Media Literacy Through Filmmaking In the Classroom: 1987-2022

Abstract

The changes I have experienced over 35  years of student media production are part of a continuum of our wider media landscape. This area of exploration is relatively unexamined and relevant to current media literacy practices, bringing context and clarity to this engagement. It will give direction for educators and other practitioners and scholars who wish to reflect upon this relevant history from the perspective of best practices for teaching digital media and introducing media literacy into public education.

Keywords

Media Literacy History, Youth Production, Best Practices

Intro

Teaching with video in the classroom has been possible since the 1980s when prosumer cameras became available to artists and educators.  The media landscape has changed dramatically since that time, and media literacy foundations have evolved along with those advances.

This article provides a historical framework which includes my student work samples that span decades.  I wish to share a constructivist paradigm based upon the work done with students in the public school setting.  My methods and concepts for media literacy curriculum are depicted in this documentation and reflected in my larger viewpoint of media literacy through filmmaking.

Film, video, photography, audio and animation are among the media formats that my students use to create fiction, documentary and experimental work.  The collection of work illustrates how media culture changed in fundamental ways over time.  Initially, the inherent aspect of instant playback in video was as helpful to working with students as it was astonishing.  The earliest student work was a reflection of the new technology and also of changes in the ways students were able to see and express themselves.  This automatic reflex inherent in the medium was as important as the ability to bring their ideas into a visual platform.  Students were able to create work where they reflected on their personal experiences as well as a shared cultural reality.  There was no internet, no social media, only network television, radio and movie theaters.  Student work was around friends and family for the most part, and this beginning of multi-modal expression became a new form of social interaction.

As the media landscape changed and evolved with new technologies, student work reflected those changes.  This evolution can be likened to the movement from still to moving pictures.  Inside the moving picture is the still image.  Inside the student work from 2022 is the work from 1987.  Young people have the same human impulses and issues as they had in 1987, but the changes in our media landscape cannot be quantified.  Just as the still photo is inherent in the moving picture, the student working with media can be characterized similarly.  The seed is inside.

Archival student clips provide a springboard for examination of the transformation of student media as it moves along with new technologies.  They learn to put their own work into the context of wider media concerns. 

My media program is based on an elemental structure of lectures, lessons, projects and activities that bring students to media literacy through a series of filmmaking steps.  As we move from documentary, through fictional narrative, and onto advertising, students gain skills and knowledge of both production and media literacy core concepts and key questions. Modern media brings all the obvious contradictions, and along with those contradictions the inability for students to differentiate documentary from fiction.  My curriculum steps are designed to shore up those contradictions and attend to a dearth of skills to navigate our digital world.

How I Got Here

I am reaching hard to close my legacy to complete my work in education.  No doubt I have learned much more than I taught, and this ride through the unknown has been exciting and wonderful.  My students remain in my mind, young people with their lives ahead of them.

Recently,I went through my most recent students’ high school graduation, (each year the faculty jokes about when WE will get to graduate).  I recollect this same sad scene from years ago, when I was the fresh-faced newbie among this group of fully regalia-clad staff, proud of my master’s robes.  The days go slow, the years go fast–as parent and teacher.  The advantage to being an educator, as opposed to being a parent, is you aren’t usually with your students as they age and grow.  Despite the “Hello Ms. DeGette” that I hear in the local supermarkets and other places, My students remain as they were in school.  Frozen in time, lost in nostalgia.

I preserve their work–all the various formats, delivery devices, and outputs.  I dig up their work when requested (more often than one would imagine):  sifting through the piles of DVDs, combing the old YouTube channels, and delving into the labyrinth of student projects that sit as files on hard drives, jump drives, thumb drives, external drives, Google Drive, the Cloud.  I try my best to retrieve their past in order that they might revel in the golden bygone era. But, what of this is relevant to anything?  Beyond some strange school memories for a limited few? Beyond the “small circle of friends,” what does it matter?  There are many ways these works matter and I will share resources to begin to bring media literacy through filmmaking to other students and communities.

