Unlocking the Moviemaking Mind
Page 17
terial motive like this behind videomaking in schools is that it puts stu-
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Chapter 24
dents in a very unrealistic position: to seek critical acclaim in competition with others who most certainly will have more experience and resources.
Thus, much, if not all, of the road to success in such a pursuit will be
filled with failure.
Visual stories created from a learning motive are artist or maker-cen-
tered. They seek discovery, insight, and knowledge out of the experience
of making a movie toward a predetermined, teacher-defined learning
objective. The experience is successful if it puts the student filmmaker(s) in a position of taking ownership of a lesson. It doesn’t matter how many
people watch such a story, in terms of the educational value, or how
many awards it wins as long as the experience of making it delivers the
lesson plan to the visual creator. The more there is to learn in a subject, the richer the videomaking experience can be.
Over time we have also learned that stories created from a learning
motive have a very different aesthetic. Considering that stories made in
the realm of profit motive are expected to perform to the highest artistic
standards and expectations of visual image forms and genres they can
only be deemed successful if they are “beautiful” to their targeted audi-
ence.
As long as stories created in the realm of learning are connected to a
learning outcome they need only to be beautiful to their creators. Why is
this? Because the motive behind their making is more about the active
and participatory experience and doing of a lesson plan than the final
product.
Keith Devlin (2011) illustrated this in relation to the school subject of
mathematics, in particular the use of video games to bring dimension to
the practice mathematics:
[M]athematics is not about acquiring basic skill or learning formulas.
It’s a way of thinking about problems in the world. The skills are mere-
ly the tools you need in order to do that thinking. Math is not a body of
knowledge, it’s something you do. And the printed word can be a terribly inefficient way to learn how to do something. . . . for example, if
you want to learn to play chess, you can learn the rules from a book,
but you won’t learn to play chess until you start playing games. The
same is true for learning to ride a bicycle, learning to swim, to ski, to
play tennis, or to play the guitar.
Our recent work with a 6th grade class at Frederick K-8 School demon-
strated the learning motive in practice. We had worked with Derek at
another middle school the year before this project and had the time to
make him comfortable with videomaking technology. After a year of
working together we left him with a simple camera kit in hopes that he
would find a way to use it in his new school. It didn’t take long before he came up with an idea in the form of the Eagle Eye project.
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For an assignment in his English class, he wanted to focus on the
process of editing written works, in other words, the process of re-work-
ing a first draft into a more effective final draft after receiving feedback.
Editing had always been a lesson he found very challenging to get
through to students. But, after he watched a movie being made with
iMovie software the year before, he realized he could teach the concept of
editing. In short, he realized he could more effectively develop an appre-
ciation and understanding of the editing process, while doing something
that fascinated his class: making a movie. If he could get his students to
appreciate the process of editing, it didn’t matter what medium they
used, as much as it mattered that the students experienced the joy of re-making something into something better using the editing process.
His idea was to have the class create a news magazine show about
issues of their school and have small groups create different stories for
the show. Through this video experience he would demonstrate to them
how much better their second drafts of video stories were once they had
been re-edited and reconsidered in a thoughtful editing process.
Eagle Eye and the Incarnation of Writing
In the end, Derek’s Eagle Eye project was a success on both expected
and unexpected fronts. First, the project was an example of an increasing
move on our part to take a step away from classrooms as video technolo-
gy and form consultants. Derek and his class were largely independent in
this activity and they figured the experience out and made it work on
their own. This is very important in advocating the idea of incorporating
videomaking in K-12 classrooms, as it should be doable.
It is important to acknowledge that the experience was not without
flaws, difficulties, and disappointments. Derek was not happy with the
work of a small handful of the more than twenty-five students in his
class. These students did not embrace and put themselves into the writ-
ing aspect of the experience the way he had hoped. And the school was
not quite ready for the impact of a videomaking exercise on the everyday
activities of the traditional practice of education. For instance, one group decided they wanted to do a story about school security, so they went to
the head of security with a video camera and informed the man that they
needed to do an interview with him. The head of security, though a very
nice and approachable person by nature, was confused and caught off-
guard by not only the impact of a camera being thrust into his face, but
also—in the absence of any explanation or context—the inherent role
reversal presented in the act of children questioning his authority.
