Feeling Giggly: Building Print Literacy Through Video Production
By Steve Goodman

“I learned a lot of things, but I never learned how to read,” Aaron, a recent graduate of EVC, explained to me in a recent conversation. With the start of the new school year, we are reminded once again of the deep and persistent literacy problems so many students are struggling with.

Aaron told me about the years he spent in special education classes, about the humiliation he felt, and how he almost dropped out of high school altogether. But then he described how creating documentaries at EVC motivated him to work harder at reading and writing than he ever did in school. He said that while it was still a struggle for him, he was able to successfully read and take notes from articles, develop interview questions, write journal entries, logs of videotapes, and edit plans. This conversation left me with the question: How did learning to make a video documentary develop his reading and writing skills? Here are four strategies that have worked well at EVC.

Peer Coaching in a Community of Creative Production
“If I couldn’t read it, I asked somebody else: ‘Maybe you could proofread it for me?’ And people helped me out.”
At EVC, students develop their reading and writing skills as part of the natural process of producing a documentary about a critical issue in their lives. They learn to make meaning from various texts and use writing to express themselves as part of a collaborative community of creative producers. Learning and language development all take place within this context.

Aaron spoke to me about his difficulty reading some of the research articles assigned. As he explained it, his “vocabulary was pretty short…. The rules of reading is very difficult. There’s a lot of rules, and a lot of different ways to pronounce.” Despite these challenges, he was able to actively participate in his group because his peers helped him with what he called “proof reading” -- telling him the meaning of some words that he didn’t know. Too often when students can’t read an assignment, they give up rather than risk being embarrassed by their teacher or their peers. In Aaron’s case, he was able to reach out for assistance because EVC had created a culture of trust and mutual respect, and the expectation that knowledge is socially constructed and distributed.

And Aaron was able to later return the favor and offer his peers technical assistance with digital editing skills he had mastered. There was a common belief that regardless of each student’s talents and language abilities, everyone’s participation and ideas counted. So, Aaron’s difficulties with vocabulary did not lead to his feeling humiliated or demoralized, nor did it prevent his participation in the group, or limit his contribution to the main project. In fact, the documentary making process as a whole created multiple opportunities for students to feel productive making written, spoken, visual, musical, technical and artistic contributions.

Multiple Literacies: The Image and Spoken Word Contextualize the Written Word
“I read… and I heard people talk about it and that makes it a lot better. We had group conversations.”
The visual image and spoken word gave Aaron (and the rest of the students, as well) cognitive handles to gain a better grasp of the abstract symbols and often specialized academic vocabulary of print literacy. The creative process of documentary making placed the de-contextualized word within a visible and aural context of action. This fluid movement across the visual, spoken and printed words is really how we experience and make sense of the world anyway in our media saturated culture. The modes of communication are constantly changing, morphing from one into the other.

Students learned to gather information from multiple sources including people, books, newspapers, films, and the internet. Their reading was supported and contextualized by collaborative group discussions. Their research informed the interview questions that they wrote. Their written questions were communicated through oral interviews. The spoken answers were understood within their visual context, and were then transcribed into written form. Once the videotaped interviews were imported into the computer, then the once lived experience of dialogue was transformed into digital information that visually appeared on the editing timeline as separate and moveable tracks of images and audio frequencies.

The Russian psychologist Vygotsky wrote about the connection between speech and writing. He described writing as a double abstraction for students to learn. It is an abstraction first because written language is made up of abstract images of words -- symbols in the form of letters, accents, and punctuation-- which replace the sounds of words we hear when we talk. Second, instead of being able to engage in a reciprocal interaction of dialogue with another person, the new writer must learn to replace the partner in dialogue with an imagined listener/ reader, or no one in particular. And so, initially the writer enters into a monologue with a blank piece of paper (or computer screen).

