in-
volves paying close attention to gender, ”race” and social class al-
though we need to avoid regarding these simply as “demographic vari-
ables.” On the contrary, we need to consider the diverse ways in which
young people themselves construct the meanings of those differences,
and how they are defined and mobilized in different social contexts.
In perhaps the most striking display of multidimensional humanity, sixth
grader Gavyn looked at his picture of himself shooting a basketball into
the hoop in the school gym, calmly took the microphone and, with no
rehearsal, rapped the following in one take:
The reason I took this picture
Oh, . . . I like to play
Basketball
Basketball.
You gotta
Shoot it in the hoop,
Shoot it in the hoop.
Make that swish
Like swish swish cheese.
Swish cheese,
Swish! Swish! Swish!
What is important to realize when it comes to the multidimensional hu-
manity, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, is that it is there in
plentiful supply and in clear view of the videomaking experience.
NOTE
1. By Gaston Alonso, Noel Anderson, Celina Su, and Jeanne, Theoharis. New
York: NYU Press.
Part Three
Unlocking the Moviemaking Mind
Media and Literacy
Video production can help students make gains in such areas as self-
esteem, self-efficacy, and critical thinking. Unfortunately, many stan-
dardized tests make little attempt to gauge changes in these areas, prefer-
ring instead to measure students’ knowledge in domain-specific areas
like math, reading, and history.
The link between video production, intangibles like self-esteem, and
standardized test performance is still under investigation. To focus solely on improving test scores, however, is to misunderstand the full range
and potential of video production and other media based projects in the
K-12 classroom. We can connect the potential benefits of these types of
exercises back to storytelling as an extension of our humanity.
In short, video production exercises improve, refine, and hone story-
telling capabilities. People become better storytellers as a result, yes, but they also become more experienced in envisioning, executing, crafting,
shaping, and editing ideas. In learning how to tell a good story, students
also learn to dissect and contemplate the contents of stories. Stories, thus, become a landscape for critical thinking, self-reflection, and introspec-tion.
In this way, we can conceive of video as a new type of literacy. Literacy commonly refers to the ability to read and write. Historically we associate the concept with the invention of the printing press, the Enlightenment,
and the Industrial Revolution, all of which were factors in increasing
literacy rates among laypeople (that is, non-land owners and non-clergy
members).
Increases in literacy rates, however, represented a social change that
was about far more than simple expansions of ability; literacy was about
the transfer of power from those who had it to those who did not. It is
unsurprising, thus, that literacy was met with opposition from groups
who occupied the top tier of social hierarchies. The Catholic and Angli-
can Churches, for instance, both warned of the “evil and demoralizing
tendencies” of unsupervised reading (Curtis, 2007, p. 9). And prior to the
Civil War and the federal emancipation of Black persons in America,
numerous states ratified anti-literacy laws for slaves (Mitchell, 2008).
Of course, it wasn’t the mere ability to read and write that dominant
social groups opposed; rather, it was what these abilities represented—
the spread of ideas, a possible questioning of the status quo, and perhaps
even an opposition to the existing social order—that worried them. In
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Media and Literacy
this book, we argue that literacy is once again at the center of a seismic
cultural shift in the ways in which ideas are born, reproduced, and dis-
seminated. However, unlike the past, in which literacy was conceptually
opposed and challenged overall, the current debate has do with institu-
tional demarcations about what counts as literacy and, consequently,
what does not.
Thus, for our purposes, traditional definitions of literacy are proble-
matic for several reasons. What does it mean to read? And what does it
mean to write? Must reading and writing take written text as their ob-
jects? Or can we talk about reading and writing in regard to other kinds
of texts—video, for instance?
If we are to expand our understanding of literacy, it is necessary first
to abandon the traditional definition of the concept. Not only is it unnec-
essarily narrow but, moreover, the traditional definition of literacy sys-
tematically and disproportionately excludes members from lower soci-
oeconomic classes. Furthermore, the traditional definition can neither ad-
dress nor keep pace with the cultural changes occurring outside the edu-
cational system.
We propose a reinterpretation of literacy—one that is reflective of
today’s contemporary participatory culture, popular culture, and the pro-
liferation of convergent consumer electronics like smartphones and lap-
tops. Furthermore, we argue that video production as a means of story-
telling is critical to our everyday lives. We live in a world in which we are increasingly surrounded by media platforms, all of which are actively
engaged in storytelling. Video production exercises can begin to equip
students with the necessary skills to make sense of this ever more com-
plex world and, furthermore, to be successful in it. However they can
only do so if literacy and literacy standards begin to acknowledge and
incorporate media as part of their conceptual foundations.
TWENTY-ONE
Reciprocity
Incorporating any new learning strategy into a classroom setting is usual-
ly an investment. And by nature, investment can lead to improvements,
but usually involves an upfront cost. In the case of videomaking, the
upfront cost is something we refer to as the encoding deficit.
From birth we are brought up within view of moving image media—
game
s, televisions, movies, web, Blu-ray, iPods—and just by watching
we learn how to decode—or read—these media very well. By the time
children arrive in kindergarten, they possess, without any formal visual
reading training, a strong aptitude for the reading of visual media. The
same cannot be said about their encoding skills, or their ability to effec-
tively communicate to others using visual media, thus producing and
giving way to an encoding deficit.
Conventional Reading and Writing
This encoding deficit might even be considered an improvement com-
pared to the double deficit that many, if not most, young children bring
into their first classrooms. In terms of print media, children arrive with
comparatively low aptitude in both decoding (reading) and encoding
(writing) skills. The difference is that K-12 curricula from day one focuses on improving these particular decoding and encoding skills and continues to the very end. As there is no consistent curricular treatment, outside of late stage media literacy instruction, of visual reading and writing
skills, they reside in the margins of the K-12 experience.
Compounding this unfortunate reality is the fact that the typical K-12
teacher has no more or less skill in visual media than his or her students.
Though they can “converse” in the practice of reading visual media like
instructional videos, television, film, and new media, they are usually ill-equipped to oversee any kind of a videomaking activity because they
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Chapter 21
have no idea how to do it. And this example applies to new technology
developments outside of videomaking as well.
Technology Elephants
There is an elephant in the room when it comes to considering any
great new idea—call it supercool teaching tool “X”—for the classroom:
How can teachers be expected to do “X,” let alone find the time to get up
to speed with yet another promising new learning technique? Not only
are there many other priorities for teachers in their day-to-day work, but
something like moviemaking is complicated, requires a knowledge of
specific technologies, and is not at all intuitive for the average teacher.
Unlocking the Moviemaking Mind Page 14