For this task, I told a story about making frame drums with fellow teachers last Thursday. The drums will be given to our graduating grade seven students.  I used the dictation format that our Learning Assistance teachers suggest to our classroom teachers; open a Word document and ‘fn-fn’. I’m a believer that if we ask our students to use a program or complete a task, such as creating a portfolio or self-evaluation, then we should be prepared to use the same methods to experience the process.  I have also used this dictation method when I taught grade four and have first-hand knowledge about the frustrations from the teacher perspective.  My unedited story below confirms the limitations:

There are many places that my oral creation is not representative of what I would have created using planned writing, and much of it deviates from proper written English.  Punctuation is absent, spelling is horrific, and grammar is choppy.  Although this ‘writing is made material by technology’ (Haas, 2013, p.3), I tried to create a beautiful Barbie and ended up with Frankenstein.  With so many errors, it is hard to develop a groove to reading and meaning-making becomes more difficult.

The most pronounced spelling mistakes are proper nouns, followed by context or culture-specific common nouns, and what could be interpreted as my mumbling and scattered cadence.

Context-specific vocabulary was also assigned incorrect word choice, such as ‘outdoor learning traditional space’  turned into ‘ outdoor learning space station’ and to ‘attach the hide’ became to ‘live stream’.  It is ironic that two traditional ideas were turned into two technological-age vocabulary words.  Last time I checked, being out on the land in traditional ways is pretty far from being on the space station.

Most importantly, I was disappointed that my speech-to-text is glaring in the lack of respect that is deserved with sensitive topics.  I give land acknowledgement and am talking about traditional First Nation people and objects that hold sacred and culture value. For the dictation to have mashed up words, especially in crude ways (i.e. calling ‘babiche’ – bitch), I feel that it not only distracts from the message, but offends a culture and ritual.  In addition, the oral dictation lacks emotion to draw-in the reader and/or engage the audience through conversation.  In planned writing, the author can proactively describe and assume questions or comments that the audience might hold and address them in their work.  For example, one part left out of the story was that when kids make their drum, they are asked (as per tradition) to give it away to someone special.  If this monologue story was told in writing or been given the opportunity to be presented as a back-and-forth conversation with an attentive audience, then important pieces of the story would most certainly been included.  I found that without brainstorming and scripting, it was harder to formulate and make connections between beginning, middle and end, as well as remembering to include important details in order.  Writing is planned, so it can be analyzed and stored forever; therefore, it is more likely to be carefully crafted.

My last point, in thinking about the drum as material.  For example, watching dance or hand games, it is easy to hear the drum beat as a medium for storytelling, art and communication (just as we saw in Module Two with the tap dancing of Alexander MacDonald).  In this way, the drum could also be seen as a technology.

        Drum making BY grade seven students, June 2019

        Staff drum making FOR grade sevens during COVID-19 closure, June 2020

Haas, C. (2013). The Technology Question. In Writing technology: Studies on the materiality of literacy. (pp. 3-23). New York, NY: Routledge.