Initial incidents like this led to a pause in videomaking activities. Der-
ek realized the necessity for him and the students to create a process of
information, clearance, and scheduling that would avoid putting staff
and students of the school on the spot. In this lesson phase of the Eagle
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Chapter 24
Eye project they learned two things: first, that they needed a process for
their videomaking activities. But something else was clear after the prin-
cipal of the school spoke with Derek after the incident. Even though the
status quo had been threatened by the unchecked and unexpected flurry
of videomaking activities in the school, the school community was talk-
ing about it and they were clearly energized by the experience despite the
fact that some changes in approach were necessary.
Most importantly of all, however, the lesson plan was coming to life,
certainly in the way that Derek had hoped, and also in additional unex-
pected ways. In the same way that Keith Devlin talked about the fact that
math was not a body of knowledge, but rather something we do, Derek
was finding the videomaking experience was bringing the practice of
writing to life. The Eagle Eye project was slowly but surely becoming an
incarnation of the writing process. Students were not just writing their
stories in response to an assignment sheet and handing them in. They
were pitching ideas and often re-pitching when D
erek told them they
could do better. And the students were not reacting to the challenge in an
academic assignment way. They were going back to make their Eagle Eye
story better for broadcast.
The students who had been sent away from the security officer were
forced to rethink their approach to an information source and understand
that source in a more complex, human way. They were learning about the
responsibility that writers have to not only readers, but also their subjects they write about.
They were learning how to collaborate as writers and how they could
connect their own ideas with others to give extra life and resonance to
subjects they wrote about. This was particularly evident when it was time
to talk about the opening to their news magazine show. In this video
piece they would have to agree upon a collective identity and represent it
in their own stories. The basic idea behind their opening was that their
mascot (the Frederick Eagle) was a strong creature with great vision from
above. They used that idea to incorporate in their writing identities—
each of their stories would serve as “eagle eye perspectives” on their
school. What had always been a solitary experience to them (writing in a
vacuum of their own voice as a student in response to an assignment)
was becoming a collaborative enterprise that required an entire rethink-
ing of what writing was. The bottom line was that they were doing writing.
In the end, visual stories conceived and created out of the motive to
learn are by no means any easier (or more difficult) than visual stories
created out of the motive to achieve public (and financial) impact. They
are just different: suited for the respective environments they are in. But there is an extra advantage for K-12 filmmakers engaged in the pursuit of
learning. The learning motive inspires a new, fresh, and truly unique
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storytelling genre that presents young videomakers with a wide open
frontier of possibilities for not only aesthetic achievement, but, more im-
portantly, learning achievement.
TWENTY-FIVE
Confabulation
Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in
which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and
incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the
consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought
small. . .
—Virginia Woolf (1925) on the inherently human dimension of writing
Recent brain research (Gazzaniga, 2012) has shed fresh light on the fasci-
nating way the human mind makes sense of the often overwhelmingly
complex (even chaotic) world it exists in. From Woolf’s perspective,
clearly ahead of her time in 1925, there was a certain atomic level beauty
in the complexities that fell upon the mind. Her words were meant to
encourage writers to savor these complexities before reducing them to
simple explanations or writing forms.
Michael Gazzaniga examined the other side of this equation, particu-
larly how the mind not only searched for clarity in the chaotic, but also
how it instinctually preferred such clarity, through a process he termed
confabulation. This process could be seen in split-brain patients presented with contradictory visual information:
What was interesting was that the left hemisphere did not say, “I don’t
know,” which was the correct answer. It made up a post hoc answer
that fit the situation. It confabulated, taking cues from what it knew
and putting them together in an answer that made sense. We called this
left-hemisphere process the interpreter. It is the left hemisphere that
engages in the human tendency to find order in chaos, that tries to fit
everything into a story and put it into a context. It seems driven to
hypothesize about the structure of the world even in the face of evi-
dence that no pattern exists.