History

So what has changed since I began Video in the Classroom in 1987?  Everything and nothing!

I will outline systems that designed my process for delivering a media literacy platform for students to use/add to–an elastic mechanism that is built for change. Further, this program was built around the media literacy foundational key questions and core concepts that provide the bedrock for my program.

If you are old enough to imagine 1987 in New York City–Harlem, the South Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens–all of the poverty and chaos provides the backdrop for my work in public schools.  At that time, video cameras for prosumer use were just beginning to be used.  Most of the students had never seen a video camera, muchless used one.  The pop culture icons were shared very differently.  Word of mouth, print, network tv, billboards, and radio were prominent.

What was the same?  Students tried on identities based on pop culture similar to today.  The cultural values were just as pervasive in defining their content as it is today.  These students, most if not all of whom had never used video, were determined to recreate their reality in their own terms.  As soon as they were able to see themselves in automatic replay, they knew instinctively how to make the most of this important new tool!  One of my first discoveries working with public school classrooms was the group storyboard. This both focused and freed their young imaginations to articulate the narrative of their own lives through the encompassing drama that they could understand and work out as a group.  They emulated the adult world and recreated it and watched it immediately–and then of course later in an edited form with an audience of their peers and teachers and who knows who else.

As a time-based medium, the videos could travel and be preserved through time. The students made lots of guns out of paper and staples for use as props. The styles to these paper guns provided endless fun and speculation as they created props with their own hands and the general camaraderie of a film production.  Even back then in the late 1980s and early 1990s the students were leaders in pushing the formats and also taking easily to the techniques.  These early lessons for me and the students: we learned from each other especially when it comes to digital media and technology.

Format Impact on student productions:

As we moved through Super8 Film,  ¾”, Beta 1 and 2, VHS…then 8mm and Hi8, DV, miniDV, and all other iterations, the complete shift from analogue to digital was no problem for the kids.  I suppose you could liken this to writing implements, or any tools–as long as students are given the proper structure to create with filmmaking tools, they can adjust to any production and post-production environment.  These changes in format taught me that because the technology is constantly evolving, the nature of education for students in filming and media literacy must come from an elemental structure of concepts and lessons culminating in a cohesive and elastic directive for media literacy instruction in K-12 public education– as well as at the college level.

I believe our best way forward is to come together as scholars and educators to create a network of support to bring media literacy skills to our students and the youngest of our global citizens.  It falls upon those of us who have witnessed the progression into our current media landscape to bring that long view into practical use for future generations.  This is where the power lies–if as scholars, practitioners and educators we are able to harness our collective power of history, examination and practice into programs, curricula and courses that also pull production into the mix. There is hope to support a generation of producers instead of mere consumers of digital media.  It is only through the power of all of us together that there is a chance to articulate and motivate the changes necessary to bridge the literacy gap in media and technology that most agree is essential to the challenges that we currently face.

Elements of program

I employ the best parts of film school in order to bring media literacy to my students.  I decided as soon as I became an educator to leave the worst parts of film school as far in the past as possible.  The old white men who were the predominant forces in my film education (thankfully this is changing) had no hesitancy but to trash my early filmmaking attempts complete with their ideas to re-cut, re-tool, reframe, refocus, and re-do my films and videos to fit their concepts.  The amount of damage this approach does to young minds and the early creative development is not to be underestimated.  Especially for vulnerable populations such as women, people of color, and otherwise challenged students.

Starting out in 1987, going to several schools in revolving 6-week programs through “Learning Through Expanded Arts Program” (LEAP).  One of the first of its kind and run by two lovely women who ran the organization out of their Upper West Side apartment in NYC.  They employed artists across disciplines – from which my program “Video in the Classroom” was born!  I drove my ‘71 Dodge pick up truck from school to school over 4 boroughs of New York City–most of the schools were located in ghettos but some were white and wealthy.  The kids were the same all over the city, but the program had differing emphasis based upon demographics.  For example, in low-income schools in the Bronx and Brooklyn and Queens, students were waiting with open arms outstretched in anticipation of my visits.  Their work with me was joyful and packed with intensity of purpose.  They came from families struck down by crack cocaine and AIDS.  Their neighborhoods were overrun with gangsters and guns, and as they created narrative explorations of their lives in that environment, they worked through their realities by creating videos that contained those stories.

