Video, Collage, and Narrative

Lesson Context

I developed the idea to utilize digital narratives and collages in combination with a unit on personal narrative, after witnessing the trouble that many of the students in my English-100 Introduction to College Composition class faced when beginning to write in this genre. The first sequence of our English-100 curriculum is largely dedicated to writing in personal narrative, and I found that it was a skill many of the students lacked after four years spent writing five paragraph essays in high school. Many of my students faced difficulty in coming up with ideas for personal narratives and even more difficultly using descriptive, metaphorical language to make those narratives come alive.

I knew that it was essential to try and jump-start my students’ creative side and reconnect them to a more imagistic, layered, emotive narrative in order to help them better “show” and not just “tell” their narratives. I tried a number of different approaches, but one central gap or deficiency in my approach upon reflecting back, is that I did not draw enough upon visual modes and experiences to help them begin to “show” through their own words and language. It seems obvious now, but I missed incorporating these strategies into my classroom while teaching this previously. I needed to attend to the ‘visual-verbal’ skills my students already possessed in order to get them to explore and connect with this in their narratives. Through this process I also discovered the many ways digital narratives can be applied to other forms of writing as well, and I offer adaptations to address this issue at the end of my lesson sequence.

Connecting this back to our larger progress and framework, I hope to bring Shipka's understanding of composition and multimodality into my classroom as a means to ‘broaden’ and ‘cultivate’ the notions of meaning and composing that my students have. While working on my masters I had the opportunity to compose a digital narrative as an aesthetic response to The Sound and the Furry in addition to writing a critical literary essay, and this experience solidified the potential of visual strategies, collage, and narrative as a thoughtful means of critique and expression - at the end of these lesson ideas, I offer adaptations, so that this general idea can be applied to a number of different writing prompts, and as a means to explore a wind range of rhetorical devices. I hope to offer this same experience to my students through this series of activities and I hope to present this in a way that is useful to you as instructors.

Lesson Sequence

Introduction

To begin you should introduce the theme or composition prompt that you will be exploring throughout the lesson sequence. This theme will connect to the culminating visual project that your students will create. For the purposes of my class, the central concept I came up with is: compose a personal narrative describing a moment in your life that sticks out to you as important to your individual personal growth – it should be a moment that moved or changed you in some way. I am thinking of “moment” here quite broadly. This can be a defining personal experience or large obstacle that you have overcome, or just a simple moment where you noticed the beauty in something in the every day that may have shifted your thinking. Think thoughtfully, carefully, even abstractly about this.

Inspiration: Watching Radiolab Video

Radiolab is a radio program on NPR that explores a number of different scientific, metaphysical, personal topics and themes each week. This is their mission statement:

Radiolab believes your ears are a portal to another world. Where sound illuminates ideas, and the boundaries blur between science, philosophy, and human experience. Big questions are investigated, tinkered with, and encouraged to grow. Bring your curiosity, and we'll feed it with possibility.

The video I am suggesting you use, was composed in reaction to a show from Radiolab that centered on the afterlife, and it celebrates the beauty in the everyday moments we experience at different stages in our lives. It combines visual video collage, music, thoughtful pacing and editing as a means to explore the personal and everyday moments in our lives. I have utilized a few different similar videos from Radiolab in my classroom and the students really loved it. They are engaging, thought-provoking, visually entertaining and unique -- all in just about 4 minutes.

Before you watch the movie as a class, encourage your students to consider some of the different moments that are highlighted, have them think of the range and possibility of the moments, ask them to consider how these images move them, make them feel. Encourage your students to think of the why behind the moment not simply the action in the video itself, why would these moments be important, special or interesting to someone, which ones resonate with your own experience? You will use this video to ignite your student's thinking about the personal moments we would like them to explore through visual collage and in writing.

I think that it would be helpful to have students do a free-write after watching this video so that they capture their thoughts and feelings about what they have just scene. You could utilize a standard focused free write model or employ other strategies like: clustering, listing, brainstorming etc.

After your students have had a chance to gather their thoughts about the video, you should discuss it as a class in a few different ways. Firstly you will want to examine the particular strategies and devices in the film used to tell a story (sort of a film analysis). How did the music, pacing, images, symmetry etc combine to impress a particular feeling upon you. Push them being a surface engagement with the film and ask to analyze some of the deeper compositional strategies that make it unique. In many ways these devices are similar to the the rhetorical devices used in standard composition in that they are utilized to produce a particular effect, feeling or argument when combined thoughtfully.

