Production 8

Allen Luke’s reading, Digital Ethic Now was an excellent reading to end the course as it discusses many of the course themes throughout the year and why they are so important in today’s classrooms. While reading the article the quotation that stuck out to me the most was when Luke concludes his article by saying, “In these studies, teachers and students are using digital technologies for (1) solving and addressing local political, social, and environmental problems; (2) mobilizing cultural resources to connect and engage with their communities and their histories, their Elders and younger generations, their peers, and with distant cultures that they might otherwise not have contact with; and (3) the practice of active and engaged citizenship, participation in community projects, and social movements and action”. This quote stuck out to me the most because it basically sums up the pedagogy within my community placement with The Future Design School that I discussed on a previous production. This company focuses on project based learning techniques by having students think of a problem they’re faced with or something they’re unhappy with in their lives, local community or globally and come up with ways to solve this problem through a project. This project becomes meaningful/authentic to students as it’s customizable to each person’s interest and allows them to invest their time into solving ethical, social justice based, civic problems that affect their lives and community. This type of learning is very different than the outdated traditional ways of learning that prepare students skill for a job in the future. These projects encompass traditional learning skills but does it in a way that is meaningful to the student and engages their personal history and identity as a citizen. My school placement is unfortunately very different as they are stuck in the traditional rigorous ways of teaching at students, so it was nice to see a different perspective with 21st century learners in classroom with my community placement.

For my final project, my group and I came up with a new way to engage with traditional English texts in a classroom by using Twine and making poem analysis interactive. As mentioned within Lotherington and Jenson’s article Teaching Multimodal and Digital Literacy in L2 Settings: New Literacies, New Basics, New Pedagogies “Multimodal literacies transcend the alphabetic world that is the focus of classroom literacy instruction. A generation ago, the world of literacy was based on paper. Now, literacy engages people in texts and discourses that traverse space and time on screens in which we can access and mix semiotic resources that include a multiplicity of languages”. We as a group hoped to create a way to analyse poetry that moved away from traditional 2D, pen and paper practices and have the poetry lifted off the page and become interactive, representative and meaningful. My group members and I all have a background in English and collectively agreed that we wanted to challenged the traditional way teachers in the past have introduced a poetry unit in their classes by making the poem multimodal. This was done by including written text from the user’s perspective, pictures to help illustrate their findings, gifs which help convey a feeling or mood, video response which allowed the user to connect their experiences to the poem, how this represents or misrepresents their experiences, and sound. The poem we chose to analyze was more historical, but if introduced in a class I believe it might be interesting to choose a poem with a larger social justice context, message or meaning. One could ask the user/student to upload their own poetry or artwork inspired by the poem as a response/remix, how they make meaning with the poem and foster a participatory culture within this poetry unit. There are endless possibilities for meaning making within this Twine project and helps take the static, flat version of literacy that is being taught and make it more engaging, meaningful and individualized to each student’s experience.