I like Smagorinsky, and liked his piece with Michelle Zoss and Patty M. Reed about vocational classes such as interior design or shop and the status they're given in schools, compared with more legit and brainy activities like reading and doing math. They spend some time discussing motive--a topic tragically overlooked in many classrooms. It was the same way when I was in high school--vocational ed kids were the ones who weren't good at doing school, and were unfairly considered academic losers. In reality, they were probably learning a lot more useful stuff and having a lot more fun than us nerds stuck in Calculus (which I have NEVER used and suffered considerable agony to half-learn), and most likely making a lot more money than I will be. Clearly schools need to get their priorities crooked and look at, as the authors say, the value of cultural and psychological tools as well as traditional literacies. Plus it was great to listen to students excitedly problem-solve and think through their projects, rather than the resistant attitude we often see from students.
Hmm, I wonder where these negative connotations come from:
I will be honest--I did not enjoy the Burn and Parker article, although the decisions, process, and editing of film is interesting to me, especially after working with the Alamo for several years and being part of the conversation on new and innovative flicks. An article dissecting the grammar of film seems unnecessary for some reason--maybe because the kids I work with have nothing resembling access to a production like this. Grammar of regular old print text is boring in of itself, especially when teased apart from language as a sentence-diagramming worksheet chore. I can't quite put myself in the right frame of mind to evaluate methods of studying "digital moving image texts." I don't know if it's because the authors are Londoners (seems like context is an important enough idea to be wary of research done outside America) but that was one of many terms and phrases used in Digital Inscription and Animation that sounded weird in my head. Thus, I couldn't really get it. Maybe it was because I read this article last or maybe I am just out of patience after working in a BD unit for the last week and broke for the last two, but phrases like synchronic syntagm, diachronic syntagm, spatiotemporal grammatical system, interpersonal metafunctionand spectatorial grammar just get on my nerves. I know that's not a very academic attitude, but it's my blog and that's my opinion. However: my interest was piqued by Eisenstein's theory of montage I think the idea of the montage is a more useful framework in approaching many aspects of life and education: a collection, the impact of connected images, peoples' thoughts and stories--a montage does more to capture the complex context of a seemingly-simple theme or idea.
Like the Brits' article, Jody Shipka's piece was...nice...no really, it was good. But again--for the vast majority of schools I've visited in this urban, diverse city are so far out from what she was able to do with her students: "I have been inviting students to chose [sic] (that's right, there's a typo) their mix of materials, methodologies, technologies and rhetorical strategies for the past nine years." That's great if you don't have to deal with TAKS testing and were allowed to do what you want as a teacher. It's a great article--I particularly liked the American Museum of Greed project, but I wanted to put it in Mr. Pat Forgione's hands.
Bezemer and Kess focus on the effects of text and image in curriculum from the 30's, 80's, and our current digital age. By starting out with a clarification of important concepts (mode, medium, site of display, frame), this piece becomes a good foundation for Shipka's and the Brits' type of work. The appealing and artistic vibe of this line of study is the emphasis on transformation--the changing and rearranging process, the unfixed-ness of the final product, the flux and flow of building and rebuilding one's world. The real education of adjustment, the shades of meaning, rather than a fixation on an absolute answer. Although this sounds like absolute hippie talk, the kind of nonsense coming out of a New Age Music teacher's mouth, these analyses of transduction/transformation and social repositioning were done on math and science textbooks, as well as writing.