There were also many “Wrestling Boys and Dancing Girls”  programs, “The Murder Burgers” about the killer cafeteria food, and “The Ultimate Dare”–and of course plenty of interview paradies.  What was relevant to these students in 1987 are the same subjects used in today’s video stories. 

The difference, of course, is the delivery methods of media in our modern culture.  That is what has changed student media the most.

The more affluent schools had science in mind.  They loved the animation of scientific subjects.  In order to accomplish those lessons, I had to have stacks of paper and would need to walk around their desks encouraging them to draw! Draw!  Draw!!!  They had to hand draw each cell, changing it slightly with each iteration.  The students needed to have completed at least 60 drawings to have a film of any length.  It felt a bit like the army in its approach.  But the screenings were worth it as students felt the thrill of seeing the drawings come to life as moving pictures.  This experience led to one of the cornerstones of my program:  Format.  Early cinema.  Still into moving pictures.

The second cornerstone of my program is cinema studies–first glimpsed at my elementary school students in the late 80s as they took on important topics and used tropes from popular cinema in their performance.  The more I could bring from cinematic triumphs, the easier it was for students to see the relevance of their own world within that continuum.  Young people comprehend the concept of diegesis with an alacrity and nuanced understanding that adults have a much more difficult time adopting.  The way cameras move through space and the method of editing time and space have always been easy for young people to comprehend and emulate.

When writing about the cornerstones of my educational program to bring media literacy through filmmaking into the public school arena, I must preface this with the fact that I am creating these four main pillars from a philosophical standpoint.  In my philosophy, art and history align to create truth and beauty.  Secondly, the importance of narrative comes from the fact that human beings need to tell their story, (and be heard) in order to exist.  Third, understanding format and the history of film and video technology is essential to media literacy because our ability to designate language with the accompanying visual is what creates our multimodal take on the world.  And finally nature and sense memory are what creates the ability to understand and experience universality.

Current Climate

When I began teaching I could not have fathomed our current media landscape.   I like to say that students now have the “whole world in their hands”!  The internet as well as other changes in technology allow digital media into every area of a student’s life.  The time when it was necessary to look up information at the library is part of our past which includes all the outdated modes of communication. 

Videography students such as mine are forerunners in the push to bring multimodal tools and student-created materials into the lexicon of a media literacy foundation currently building momentum with each new advance in technology.  Methods and structures for teaching traditional literacy skills have been employed for centuries, but media literacy must become a fixture in education if all students are to have the tools necessary to deconstruct and work within our new media-centric culture.

Students have shown resilience as their world has both shrunk to the size of a cell phone and expanded to a global reach.

I have witnessed a total transformation through my years teaching student media production, and this student work has a place in a continuum of our wider media landscape.  This area of exploration, though relatively unexplored, is relevant to current media literacy practices. Media literacy instruction brings context and clarity.  It gives direction for educators, and scholars who wish to reflect upon our relevant history from the perspective of best practices for understanding and teaching digital media. Media literacy education is essential in order to comprehend the elements that are working in our media landscape. 

Media literacy education must evolve to stay relevant as part of our curriculum in all educational settings.  In addition to resources that are becoming available, our digital media classes, especially Videography, can be useful in developing and disseminating best practices. Supported with a strong basis in media literacy, our students will be able to take the best of what our digital world has to offer and consume and create content as empowered and educated digital citizens.

Link to video from assembly of archival student work: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zeQysiLQh0ujjo1y7a7pctVSCpYiOEsu/view?usp=sharing

Excerpts from Andrea DeGette’s

Video in the Classroom 1987-1997 (20 mins.)

Digitized from:  VHS Transfers from ¾ Umatic master edits. 

Original 3ccd camera, Hi8, and VHS.