Through the video production and the editing process, Vygotsky’s double abstraction began to melt away. First, since interviews make up the basis of their documentaries, the students restored spoken dialogue as the main form of communication. They conveyed meaning through the choice and order of words, tone, volume, accent, pacing, and flow. While interviews were obviously oral/aural, they were also visual experiences. Spoken words were combined with and situated by visual body language. Facial expressions, clothing, hair style, jewelry, body stance, and hand gestures (as filtered through the lighting, framing, angle and movement of the camera) all conveyed visual information that provide context and contribute to the act of dialogic communication. Combining their interviews with other material, students learned how to make meaning and communicate to public audiences using images, spoken words, music, graphic and text.

Recognition and Dialogue Through Public Screenings
“People were proud. People were clapping. It was fantastic. I loved the screening.”
While the videographer, like the writer, must in a sense “speak” to an imagined partner in dialogue, the social and public nature of video production renders the potential audience more knowable. Screenings and critiques of works-in-progress provide approximations for how their work might be questioned and understood by future imaginary audiences. The students almost always make multiple revisions as a result of such critique sessions.

The audience gives the students a compelling reason to strive for high standards in both their video and written work. The viewer and reader makes the “real world” judgment regarding quality and utility. Will the interview questions be understood by the subject being interviewed? Will they elicit the answers the student is looking for? Does the letter concisely explain the documentary they are making and persuasively convince the potential subject to be interviewed? Does the article they are reading provide the sufficient background research for the students to ask informed questions? Does the edit plan they are writing outline the visual, spoken and graphic elements to tell a coherent and compelling story? Does the opening narration they are writing and reading engage the viewer enough for them to want to watch the entire documentary? Is the written text factually accurate and clear and concise enough for the viewer to retain? Each document the student produce is a teachable moment, a situated opportunity for student to learn the rules, develop the craft of writing and documentary making, and practice the life-long learning habits of critique, self-reflection and revision.

Finally, presenting their work to real audiences completes the circle, gives concrete form to the oral dialogic basis of the work and does away with the second abstraction. It is at this moment -- when confronted by the tangible product of their work, and answering questions from the audience that has just viewed it -- that the students come to see themselves as authors, editors, artists, and producers in dialogue with their audience. This public recognition and appreciation is euphoric for the students. As Aaron described the screening of his group’s documentary, “People were really proud. People were clapping. It was fantastic. I loved the screening.”

Pleasure, Practice and Flow of Creative Work
“I was about to cry or something. I didn’t want to show it. I was really happy. I was really giggly.”
It takes great amounts of time and practice to read, write, research, interview, shoot and edit with proficiency. Gee writes about how literacy flows from students’ need to care about what they are learning; their need to feel pleasure, motivation, and connection to the content of their inquiry. And so it is critically important to place the students’ questions, ideas, concerns, and stories at the front and center of the learning process. Then they will grow to be invested in their work and have a reason to persist.

In addition to the content, it is the creative impulse that propels students along the arduous path of their production making it possible for them to spend hours in the evenings, on weekends, and even vacation finishing their documentary. Aaron talked about how difficult logging video tapes was for him, but how much he enjoyed editing. He couldn’t tear himself away from it. After logging, he said the editing process “was like a slide going down a slope. It was fun.”

What he is describing is commonly shared by students engaged in media projects when the happily spend hours and hours working on their project. It is what the psychologist Csikszentmihalyi called a state of flow : when they are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter.

Smith and Wilhelm make the important connection between flow, learning and literacy.
Flow experiences that we think can be usefully collapsed into four main principles:
1) A sense of control and competence
2) A challenge that requires an appropriate level of skill
3) Clear goals and feedback
4) A focus on the immediate experience

The challenge then is to create learning experiences where students inhabit this state. Then, three other important things begin to happen:
1) Students are engaged in some activity long enough, that they practice and become skilled in a range of areas that otherwise wouldn’t be possible.
2) Students can gradually independently master more and more sophisticated tasks.
3) Students find great pleasure and joy in the experience of learning and creating. Aaron told me that after he finished composing and editing in music to his section of the documentary, “I was about to cry or something. I didn’t want to show it. I was really happy. I was really giggly.” Giggly. All learning should make us feel a little bit giggly. If it did, our schools would be very different sorts of places. And we would all be better off.