“We read flowers …” Rewriting imagination through ancestral and multimedia technologies:  Theory and examples from an at-risk youth literacy program.

 

Dr. Andrew Schofield, Kwantlen Park Secondary School, Canada

Presidential Award for Reading and Technology winner 2006 

 

Kwantlen Park Secondary School

School District 36, Surrey, BC Canada

Tel: 604-588 6934

Email: schofield_a@sd36.bc.ca

 

IRA_Toronto_2007_Formal.doc

 

Abstract of Andrew's Session

Drawing on a metaphor of ‘reading flowers’, Andrew's session will explore different ways that Apple's iMovie program has been used to shift at-risk youth narratives from biographies of despair to autobiographies of hope … how technologies, including iMovie, are used to ‘re-write imagination’. Central to this project is situating school literacies within student's out-of-school narratives and using iMovie as a bridging technology to blend and extend both worlds. The result is changes in student self-conceptions regarding literacy in particular and life prospects in general, and transformations in the nature of school literacy practices. Four short student films will be used to illustrate the central argument: Our ability to make symbolic meaning in the world can be enhanced through the creative use of digital technology.

 

Biography

Andrew was a teacher, teacher educator, and school district administrator in his native South Africa during that country’s transition to democracy. He served on Provincial and National education policy task teams and developed a research based training program for proposed new National Teacher Appraisal policy. As a district administrator Andrew formulated an approach to school-community integration and development, an experience that forms the basis of his Ph. D (University of British Columbia, 2003). Andrew returned to the classroom in 2001, teaching and researching in an inner-city Secondary school working with at-risk students contributing to the field of youth literacy. This work is recognized internationally with the award of the International Reading Association’s Presidential Award for Reading and Technology (2006). 

 

An Overview of Andew's Session

 

Intro

 

•  “We read flowers” … ? Ancestral technologies …?

•   My (former) class

 

My argument

 

•   MMT’s (including iMovie) must be part of our ‘reading of flowers’, part of making sense of the world and ourselves.
•    MMT’s (incl. iMovie) must be part of (and dramatically extends) our construction of self

How do we ‘read flowers’

 

•  Metaphor

•  Symbolization (‘Symbolic technology’ Donald, 2001)

•  Language and narrative

•  Mythic creation (etc)

What ‘flowers’ are being read (and revealed) here?

 

•  Chad’s The Metamorphosis

•  Nikki’s Hills like white elephants

 

Reading flowers: Meaningful literacy

Because meaning is the core of literacy, we can conceive of literacy in terms broader than is customary. Literacy can be conceived of as the ability to decode or encode meaning in any of the social forms through which meaning is conveyed (Eisner, 1998, p. 9).

 

How do we ‘read flowers’? Part 2

… through narrative. For example:

 

“Our capacity to render experience in narrative is … an instrument for making meaning that dominates much of life in culture … Our sense of the normative is nourished in narrative, but so is our sense of breach and of exception” (Bruner, 1990, p. 97).

 

    So, narratives structure our experience; they give us a position

 

Campbell (1988)

[all myths] are speaking about the deep mystery of yourself and everything else. It is a mysterium, a mystery … tremendous, horrific, because it smashes all your fixed notions of things, and at the same time utterly fascinating, because its of your own nature and being. When you start thinking about these things, about the inner mystery, inner life, the eternal life, there aren’t too many images for you to use. You begin, on your own, to have the images that are already present in some other system of thought” (1988, p. 38).

 

Gettin away from the cops

Sam: Hey can you imagine sitting in a car gettin away from the cops and you speeeed up and speeeed up more an more an you’re just bookin it down the road faster and faster till you are goin at the speed of light. Can you imagine that man? Bookin it away from the cops at the speed of light? With an expression that is both quizzical and skeptical, Craig looks at Sam.

 

AS: Craig this is what’s called a thought experiment. You can’t do it really, but only in your mind... in your thoughts. What do you think you’d see going at the speed of light getting away from the cops?

 

Craig: Donno man. Never done one of those.

 

AS: Can you imagine that?

 

Craig: Would you see anything?  

 

Sam: You’d catch up with what you’re seeing! You couldn’t see ‘cos you’d have to catch up with what you’re seeing?! Think about it man; that’s dope ... man that's like time travel ... you’d catch up with time!

 

Craig: You can do that?! You could pick your favorite day and catch up with it?

 

Sam: You could whip around the world like in 10 minutes. Maybe quicker.

 

Craig: You’d get away from the cops!

 

AS:  There was this fello Albert Einstein. He was the first person to do this thought experiment. Only he used a train. He figured about using light on a train, just like Sam figured using the cops. What do you think about these thought experiments?

 

Craig:  They’re trippy man

 

Reading flowers: Managing the self

 

• Munt:  “the self has to manage intelligibility of itself through time, and it achieves this through narrative, through becoming the ‘hero’ of its own story … Techniques of the self, such as writing, render the self visible and plausible to itself and to others” (2002, p.8)

 

 

• Romi’s Nuclear Power

 

(Re)positioning students

 

• Nikki’s Woman chooses death

• Kelly’s The Guest

 

Repositioning Nicole

        The almost finished paddle

Last night I spent 2 and ½ hours painting the paddle. It was very hard and I had to do in my room by my self. This morning I had to uses a fine tip sharpie black and red to fill in mist betal and outline a bit of the parts that I missed. The hardest parts where the eye nd the beaks it had the most betal the beak had line that were very thin lines. The eye had a circle, called an ovid done in a northcoast art style. Within the ovid, you can see a crescent, normally, in first nation’s art, a crescent like this which shows weeping (Gilbert and Clark, 2001, p. 95). But, when I was ‘carving’ I was happy. So I showed my own ‘happy’ weeping by making a sideways crescent. Returning to the topic of art styles there are many different varieties- North, West, South Coastal, Plains, Interior and so on. In any orher carving that I do I will focus on one art style. In the one that I have done now I have 3 different art style and have changed some to my own.

 

Nicole on Heidegger

 

• “Art is truth setting itself to work’. This is by Heidegger. I read it in an extract by mark pike. To me it means that you might look at a piece of art or witting. It might mean one thing to you dut you need to think that maybe it has a different meaning to everyone else. My paddle has a spiritual event that happened to me. Everything in my painting on the paddle has something to do with what happened. You might look at the paddle as a Humming bird with an egal [eagle], bear, drum, handle, and fire on it. In fact, all of those things have something to do with the spiritual healing that happened to me. This spiritual healing is my art and my truth. For me, it is art and truth setting myself free” (emphasis in original).

 

‘Reading flowers’ …

 

• Depends on where you are (in time and space, actually and existentially).

• Entails reading the external and internal worlds … and our place in both.

• It’s essential that we read and listen to ‘the flowers’: What narratives are our students revealing to us in their class-work and stories?

 

Where people are birds- Fragments beyond imagination: “Between the facts”

“Sign and symbol are knotted together in the production of those fixed realities that we call “facts” … But between the facts run the threads of unrecorded reality, momentarily recognized, wherever they come to the surface, in our tacit adaptation to signs; and [between the facts run] the bright, twisted threads of symbolic envisagement, imagination, thought – memory and reconstructed memory, belief beyond experience, dream, make-believe, hypothesis, philosophy – the whole creative process of ideation, metaphor, and abstraction that makes human life an adventure in understanding” (Langer, 1942/1957, p. 281. Italics in original).

 

Ie: Between the facts lies creativity

 

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