Teachers can’t realistically keep up with or identify with every learning
tool. What is a teacher to do?
Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to this question. But there is
a companion reality to consider when it comes to the idea of videomak-
ing in the classroom. As difficult as the idea of incorporating videomak-
ing into learning is to adult teachers, it is considerably easier and more
intuitive for children. Why is this?
Visual Language
One of the first steps in educating our film and TV students in college
is to get them to see motion picture media-making as a language. The
reason for this is that video looks too much like real life, and the fact that it does creates a problem for the students when they look at it through a
camera viewfinder. This is because what they see in that viewfinder is, in
reality, far different than what our eyes see in real life. Students tend to realize this very quickly when they make their first movies and they end
up looking so very different from what they imagined on the screen.
They know that something is wrong, but they don’t immediately under-
stand what it is.
It’s usually because they tried to tell a three-dimensional story in a
three-dimensional way. The problem is that they are working with a two-
dimensional medium. Converting a three-dimensional idea to a two-di-
mensional medium requires a certain degree of critical awareness—in
other words, help in recognizing the difference between these dimension-
al portrayals—and then a lot of translation. It’s a lot like drawing.
Encoding and Decoding
The reason why language is a helpful metaphor in teaching video is
that it involves an encoding and decoding process. If you want to com-
municate an idea to someone else—say, for instance, this encoding/de-
coding idea—the author of the message has to encode that message using
Reciprocity
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selected language symbols, in this case alphabetical characters of the Eng-
lish language, in hopes that the audience it was designed for is capable of decoding that message. Chances are good if the audience is proficient in
the English language.
Videomaking involves a similar encoding/decoding process, but the
language is different—very different. Instead of arrangements of letter
symbols, picture and sound arrangements are used to communicate its
ideas. On top of this, the structures and tactics of these arrangements are often very counterintuitive to the process of print encoding and even
common sense.
This is much like the frustrating difference that foreign language stu-
dents, young and old, face when trying to learn a second language later
in life. Students of a second language often express frustrations related to the adage, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” The reason for this
tendency is that time fertilizes the roots of our first-given language structures in everyday life and makes it more difficult to allow a wholly different language structure into our thought process. Take, for instance, the
order of adjective and noun in the Romance languages compared to Eng-
lish: hot coffee versus café caliente.
As young school children are still in the process of formulating their
language understanding, they are comparably more open and tolerant of
alternative language structures. The fact that they are already fluent in
the reading of visual language, as their everyday lives are saturated with
visual media, presents a built-in incentive for kids to explore the writing or encoding practices of visual language. It is very parallel to the notion of how traditional curricula teach sentence structure and grammar to
primary school students. The encoding skills of visual language are simi-
lar in nature and congruent with other language development features.
Even though children are lacking in writing skills associated with
visual expression, the good news is that if they can learn and communi-
cate in the high levels of abstract thought associated with written and
spoken English they will likely find learning video symbols and expres-
sions easier in comparison. But as is painfully clear with the case of adults learning new languages, the earlier children are exposed to formative,
language-like practices like visual language encoding, the better.
Video: A New “Paper” to Write On?
Another embedded feature of videomaking in classes is the broader
opportunity it presents for teachers to get acquainted with video’s formal
features, not so much as a technology, but more as an instrument of
education. For instance, social studies teachers are not necessarily spe-
cialists in literature or writing, but more often than not they utilize the discourses of reading and writing as instruments in their lesson plans. In
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Chapter 21
this light, video can be seen as an expanded “intertextual paper” to read
and write with (Navas, 2010).
The purpose of this discussion is by no means to intimidate teachers
about the different and often difficult language involved in videomaking;
rather it is to call attention to the fundamental differences underlying the structures of written and spoken language versus visual language. The
down side is that teachers have to learn a new language, which is a tall
order. The up side is that because it is new and different, it can bring out new and different dimensions of learning that current learning methods
(reading and writing) cannot. As there is no question that videomaking
can add considerably to learning environments, the only question re-
maining is whether it is worth a teacher’s investment to learn and apply.
