Zoe Armstrong – MET

LITERACY AND LITERACIES

Mode-Blending Task:

What’s in my bag? Stop-Motion Edition!

I have always wanted to created a stop-motion video and this felt like a great opportunity to try it out. I used the app Stop Motion Studio to create this video. It was really user friendly and easy for me to figure out. Using the New London Group’s 1996 Framework, I have reflected on the creation of my video:

Audio Design – I had to make sure that what I wanted to say fit within the frames that it was displayed during the video. Because I recorded the audio after the fact, this was definitely the most challenging part. In my attempt from Task 1, there was much more room for additional detail as I didn’t have time or space constraints on what I wanted to “say” to describe each item.

Linguistic Design – For this video, I used a more every-day dialect and wasn’t as worried about using an eloquent level of language. I wanted it to feel more like a conversation I was having with myself compared to my first attempt in Task 1 which was more formal, more edited and more rehearsed.

Visual Design – The research I had done online suggested keeping the same frame for the entire video so I went in that direction. I chose to bring forward each item into the foreground with the backpack always remaining in the background to give light and importance to each individual object in the scene. The order in which I presented each item followed a similar order of my first attempt in Task 1 where the items of most importance were presented first.

Gestural Design – At first I thought about not including any of my body in the film however upon further reflection, I realized that it would be important to see my hand reaching into and out of the bag as well as holding the items. Items don’t simply float so that gave a little bit of perspective to the video. This also made the video a little more familiar and ideally allows the viewer to connect with it more by seeing actual human action.

Benefits & Challenges

One of my favorite parts of the New London Group’s paper was the frequent celebration of differences and their discussion about specifically, what schools can do to promote differences and the need for learning processes to recruit subjectivities (1996). I believe that this is a benefit of mode-changing. It allows for more interests, purposes and intentions to be built into learning, creating and ultimately designing. It is also an opportunity for “Transformed Practice,” which was also discussed my the New London Group (1996). Allowing space to take knowledge or information already acquired and create something new with it. As a designer and learner, I was able to become extremely familiar with the information I was working with.

A challenge of mode-changing may be in the time that it requires. From the perspective of a middle-school teacher, I can only imagine attempting to ask a colleague to make a stop-motion video with me to present the nutrient cycle to students. We are already so short on time and only have so many preps in a week that for most, the simplest way is going back to basics and presenting information to students in un-redesgined ways. One of the points the New London Group makes is a need for metalanguage and how teachers need to be motivated to work with this (1996). Similar things can be said for mode-changing. With the right attitude, it can be a lot of fun, however many may considerate daunting and time consuming.

In an ideal world, teachers would be provided with enough time and access to create multimodal resources that would engage learners across a broad array of subjectivities. Until then, we keep fighting the good fight!

References:

The New London Group.  (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review 66(1), 60-92.