About ten years ago I was teaching an advanced undergraduate course on Spanish Romanticism (that is, literature from the first half of the 19th century in Spain), and we were working through some short poems by Gustavo Adolfo Becquer. These poems are beautiful, full of fantastic imagery, pleasurable sounds in the ear and on the tongue, and have become favorites in the canon. And the students seemed to be made of stone. I was pretty sure it wasn't only the material-- true, there was a whole cycle of poems, and it took some effort to follow the arc and build-up of the cycle form, but still-- and it wasn't only my possibly being boring about it. Something was missing. Something was going on that was creating an unbridgeable gap between their minds and the words on the page. What was that thing?
More below the jump.
I stopped the discussion and asked them how they were feeling about what we were doing. I told them how excited I became by the images and the language, and that I was surprised that none of them seemed to respond to it. I told them I was trying to figure out what was going on at that moment in the classroom.
One of them raised her hand and ventured matter-of-factly, "it would really help us if you could make it seem more like a movie."
---make it seem more like a movie!!!!!!!!
And that's the basis for my Teacher's Lounge ponderings for today: what is this business of students wanting it to "seem more like a movie?"
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I am one of the faculty members in my department responsible for the teaching of Spanish history, culture and literature produced prior to 1900. This means we do a lot, a lot, of reading of printed literary texts. Makes sense, right? And yet within the last decade in particular, I get more and more students who say they do not read, they do not like to read (printed text), they do not want to read (printed text), and they just don't feel motivated to relate to a printed text. They want it to be more like a movie. They want to see it, and experience it, and gain understanding from it, in some sort of visual format, some sort of graphic or digitalized screen interface.
And why shouldn't they? As Suzanne Stokes points out:
"'A culture's predominant mode of literacy depends on the technology and mass media it embraces' (Sinatra, 1986)...As more visual elements are incorporated to achieve an optimal balance between verbal and visual cues in education, interdependence between the two modes of thought will be fostered...multiple literacies are necessary to meet the challenges of today's society, literacies that include print literacy, visual literacy, aural literacy, media literacy, computer literacy, cultural literacy, social literacy, and ecoliteracy." (Stokes, "Visual Literacy in Teaching and Learning: A Literature Perspective") (link in paragraph immediately below)
"Multiple literacies are necessary to meet the challenges of today's society." It's crucial for teachers of literature to take this into account-- even if they don't yet have strategies developed for "making it seem more like a movie".
http://74.125.47.132/...
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Now, I have to confess that my initial response, all those years ago, to the student's request that I make things seem more like a movie, was hand-wringing. Aren't there certain sorts of interpretive strategies that get brought to the printed page, and to the development of thought in time through narrative or through verse? How can the students learn such strategies if they prefer to see with the immediacy, flash and impact of graphics? Oh Noooooes!
As it turns out, it's true that as people read printed text less (and at the same time manipulate different kinds of texts and interfaces), they do learn new ways of interpreting and assessing information, and they don't receive as much exercise in institutionally-formulated relationship and interpretive strategies with regard to printed text. At least, according to a Tampa Bay area newspaper article on how "Fewer Students Read Between the Lines":
http://www2.tbo.com/...
But is it such, or necessarily, a bad thing that students read less, and relate in changed ways interpretively to text when they do read? I have to say that though my thinking over the years has become more nuanced on this, I still firmly believe in the importance of reading printed text. Not in the exclusive, superior importance, mind you-- but still, in the necessity of it. Maybe I react this way because my training prepares me to do so. But I do have some support out there the "the culture:" The New York Times, for example, ran an article on "Study Links Drop in Test Scores to Decline in Time Spent Reading:"
http://www.nytimes.com/...
The National Education Association-- which tends to be a conservative organization-- published a big study titled "Reading at Risk," outlining concerns around the cultural shifts taking place with regard to these questions of multiple literacies.
First, the link to it:
http://74.125.47.132/...
Then, an Inside Higher Education article on it, titled "Students Read Less: Should we Care?":
http://www.insidehighered.com/...
The implication being yes, yes indeed, we should care.
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And I do care--- to try to figure out a balance on this. An example from real life: I'm teaching two sections of the same course this quarter, in two different rooms. One is fully wired, and one has nothing but an overhead projector and blackboards. For one of the lessons we are doing this quarter, in the wired room I was able to do an introduction to the material incorporating videos and material from the web. In the other room, alas, we had only the textbook and blackboard to work with. The students in the wired room had a much richer lesson, and (visibly) a better time in learning what we were focusing on that day. So I see the importance of developing integrated visual-verbal strategies for the material at hand. And I can see this in a way I didn't back when the student all those years ago asked that question about making it seem like a movie.
(With regard to some of the strategies I've adopted for addressing my students' visual desires, I published an article with thoughts along this line in the journal Dieciocho a couple of years ago:)
http://www.articlearchives.com/...
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One last thought: At the top of the fold, I cited this statement: "A culture's predominant mode of literacy depends on the technology and mass media it embraces (Sinatra, 1986)". Now this seems really important to me in terms of this question of what students might (seem to) be needing right now. For it's true that there is a synergy, an industrial, technical, marketing and institutional synergy among corporations, practices and development when it comes to the new attraction of the visual, and to the new importance of visual literacy in education. This introduction to the 1996 issue of October magazine lays out some of those considerations:
http://74.125.95.132/...
In other words, visual literacy is more important now, because some very big corporate interests want us to see more through new digitalized and electronic interfaces, and want us to buy things through which we will do such seeing, and want to patronize or underwrite the development of programs that will promote the kinds of visual interactions possible through the technology and machinery they make. This makes a lot of sense to me when I think about how many of the classrooms in the our school district now have "smart boards," or how many classrooms in the buildings in my institution of higher education are now wired to incorporate web, video and other visual and aural technological interventions...ultimately, all this stuff depends on new equipment and new technologies, and it's in somebody's interest to promote it, and make sure that it gets sold and distributed to schools, and utilized in education, because that somebody will make money off it.
In this regard, AnnetteBoardman's last Teacher's Lounge diary, on the question of going textbook-less, is really interesting:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Annette raises the point that going textbook-less can imply a loss of income for a University: "among other things, our Student Union Building is supported in part by the rent paid by the bookstore company that runs the campus bookstore. The electricity, heating, etc., are at least in part covered by the sale of books. This means all the meeting rooms that are available free of charge to campus groups, the office spaces for student government, etc., are paid for at least in part by the profits from selling textbooks. How would this be replaced?"
Maybe one response to this question is, that in the near future-- or maybe it's already been happening-- the financing of infrastructure at schools needs to be supported by web, digital media, and other for-profit visual product corporations that serve educational communities, instead of textbook or other academic print publishers. I'd be really interested in people posting examples of this sort of thing at their institutions, in the thread below.
But in the face of all this, I can't tell my students "you just want it to seem more like a movie because Industrial Light and Sound, or Sony, or some German electronics manufacturing firm, or some Smart Board distributing company, want to you." Can I?
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Well I'll end this very long diary here. Thanks for sticking with me on this. Jump in to the discussion, everyone, and everyone have a great rest of the weekend!