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By Michael Schoonmaker Over the years of teaching video production to college students, I’ve found there are two ways to teach it: The first is to take them from “square one”, everything from how production practices evolved from early twentieth century filmmaking to present high definition digital video and plain old teach them how it’s done. This approach is like teaching them a new language, and like language it takes a great deal of practice to get it “right.” The second way is to just let them do it without telling them the “proper” ways and techniques, to express themselves, apply common sense and get their feet wet with the video camera—see what they can do. Out of this experience they usually develop an interest in learning the proper ways, but much can be accomplished with their inventive spirit. The first way of teaching tends to work well with college students as they have professional interests the subject matter and the time to dedicate to focused study. The second way of teaching works enormously well in K-12 environments where there is little opportunity to teach the intricacies of the video production process, but more opportunity to experiment and apply video to educational contexts. I call this technique “inventive video, ” a term I borrowed from Sally Beachwood's first grade class. It was while I was working with Mrs. Beechwood and her students on their first grade movie that I learned about a very similar technique she called “inventive spelling.” Inventive Spelling I must admit, I was skeptical when she explained it to me. After all, what if it didn’t work? What if it just engineered a generation of poor spellers—people with no regard for discipline and consistency in written communication? The idea behind inventive spelling is to let a young learner’s desire to write motivate their adherence to proper writing form and procedure, rather than vice-versa. Traditional spelling instruction has tended to emphasize form and correctness over and before expression. In other words, students are encouraged to write correctly before they are invited to let their thoughts flow in writing. Mrs. Beechwood agreed with the inventive approach to spelling. To her, the traditional method could discourage young writers from expressing themselves, and therefore instill a negative connotation around writing. Expression and form were simultaneous and synergetic learning outcomes with inventive spelling. There was no proper order to learning them. Demanding “correctness” before in writing could stifle young writers. Write First, Spell Later Inventive spelling allows students the opportunity to freely express themselves with words. Teachers accomplish this by legitimizing the words their young writers write as meaningful expressions. The objective is to reward spontaneous expression and develop a sense of comfort and confidence in writing. Spelling and form should not create barriers to expression. This is not to say that form and correctness are not important. In fact, proponents have demonstrated the technique motivates an interest and curiosity in correctness and word recognition that makes them better spellers in the long run. This is because their writing drives form, not vice versa. Spelling is then seen as a tool of more effective expression. Students also gain an appreciation of form and protocol through their reading experiences. Teachers can model spelling and writing strategies by calling attention to patterns in works they read as much as in works they write. To Mrs. Beechwood, this technique unlocked the writer within and created a critical thinking framework for them. Critical thinking was important to her because she was in a position to build foundations of her students’ thought processes. Sally explained this after we had finished our second movie together: “When you’re teaching kids in a setting where the economic structure and the home structure and the skill level are so varied, some children—their world is very small. And I think anytime you can expand that with outside experiences you’re expanding everything about them. You’re giving them a new reference point, you’re giving them new knowledge, you’re giving them more critical thinking…new experiences they can relate to and I think it’s really increasing their brain power.” There was something about putting a video together with a group of kids focused on the same task that naturally inspired a critical thought process, especially when applied to a learning objective of some sort. Perhaps it was the fact that we were deliberately preparing a public presentation and thinking about how it would be received by them: a self-reflexivity of sorts. Inventive Video What the K-12 teachers and I were finding over time was that our videomaking activities were instilling a very similar spirit to curricula as inventive spelling. Our version, call it inventive video, was unlocking “the moviemaker” within young learners in a similar way that inventive spelling was unlocking “the writer” within them. Both of these expressive tools were exercising critical thinking as well. In its simplest form, inventive video was the experience of young learners applying class concepts on their own. Since most teachers I worked with over the years had no movie-making experience, they had no pre-set designs on what videos in their classes should consist of, or even how they should be done. This gave K-12 learners uncharacteristically wide latitudes in doing their video projects. I recently discovered a sixth grade video my son had made, that I had never seen. Although it was largely a playful video spoof of Greek Gods, it was a very clever story and contained a great deal of information about Greek mythology. In the end it was a critical application of curricula in a child’s preferred context: comedy. In the end, my son and his project team took ownership of the lesson and invented their very own understanding of it. Michael Schoonmaker is Chairman of the Television-Radio-Film Department at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications, and author of the book, Cameras in the Classroom: Education the Post-TV Generation. . He began his production career with MTV, then joined NBC’s Olympic production unit. He has taught television and filmmaking courses at the University for twenty years, and worked with K-12 teachers and students for the past fourteen. |
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Inventive Video |
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December, 2008 |