In her book Engaging the Eye Generation, Johanna Riddle (2009) shared an enlightening epiphany she experienced when she battled with the
notion of whether to accept the challenge of videomaking in her class:
It didn’t take long to realize that every child in the school wanted to get their hands on that digital camera. They saw me clicking around campus, honing basic digital photography skills, and they wanted to try it
too. They wanted to experience education, not just read about it or
listen to a teacher talk about it. Their hunger for a broader forum of
communication and creation encouraged me to overcome my first hur-
dle in this new world of technology application. That moment of cogni-
zance remains one of the great epiphanies of my teaching career—
realizing that my students’ need to know superseded my need to know
it all. I finally understood that I didn’t have to have full mastery in
order to empower them. I simply had to be willing to learn alongside
them, to trust in my judgment and experience along the shared path of
learning. That insight changed so much about the way I had always
viewed my role as a teacher. It was a definition that shifted and broad-
ened as I realized that we were all going to move forward—together.
She realized the first step in unlocking the moviemaking mind is to have
the courage to let go of the idea of knowing it all and to be open to
becoming a student in one’s own classroom.
TWENTY-TWO
Empowerment
Teachers are so afraid of that word—empowerment. They’re afraid that
kids are going to tak
e over.
—Lorraine McBride, Principal South High School, in Connecticut
Our second of three iMovie training sessions was underway, and we
brought a visitor with us because he was intrigued with our project. Brad
Bartholomew taught video and communications at a nearby suburban
high school and found it very interesting that our research project in-
volved teaching 4th, 5th, and 6th graders how to edit. He seemed some-
what skeptical of whether they were old enough and capable of learning
such a seemingly complicated thing as video editing. So when he asked if
he could observe and lend a helping hand, we welcomed him.
All the students had already shot video of their own and it was time
for them to learn how to assemble the footage they had shot with video
editing software, iMovie, already included with their classroom comput-
ers.
We had run the first training session with the 4th graders the day
before and on this day we were doing back-to-back training sessions with
the 5th and 6th graders, one hour each. It seemed the more we unveiled
our plans to Brad, the more skeptical he was that they would work.
Would one hour be enough time? Were the students too young and inex-
perienced to be able to grasp the concepts?
Brad sat back and watched as Jason, the technology guru of our re-
search team, projected the iMovie program on the screen at the front of
the room. Jason was a skilled video editing trainer, but the youngest
students he had ever worked with before this project were college fresh-
men. In fact, everyone on my research team—not to mention ALL the
teachers at the public school we were working at—had at some point
looked at us strangely, head cocked slightly to one side, and said, “Real-
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Chapter 22
ly?” when we suggested that these kids would have no problem learning
video editing, and quickly at that. Based on our experiences in teaching
kids editing in the past, the best approach was to lure them in visually.
This involved putting the video material in front of them, explaining how
the interface worked in a basic way, and inviting them to try it in front of everyone to confirm how easy it really was. If our theory was correct, in
no time they would be dancing around the whole program and investi-
gating its capabilities on their own.
The session was going very smoothly when Brad whispered to us that
he had an idea of something he could contribute to the project. He could
print out instructions of all the steps Jason was going through so that the students could have a roadmap for putting their videos together. This
was something his high school’s administrators had required him to do
in his classes and, since he was very familiar with the procedures, he
would be happy to do this for us.
Our first reaction was to thank him and accept his generous offer to
help. But as we watched, the kids slowly but surely took the controls
away from Jason. In a matter of minutes, they were effortlessly editing
their own videos in front of the class. These digital natives clearly operat-ed in a different way than the digital immigrants who were training
them.
They didn’t need text-based instructions to learn editing. They needed
to explore and experiment—trial and error technique. Marc Prensky, who
coined the terms digital native and digital immigrant to illustrate the divide between students and teachers in the digital age, elaborated on the tension inherent in classrooms today:
[T]he single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital
Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the
pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an
entirely new language. . . . Digital Natives are used to receiving infor-
mation really fast. They like to parallel process and multi-task. They
prefer their graphics before their text rather than the opposite. They
prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when net-
worked. They thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards.