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Chapter 25
These findings not only bring life to an idea we began the conversation of
this book with—we are hardwired to tell stories—but they also demon-
strate a companion human drive to make sense of the world, indicating
that we are hardwired to make sense of the world, or to learn.
These empirical insights are also particularly helpful in beginning to
understand the experience of videomaking in K-12 learning environ-
ments. Though we’ve certainly gotten used to the idea of how well re-
ceived videomaking is by students, we still cannot help wonder truly
why it is so enriching for kids, beyond the simple novelty of the experi-
ence.
The multidimensional context around the creation of youth video is
certainly rich in implications involving the opportunities for youth voice, and also the creation of unique forms and processes of doing youth-based
digital media storytelling. Videomaking in K-12 settings encourages and
allows creative space for sense-making, and also, in Woolf’s sense, small
almost peripheral discoveries that come out of the narratives of sense-
making.
Day in My Life
When the eighty-five students in our Smart Kids Visual Stories Project
were given the chance to be seen and heard, they always had stories to
tell that reflected how they made sense of the experiences of their educa-
tion. To date they have produced hundreds of hours of footage, nearly
three terabytes of digital video stories about their experiences and per-
spectives on school.
But this footage and the stories compiled from it also unearthed inter-
esting complexities around the confabulative storytelling process stu-
dents engaged in. When it comes to the storytelling process around the
K-12 videomaking experience, there is no manual of how to tell a story,
what kind of story it should be, what form of media or genre would fit
the story best. Story is a very complicated word and when you add mov-
ing images and sound it gets even more complicated, especially as it
relates to the media production process surrounding its creation. This
was illustrated in recent experiences surrounding seventh grader Talia
Edwards’s visual story at Corrigan K-8 School.
FLASH FORWARD:
SMART KIDS VISUAL STORY #9
“A Day in My Life”
by Talia Edwards, Corrigan School, Grade 7
INTERIOR: CLASSROOM (CORRIGAN SCHOOL)—MORNING
We are looking at part of the classroom from a very odd, perhaps unin-
tended angle as if recording something that was not meant to be re-
corded. Talia is partially revealed as she enters left frame with equipment
Confabulation
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bag, tripod, and small video camera in her hand. Some classmates near
her are facing off-screen right in the direction of the teacher who is out of frame. We hear Talia’s voice-over, describing the action.
TALIA (voiceover)
One day in my second period class I got to class late with a lot of
equipment in my hands. As soon as I got settled in and had almost
everything put away—except my camera which I was
examining at the
time—The teacher starting yelling at another student. By time she was
done I was just about to put my camera away when she started yelling
at me. In confusion, I turned around and just listened, just catching the
angry question.
TEACHER (yelling)
Why do you have that camera in my classroom?!
TALIA (quietly)
It’s for a project. At my old school this group of people from the univer-
sity came to my school and we made a video of our experience. Now
they’re coming back to see us in our new environment.
TEACHER (yelling)
Who gave you permission to have a camera in my classroom? You
need to put that away!
TALIA
The principal gave me permission.
TEACHER (yelling)
The principal can’t give you permission to have something in my class-
room! This is my classroom!
TALIA (voiceover)
By now I’ve turned around [away] in anger but didn’t do or say any-
thing.
TEACHER (yelling)
Look at me when I’m taking to you!
TALIA (voiceover)
So I turned around [to face the teacher], but she didn’t say anything.
Then she got up and I turned back around [away].
TEACHER (yelling)
You know what? I’m sick and tired of your behavior! Go to ISS! [In-
School Suspension].
TALIA
For what? What did I do?
TALIA (voiceover)
She gave me a lot of false reasons.
TEACHER (yelling)
You can either go to ISS or you will have lunch detention!
TALIA (voiceover)
So I quietly picked up all of my stuff, and went to ISS for time out, but I ended up having to stay the whole period.
FADE TO BLACK
TALIA (voiceover)
This situation made me mad, and made me feel like I was helpless.
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Chapter 25
Context of the Project
Talia’s story began in her second year with the Smart Kids Visual
Stories. She was one of twenty-two students we followed after the district
decided to close the original K-8 school we were based in. In the previous
year, Talia was also one of eighty-five students (the number fluctuated as