Junior AV Club - Video practice and early learning
This day turned out to be a turning point for the summer. Our goal had been to explore computational literacies along with the literacies of media authoring. Up to this point, these areas had been explored more or less independently of each other through a series of directed lessons. For this day, we gave broad instructions and what we hoped would be interesting resources and tools, and left it up to the students to decide how to use them.
The instructions we gave were to use the grid system on the ground to create a game that was also a story. We gave them sheets of paper with colorful pictures and arrows. We reviewed some of our previous work about the creation of rules and instructions and the nature of stories. We also brought a number of still and video cameras into the environment, though we gave no explicit directives about their use.
Through the course of the activity, we saw distinct approaches to game making - some that were simply collaborative imaginative story making, some that resembled a Dungeons and Dragons style adventure with turns and decision making orchestrated by a guide, and at least one that had all regular elements of a board game with turns, elements of chance, discernible progress and goals, and a winning or losing state.
While the game making was interesting, especially in the way that ideas and innovations spread amongst the groups, the more striking aspect of the day for me was the free and open exploration of the cameras in the space and context of the activity. For students who were less interested in creating games, the cameras gave them something else to investigate and explore. Individually at first, but eventually driving them towards a deeper reconnection with the activities of their group members. Their thinking becomes visible in the video evidence. Their perspective and sight is given a body beside their own. There is some adult direction and intervention, some instruction about camera movement and focus, but mostly the use of camera is student driven.
This becomes especially important at the very end of the day. As an instructor interacting with the students, I had my own camera in hand. Once the story game making was done, the students invited me to come back to their school with them next door to our lab. They wanted to show me the protest signs they were making in response to the threatened termination of their summer program. This visit led to a student driven choice about the direction of the rest of our time together that summer and the student-produced journalistic style documentary on the subject of their summer program's closure.