They prefer games to “serious” work.
The problem with most work labeled “serious” is that it tends to be
didactic, sedentary, unmotivating, and, in terms of their everyday lives,
irrelevant. This is not to say that students cannot do such serious work in the classroom, but rather there are rising limits in the effectiveness of
such dated techniques with the emerging K-12 student. This has forced
teachers to rethink their definitions and impressions of what they consid-
er serious work, as such methods by themselves (as currently defined
and engrained into the fabric of education) are proving increasingly inca-
pable of producing “serious” results. Prensky elaborates on this dilemma:
Empowerment
cxxix
Digital Immigrant teachers assume that learners are the same as they
have always been, and that the same methods that worked for the
teachers when they were students will work for their students now. But
that assumption is no longer valid. Today’s learners are different. Is it
that Digital Natives can’t pay attention, or that they choose not to?
Often from the Natives point of view their Digital Immigrant instruc-
tors make their education not worth paying attention to compared to
everything else they experience—and then they blame them for not
paying attention!
In the information age, students learn many, many things about their
worlds in non-school ways. Will schools embrace or cast aside the learn-
ing methods their students deliver, at no cost or obligation, to classrooms of the twenty-first century?
Through our own trial and error over the years of working with digi-
tal natives, we had slowly sanded down the rough edges of our immi-
grant accents. This afforded us a reasonably well-informed hunch that
these natives we were teaching video editing to would not need printed
instructions to refer to after the training session. Instead they would need time to explore and experiment. When we told Brad this, he was at first
surprised, but as he watched the kids masterfully relishing the new fron-
tier of video editing ahead of them, it made sense. He concluded, “If 4th,
5th, and 6th graders can get it this easily, I have some rethinking to do
with my high-schoolers.”
At the risk of romanticizing the ascent of digital natives, it’s important
to note that they are in fact learners in need of teachers with timeless
lessons. The question is: Will teachers put in the effort to engage with a
generation of learners with very different learning styles? And if teachers are willing to do this, they must be prepared to learn as much as they
teach. In the end, digital natives are not just born and raised on digital
media and technology; they are born and raised on learning from it. They
are learning natives as much as they are digital natives.
TWENTY-THREE
Transformation
A world being transformed by new technologies and media as well as
new social and economic arrangements creates the need for rapid and
deep transformation of genres.
—Charles Bazerman, Adair B
onini, and Débora Figueiredo1
Most K-12 teachers we work with don’t think of themselves as movie-
makers. At the beginning of a project, their sentiments about moviemak-
ing are typically summed by something like, “I have no idea how to
make a movie, let alone where to start.”
Even if teachers are interested in making movies (or other media
products), they don’t usually think of themselves as qualified overseers
of such activities in the classroom because they’ve never been moviemak-
ers. They are used to being movie readers, but never movie makers. In
media terms, this presents an interesting contradiction. Because if a learning task involved students writing a story with words and images on a
paper, most teachers would not have a problem overseeing the activity—
despite the fact that they are no more writers than they are moviemakers!
The idea of transferring the writing process from paper to movie screens
is frightening to most teachers.
Part of this fear involves technological intimidation. There is equip-
ment involved along with all of its complications: acquiring, accessing,
securing, operating, distributing—just to name a few. Any technology
that is new to a teacher requires an investment in time and skill building
in order to bring it in a classroom. We’ve talked already about the ready-
made skill and confidence digital age learners bring into classrooms that
can serve to alleviate at least some of this technological tension. But there is an additional factor that challenges teachers even if they were to overcome their technological intimidation: the genre factor.
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Chapter 23
The idea of genre in a videomaking context presents an entirely differ-
ent challenge to teachers compared to technology, more along the lines of
a paralysis. This is due to the overwhelming number of choices that crea-
tors with a video camera in their hands have, not just in media genre
choices like TV or film or podcast, but content genres like nonfiction or
fiction, and subcategories within like reality or documentary or fantasy
or music video or PSA. The challenge is to decide what single direction to
Unlocking the Moviemaking Mind Page 15