Multimodal Storytelling and New Media Genres to Promote Deeper Writers, Creators, & Thinkers (Blog Post 4)

     Lately, I've been reminiscing on the telenovela I made when I was in high school for a Spanish project. For what felt like forever, the roughly 6-7 minute long video was posted publicly on YouTube by my classmate who recorded and edited it; but, tragically, I can either no longer recall the correct title of the video or their YouTube channel or they have deleted the channel or video. I hope to find the video one day, but for now I will include another example of a student created telenovela I found on YouTube in my search (although theirs is far better than mine). I was first reminded about this video because I planned to show my students how far I've come with learning Spanish, since sometimes students who are new to learning a language at my immersion school feel hesitant to begin speaking and learning a language when compared to peers who began learning their language in kindergarten. However, in connection to the work we have been doing in Currins 547 with engaging students through multimodal literacies, I have come to see that creating this telenovela when I was in high school was an exercise in more than practicing my developing accent in Spanish. Rather, my Spanish teacher was engaging our class in digital story telling that provided us with many opportunities to expand our learning in both the content of Spanish and in many areas beyond.

    I continue to be very interested in digital storytelling as a method for deepening understanding and learning, both in my own experiences and as a potential tool for student learning. While I find it is not often that I am presented with topics I wish to create a digital story on, I know that in times when I have had to be a part of a video in the past my engagement and agency in the video has skyrocketed. For example, when working with groups of colleagues to create a presentation on something, I am certain to ask for clarification and have a clear plan for what we will present. The same is true for my students when they have had to present skits in class or make posters for an activity in class. When students are required to produce or engage directly with images, it contributes to students engaging intellectually and asking about course materials (Thomsen, 57). It seems that including multimodal opportunities for student and our own engagement not only increases engagement but also opens opportunities for questions about clarification regarding academic expectation. Perhaps this is because with the creation of images on the line, writers and creators feel more personal stake in their creation. In the case of my Spanish project, I remember the script was something we worked hard at to fit the genre of a telenovela with the classic genre. My classmates and I decided to portray ourselves as roommates and used the fact that one of our classmates was vegan as the main point of tension in the telenovela. I will always remember my line, "Bella solo come zanahorias," complained to a roommate, followed by a shot of Bella sitting by herself eating a plate of carrots. The agency that I felt in planning the video and script not only deepened by understanding of the language as I practiced writing and speaking for the video, but it also deepened my understanding of cultural context in the genre of telenovelas.

    Another new media genre that I am interested in using in my classroom is the book trailer: a video introduction of characters and important plot points to introduce a book. I have used book trailers created by others in my class; students commented on how the background music for this trailer to The Prince and the Pauper had an excessively eerie tone, which was the main thing they noticed from the start of the video. As I continue teaching and gaining my own digital literacies, I would like to venture into creating more of my own book trailers for students and eventually giving students the opportunity to make their own book trailers. Incorporating new media genres such as book trailers into the ELA classroom allow students opportunities to form deep content connections in ways that are meaningful to them. As Chisholm and Trent state, using digital storytelling allows students the opportunity to express their understanding in ways that are new and not redundant repetitions of previous compositions while also allowing them to gain authentic communication skills specific to the discipline (308-309). In order to create a book trailer, a creator must have a deep understanding of the characters and plot of the book they are previewing and a strong sense of what information from the book is essential to deliver to pique the audience's interest. These are both content specific skills in ELA that require deep levels of thinking about audience, book content, and delivery of information. I am also still considering how to layer the teaching of these skills with the teaching of video editing that would also be needed if students were given the option of creating their own book trailers. 

Fabrizio Matarese / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/