Wired Students, Disconnected Learners

by David L. Bruce, Kent State University

Ellis, a junior in high school, slouched casually against the wall as he told a group of graduate students about his video projects. I had invited the graduate students, whom I was teaching at a local university, to visit my high school classroom to speak with students about their video work. Though he was one of the outstanding students in my high school media class, Ellis earned dismal grades in his regular English class. As he spoke about and showed clips from his projects, he made an offhand remark that stunned the group of graduate students. He said:

I'm not good with pencil-and-paper writing. All of you are pretty good at that sort of stuff. I just don't get it. And remember that there are more people like me than there are like you. Don't forget that when you walk into your classes. But give me a camera and an editing station and I can write!

That incident has stayed with me as an honest crossroads moment about the reality of our students' lives in and out of our classrooms. Many students, like Ellis, will not achieve customary measures of success in a pencil-and-paper, traditional classroom. Despite this, many have rich literacy lives outside of the school walls. In Ellis's case, not only was he adept at video editing, but he had a tremendous interest in mixing digital music and worked as a DJ for parties. Why could his technology skills not help him in his classroom work?

I had the privilege of teaching high school English and communications/media studies for eleven years prior to moving to teacher education at the university. I taught hundreds of students like Ellis, students who struggled with a typical English class essay and yet who could, with video, create articulate and insightful video compositions. How might a technology like video be meaningfully incorporated into a typical classroom in such a manner as to allow for greater student involvement and expression?

Before answering that question, it's important to address two oppositional forces at work that make integration difficult. One is the tension of high-stakes testing, a climate in which teachers and administrators feel the pressure to cover material in order to have their students perform well on standardized tests. The other deals with the gap between literacy that students learn outside of school and what is often practiced in the classroom.
 

The Testing Trap

One problem dealing with the disconnect many students experience has nothing to do with technology at all. Rather it has to do with our culture of testing. What about the real pressure administrators and teachers experience because district report card data have backed them into an assessment corner―making them feel they have no choice but to jettison all curriculum considerations but those that will allow students to do well on the high-stakes tests? There is a logic, flawed though it be, that would suggest that students need more drill time on those items over which they will be tested.

If students―like Ellis in the opening vignette―are not connecting with the material, will repeated exposure to more of the same overcome those learning deficiencies? To put it in another way, will skill-and-drill writing exercises provide that student greater voice through print? Few would argue the need to provide our students with authentic assessment opportunities. However, in preparing for the formal evaluations, many schools require that nearly all assessments be similar in format to the high-stakes tests. This typically equates to more pencil-and-paper responses and fewer alternative forms of representing student understanding. By increasing the focus on traditional paper-and-pencil responses, a feedback loop is created where the weakest format of many students' expression―namely, print―becomes the dominant classroom mode of discourse and assessment. It seems that all stakeholders become unsatisfied in such an arrangement: Administrators have frustrated faculty, teachers have reluctant students, and the students will have more disconnect to endure.
 

The other problem facing those disassociated students is that the classroom is often at odds with their own expertise. I have often heard the complaint that students do not read anymore. This is patently false. They are reading, but the texts with which they engage tend to be visual or electronic. These modes of reading and writing usually have no place in school.

Hull and Schultz (2002) call this phenomenon "out-of-school literacies." Outside of the school walls, students cultivate rich interests in a variety of literacies that are not valued in a typical academic culture. For example, many students have cell phones and instant-message their friends all the time. Many keep blogs, participate in podcasts, read graphic novels, and play interactive video games. In class they are asked to fill out worksheets, write pen-and-paper essays, read curricular-mandated novels, and complete Scantron tests.

It seems as if there are polar classroom needs. On one hand, many teachers rightly feel that what they teach will be of importance to students' cognitive growth and development. On the other, students often feel the need for the material to be relevant in an immediate life context. Despite these tensions, if we do not explicitly connect the relevance of our subjects with students' experiences―why the material is of importance, even crucial, in the meaning making of their lives―our classes become a series of decontextualized exercises at best, and at worst, a sentence to be endured. As an English teacher, my biggest fear would be that students are treading water in my class until they can get to the reading and writing that are important and meaningful to them.

In responding to making classroom material relevant to students, there are dual assumptions we must avoid. One is that integrating various students' literacies equates to throwing out the essential material in our disciplines for a faux attempt at connecting with students' interests. The faulty perception is that the rigor of such an English class would require students to read only graphic novels and to create only instant-messaging conversations between the literary characters. It follows that core English assignments such as character analysis would be reduced to storyboards of two stick figures with bubble speech saying "sup?" to each other. Yet to dismiss the chance to take advantage of the interest in such student literacies as graphic novels and instant messaging translates into valuable pedagogical opportunities lost.

Another assumption we must avoid is embracing emergent technologies as the cure-all for educational ills. Television was supposed to bring new waves of learning to the classroom in the late 1970s and 1980s; yet educational programming was often reduced to "talking heads" spouting information, a televised lecture. If we believe that the technology of computers will alone make the educational difference in the classroom, we will make the same misstep as with television. Cuban (2001) found that if teachers used technology (and most do not or only do so on an infrequent basis), the "changes typically maintain rather than alter existing classroom practices" (p. 71).

We should not abandon the core elements of our subject matter or bandwagon technology for the sake of using computers. Rather, the issue becomes how might we incorporate some of the newer technologies that will help us teach our subject area differently.

From a teaching standpoint, we are looking for those connections between what we are teaching and the literacies of our students. In doing so, we are not watering down our content (as some critics would accuse) but rather expanding the context of our subject areas. In fact, by opening our classrooms to such opportunities, our students will become what Scholes (1998) says are "textual animals" (p. 73), devouring a variety of readings. To do so, he advocates that we "read, interpret, and criticize texts in a wide range of modes, genres, and media" (p. 84).
 