Secondly you can begin composing a list of different moments represented in the film that stuck out to your class (you may want to go back to the beginning and pause it on different moments): learning to swim, experiencing the birth or death of someone close to you, a favorite book that moved you, learning a new skill (fishing, biking, instrument etc.), a memorable experience from nature, a first love; all of these could be seen as potentially defining moments in a person’s life, and there are plenty of other very simple moments depicted. As I mentioned above, you will want to push your students to go beyond just the "surface" depiction of a moment and consider why these moments would be important to a person's life. Ask them to consider if they connect to any of these moments themselves.

Selecting & Visualizing a Moment

The next step is to ask your students to do some thinking about what particular personal moment they would like to explore through a digital narrative or photo collage and in their written narrative. If they are having difficulty thinking of one, look back at the list of moments you wrote out as a class and the video itself for inspiration. It may be helpful to put the students in groups to collaborate and share ideas.

Once each student has selected the moment they are interested in composing about, your students are going to collect images related to this moment. Ask them to consider the way that the Radiolab video offers simple impressions of images and moments in order to elicit an emotive response. They are both specific and abstract at the same time. Your student's project is to think of an aesthetic interpretation of their moment, to collect images that represent what they think and feel when they each think of their moment. It does not, and probably will not always be literal. This means the images can just be the impression that the image impresses upon you – for instance if you were thinking of the emotion sad, you wouldn’t necessarily have to select a picture of a person crying but rather an image that that expresses the emotion more abstractly. Push students to think broadly, creatively, outside the box, have fun collecting images that relate in any number of ways to your moment. I think that asking students to think in this way, pushed them to consider their moment in broader terms, it forces them to attend to different issues of feeling and aesthetic. Here is a selection of some images I utilized in my own digital narrative reaction to The Sound and the Fury, as you can see they are not literal translations of the book, but rather they represent my aesthetic feelings about the text :

Although Google Image search is helpful, your students will come up with a more rich and diverse set of images if they utilize different websites and databases to collect images. Encourage them to look into different art and photography blogs. This is a list of helpful places that you can direct your students to:

• Flickr
• Tumblr
• Personal or family photography
• Library of congress (for more historical and archival images)
• Lens blog from The New York Times
• Bag News Notes blog
• Time LightBox
• National Geographic
• BBC News In Pictures

The best tactic for collecting images is to encourage your students to create a folder on their computer and begin dragging, dropping and saving these images to the folder. It is better to collect more images then less, and they can (and should) always go back and edit later. Encourage your students to think thoughtfully about this process. If an image moves or specifically connects to them, ask them to consider why, consider the ways it connects to their moment, how would they explain its meaning or impact to someone, perhaps it is just a feeling they get about the image and that is OK but they should have an understanding of what moves them about the photo – diversity and creativity is important. I think it is better to encourage students to have more photographs then less, I would suggest they should aim to have a minimum of 40-50 images. There are a few different assignments you could offer based upon this process, but I think these are the most interesting.

Option 1: Photo Collage & Written Narrative

After your students have collected their images they should gather them into a collage (digital or physical depending on printing capabilities) that will help them begin to write and compose about their particular moment. If your students are creating a physical photo collage they could also include objects, magazine cut-outs etc. See Nancy's mood board page for further ideas related to this option. The students can present these collages in small groups and begin generating ideas for their essays.

Once this process is completed your students can utilize their collage in order to inform the composition of their personal narratives. Encourage your students to consider the different thoughts, emotions, and feelings that are evoked in their array of images and the ways in which these connect to their particular moment. Ask them to think of thoughtful strategies for incorporating the images and metaphors represented in their collage into their writing as well. How can they translate these feelings and thoughts in the same way visual way they are communicated in the images?

Reflection. After composing their essays I think it will also be important to ask your students to write a reflection on their process. Ask them how the creation of the collage impacted their writing, how would their writing have been different if they hadn't attended to these visual concerns? Did they specifically utilize any of the strategies used in the Radiolab film in their writing, in what way did that impact them? What obstacles did they face as they were doing each of these components? Asking students to reflect on their process will help you to better understand the effectiveness of this assignment and also offer you suggestions for how it can be adapted and changed in the future.

Option 2: Compose a Digital Narrative

In lieu of the final essay component, your students may be interested in making their own film based upon the Radiolab model. This film will be more of a traditional digital narrative, in that it tells a story visually, through film. If your students are familiar with iMovie or other film making software, or if they are interested in composing in this manner and taking a risk, I think this assignment really lends itself to that. If you are concerned about not knowing the technology, I know that here at UW-Madison there is a service called DoIT that offers free software training for students that would teach them how to utilize iMovie and other video-making platforms. If you have enough interest you can even schedule a speaker/trainer to lead your entire class through the software.

