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| on the mountain winter 2013-2014
ENGLISH DEPARTMENT COMPOSES IN
VIDEO AND AURAL MODALITIES TO
ENGAGE STUDENTS
BY JEREMY FREEMAN,
SKS ENGLISH DEPARTMENT CHAIR
“
I
t was the best of times, it was the worst
digital-est
of
times.”
The English Department seeks to engage our students using
a number of approaches and contexts. At a lecture at Bard
College last year for a conference entitled “Teaching Writing in
a Digital Age,” I experienced a shift in my perspective on what
it means to teach high school students in an age of unprece-
dented technological advancement and came away with another
great approach for helping students engage with literature.
Cynthia Selfe, Humanities Distinguished Professor in the
English Department at Ohio State University, made a very
compelling argument for how English composition teach-
ers need to rethink traditional modes of teaching writing and
composition. Selfe provided some historical background on the
perennial concern that most adults have about adolescent writ-
ers, most notably framed by the question: “Why can’t Johnny
write?” Selfe exhorts that the ‘under-taught’ high school writer
in fact can write and compose in highly evolved ways when
given the proper framework and tools. Selfe explained that
the teenage brain today is capable of digesting large amounts
of data, and, when pursuing topics of their own interest and
curiosity, they are able to produce innovative compositions
(
through different modalities) that go beyond text-centered
traditional literacy approaches.
A week later I took my findings back to the classroom here at
SKS and introduced, gradually, the option of composing essays
in a video or aural modality. This means that students are able to
use images, sounds, music, as a way to engage a text and argue
a thesis. As it happens the iPad apps Garage Band and iMovie
made such a task quite attainable. It is remarkable that we live
TURNING ON TO THE
DIGITAL (P)AGE