New Wine, Old Wineskins

A foundational way I have been able to have success with students like Ellis is through the use of digital video. Adopting this technology in my class arose from the dilemma of getting students to respond to a prompt or a reading in a manner other than with pencil and paper. If students had difficulty expressing their ideas on paper, what other means might get at their thoughts?

Although I have used video for a number of different class projects (including news stories, public-service announcements, commercials, short film, mini-documentaries, music videos, and TV parodies), two that I utilize on a regular basis are video themes and video poems.

Video themes use visuals, sound (ambient, voice-overs, and music), and text to explore a concept not easily explained with a simple definition―to explore concept words that Vygotsky (1986) says are "saturated with sense" (p. 247). Complex ideas such as freedom, peace, nourishment, and isolation are dense with meaning and require many words to explain. However, these themes can also be explored with both tremendous breadth and nuance through video.

I have my students select a theme they wish to explore, brainstorm potential images they might capture, videotape the images, and edit them on a computer-based editing program. During editing, they select only the best images they filmed, apply any needed special effects (such as slow motion or a faded-film look), choose transitions, and select appropriate music. All this is done with the purpose of exploring an idea or theme.

In much the same way they explore a theme, students can use digital video to explore and interpret a poem―the end product being a video poem. Poetry analysis is often difficult for students, even more so when the assessment of their understanding is an analytical essay. To create a video response to a poem is no less rigorous than to write an analysis. Not only are students required to closely read the text; they also utilize the same literary terminology they would need if they were writing an analysis paper (metaphor, point of view, allusion, etc.). What differs between the two means of expression is the way the students represent their understanding of the terminology. In the example below―a video project on "Listen to the Mustn'ts" by Shel Silverstein―notice how the student authors utilize a form of visual and audio parallelism and repetition. Both are literary features of the poem.

Assessment of both types of video projects―video themes and video poems―takes several forms. One is the public viewing of the finished project, as it is always desirable to invite an audience beyond the classroom teacher. Knowing that the entire class will be viewing the final projects adds the motivation of authentic audience for the students. Final projects can also be put on a class anthology DVD or posted on a website for an audience beyond the school walls. Students are also assessed through a rubric (see Box 1) that they have developed as part of the assignment. By involving them in the assessment criteria, students have an understanding of the parameters of the assignment.

Another assessment required of students is to provide a rationale explaining their video compositional choices by answering several questions for each of their shots or sequence of shots. Their assignment reads:

• Describe the shot (or draw it).
• Why did you choose to film the scene in this manner? What were you trying to show?
• Evaluate the shot. How pleased were you with the final result? Please explain.

By explaining their compositional rationale, students are able to explain and defend the choices they made in creating the video. (See the example in Box 2. This is a metacognitive exercise rarely achievable through a print essay.)

I would never suggest that students only learn to express their ideas through video, particularly in high-stakes test preparation. However, it is worth noting that since I have been using digital video, a larger class dialogue has emerged over what "composition" and "writing" are. By allowing those struggling writers the chance to demonstrate their understanding through a means other than print, we have had larger class discussions about foundational writing issues such as audience considerations, sustained thesis, supporting evidence, transitions, and the structure of an argument. My classroom is not an isolated event. Hobbs and Frost (2003) found that as students regularly viewed and composed with media, their writing and reading scores increased.
 

Technical Diff-ic-ic-ic-ulties

I would be a liar if I claimed that the examples of the technology I have used have worked flawlessly and with no glitches. They haven't. The only statement I can make with certainty is that when technology is integrated into the classroom, there will be equipment problems in one way or another. Computers might crash. Files could get deleted. Cables might get unplugged. Networks could go down. Video might get erased. All these things have happened―and will continue to happen. To make matters worse, few of us have ever received formal training in computer technology in any of our teacher education courses.

One way I deal with the equipment issues is to invite student expertise into the equation. I have found that students long for meaningful involvement in a classroom, and when invited to contribute their expertise, they become empowered rather than passive learners. Some students have great facility in using technology already. I am not afraid to identify these students as classroom experts and peer trainers because it fosters greater community. It also allows me to focus more time helping students guide the shape of their presentations.

Despite the frustrations of technology failures, however, the benefits my students experience far outweigh the equipment problems. It is messy, challenging, time-intensive, creative, and rewarding work. Stated in another way, it is what authentic learning should look like. It is the kind of classroom work that invites Ellis―and all the students like him―into a learning community where their out-of-school literacies and abilities are respected and yet the rigor of our studies is no less intense. After all, these students are already wired. Shouldn't we get them plugged in?
 

References

Cuban, L. (2001). Oversold and underused: Computers in the classroom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hobbs, R., & Frost, R. (2003). Measuring the acquisition of media-literacy skills. Reading Research Quarterly, 38(3), 330—355.

Hull, G., & Schultz, K. (2002). Introduction: Negotiating the boundaries between school and non-school literacies. In G. Hull & K. Shultz (Eds.), School's out! Bridging out-of-school literacies with classroom practice (pp. 1—8). New York: Teachers College Press.

Scholes, R. (1998). The rise and fall of English. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Vygotsky, L. (1986). Thought and language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

David Bruce is an assistant professor at Kent State University in the department of Teaching, Leadership and Curriculum Studies. He earned his Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from Kent State in the fall of 2002. Prior to joining the Kent State faculty, David taught high school English, media studies, and speech and debate during his eleven years at Solon High School in Solon, Ohio. He currently is working with both undergraduate and graduate students who are earning their Secondary Education Integrated Language Arts license. His research and teaching interests focus on various forms of student literacy, particularly media compositions. He is serving as the president of OCTELA (Ohio Council of Teachers of English Language Arts) as well as the director of the Commission on Media with NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English).

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