Remember that if your students select this option they will need to consider a number of different elements in creating their digital narrative. I think that the Radiolab video (and other videos from them) offer some really great examples of the types of concerns your students will want to attend to. However, instead of representing multiple moments (and instead of using video), their film will use different images to represent one moment. Here some key areas your students should focus on:

• Have them first compose a script describing their moment, much in the same way they would if they were to write a more traditional essay, but it should have to be timed to the length of their film. In addition to drafting this script, your students will need to utilize some sort of recording device (they could use an iPhone or iPod, or even their computer) in order to record them speaking their script. This will offer a kind of narration for the film.
• They will want to select an interesting song or background music that conveys and sets the tone for their film. Thinking back to the Radiolab video, music does a lot to convey a particular tone and feeling for a film, students will want to think thoughtfully to match their music selection to the emotions and feelings they want to convey.
• As they would if they were doing the collage option, ask your students to thoughtfully consider the particular images they will use in their film. These will also set the tone and style for the film. They must also attend to thoughtful editing: how will the images be edited together (the order of the images), consider the pacing of the film and images. Ask them to attend to the digital composition of the video to match the moment they are exploring.

Reflection. I would also ask your students to reflect upon their process in making the digital narratives as well. Ask them honestly to discuss the impact of using technology and composing in this manner. How would their "composition" look differently if they were to simply write out a narrative? How did the film-making process change their form of expression? What particular obstacles did they face composing through this format? In "Big Questions, Small Works, Lots of Layers", a piece composed for the online journal Kairos, Bump Halbritter provides the reflections of two of his students who composed a documentary film project. I think these offer a good model of student reflections you could show your students, and they may be interesting for you to read as well in order to better understand the challenges your students will face as they compose in this medium.

*Please Note: I am trying to find a way to upload my digital narrative in order to offer a model of this form, and will update accordingly.*

Adaptations

I am aware that composing a digital narrative or photo collage in conjunction with personal narrative, may not be a feasible fit for every teacher's curriculum. With that in mind I wanted to offer a few different alternative ideas or adaptations for this lesson.

• Consider altering the prompt that I offer above from something other than 'moments'. For instance Radiolab also has similar videos on YouTube related to symmetry and words that could work equally well for writing about: language and identity, proper word choice and language devices, literacy narratives (asking students to examine the literate artifacts, words, songs, books, languages etc. that influence them), writing process etc. They can really be utilized in many different ways, perhaps even just as another interesting example of digital narratives, film composition etc.
• Connected to this notion of film composition, I think that you could utilize the different devices of the film: music, pacing, editing etc. to offer examples for your students about how different art forms establish arguments, and create connection with our audience. For instance if you were writing argumentative essays in class you could begin by tracing and finding examples of the different rhetorical strategies utilized for persuasion (logos, ethos, pathos). You could then create a list of how this films utilizes similar qualities, how the particular film devices move the audience etc. Your students could compose argumentative essays in conjunction with a digital narrative relating to their argument.
• As I mentioned previously I composed a digital narrative in conjunction with a traditional literary essay connected to The Sound and the Fury. Focusing first on the aesthetic effect of the text via the composition of my digital narrative, allowed me to make deeper and more thoughtful connections and analysis in the actual paper itself. I "saw" and attended to things very differently in my essay that would not have seen had I not first experienced the composition of my digital narrative. You may consider pairing this project with a class text: a short story, novel, article etc., and utilizing it as a step before the critical essay.

The possibilities for adaptation here are truly endless - I think in many ways we are only limited by our own thinking and scope of creativity.

In Conclusion

Having been in the same position as you, I completely understand the often daunting proposal of asking your students to compose with technology that is often more unfamiliar to us. If the entire sequence of this lesson doesn't appeal to you, or if you feel it is just too involved, you could even just pick certain elements of it (showing the video, having them collect images) and incorporate those pieces into your classroom. I do know that it would have been better for my students if I had attended to their visual side in this way during the personal narrative process. The kinds of writing we ask our students to do (metaphorical writing, lyrical writing, showing and not telling) in this type of sequence, is undoubtedly served by incorporating visual tactics into the classroom - I know I will personally not soon forget this lesson and I hope it is useful one to you.