School Video News-It's the Story

January, 2008

It’s the Story

By John Kotarski

“It’s the story, stupid” is a note that I wrote to myself many years ago at about the same time James Carville was quoted as writing a note to himself that read “It’s the economy, stupid.” My note was to remind me that in spite of all of the fancy equipment I was purchasing for my program, the goal was to teach students how to tell a compelling story.

It was sometimes hard to keep that focus when many of the cool gadgets I reviewed created such seductive “eye candy” and begged for me to play with them. I knew my students would be equally seduced and if all I wanted to do was to recruit students into my proposed class, these new gadgets would do it.

I knew that my challenge was something more. As a media educator I had to show students how to use media to achieve a more profound way of looking at ideas, not just a fun way to look at the technology. In other words, I had to teach them how to tell powerful stories using media: stories that were history stories, chemistry stories, and math stories. As media educators, we need to teach students how effectively to use multimedia storytelling to communicate within a rapidly changing world. We also need to teach students how this rapidly changing world communicates with them using multimedia storytelling.

Like it or not, students are daily seeing manufactured “solutions” to complicated world problems. Each day they awaken to a barrage of media pictures, sound bites and commentary. All of it challenges their sense of what is real. All are carefully manufactured stories with nothing left to chance. We need to teach students how to write with media and how to read and process the media of others.

These manufactured “solutions” are not "slices of life" or "mirrors of society". Although they attempt to imitate reality, they are not reality. They are by definition, mediated reality. The success of these manufactured stories lies in their apparent naturalness. As media educators, we need to make media strange and problematic for the student. Media shape our attitudes, behavior and ideas about the world. As media educators, we need to coach students to think about reality vs. mediated information.

Audiences are not passive to media. Individuals may look passive as they sit motionless in front of a book or TV, but their minds are working to make sense of the information. This is especially true of fast-paced modern media. We learn to anticipate the codes and conventions in media and to somehow "read" or make sense of its message. We do this as individuals and in predictable ways, as groups. Advertisers know this and try to target audiences. As media educators, we need to coach students to become aware of the way they interact with media personally and speculate about the way others might use media.

People derive great pleasure from media, and media literacy skills can heighten that pleasure. We can appreciate the artistry of story telling, technical feats and creative vision. We can also understand that form and content are closely related in media, and that each medium has unique codes, conventions, advantages and disadvantages that influence its content. As media educators we need to coach students to read and write using media.

This year, your students will spend 12,000 hours in a classroom and 15,000 hours watching television. They will see 20,000 TV ads. We allocate countless hours teaching students how to read and interpret the texts they encounter in school, yet we spend no time teaching students how to process the television they encounter at home.

Ned Davis in his book Lessons for Tomorrow: Bringing America’s Schools Back from the Brink writes about the need for schools to co-op mass media. “Mass media show us how to consume, not how to produce, how to defend ourselves, not how to wage peace of cooperation, and how to treat sex casually, not seriously.” We cannot blame mass media. Mass media is driven by corporations that are trying to capture some of the $500 billion worth of purchasing that students in the United States now spend or influence.

In medieval universities the foundation of inquiry was language arts, the trivium, which was grammar, rhetoric, and logic. This was the First Curriculum. Neil Postman in Teaching as a Conserving Activity puts a new spin on it. “Television is not only a curriculum but it constitutes the major educational enterprise now being undertaken in the United States. That is why I call it the First Curriculum. School is the second.” Corporate media teaches us which toothpaste will ensure our perpetual youth; what car will impress our friends; and what cleaning solution will protect us from drudgery. But it is a double-edged sword. Multimedia storytelling can also teach that a community of diverse voices is an enriched place to live; that big ideas are complex and nuanced; that students must take charge of their own learning.

Mass media may have been used to prepare a nation to make war, but it is also being used to discuss universal health care and global warming. It is all in the story.

I am frequently asked to help school districts design television studios and purchase equipment. Everyone wants their facility to be state-of-the-art, which is another way of saying impressive. Often times an administrator labors under the assumption that bigger is better. Students definitely think bigger is better. Students want to be treated as adults and believe that small cameras are more toy-like. I tell everyone: size doesn’t matter. It is the story that matters. Powerful stories can change minds and adults respect people who can change minds. However, audio does matter. Video without sound is surveillance video. I advise them to buy cameras with external mic jacks.

Television studios impress people, and board of education members, as well as parents, want to easily point to something impressive that says, “we teach technology to our students.” You can see very impressive television studios on television. It follows that if schools are going to teach television they should have a television studio, right? A big studio with big cameras and a big control room is better, right? Wrong.

A lot of news studios seen on television are virtual studios created in a computer. More importantly, it’s the story that matters. Charlie Rose on PBS has a big studio and big cameras but you see none of that. You see very articulate, well informed individuals telling powerful stories. No fancy editing, no tracking camera shots, just conversation that is riveting, conversation that changes minds. So if you have a Charlie Rose at your school and can get the likes of Sandra Day O’Connor, Madeleine Albright, or Peter O’Toole to drop by, you should make building a studio a top priority. However, if not, you need to think of the story that students will tell using a studio.

I like studios. Products from NewTek and Sony have lowered the price of studio equipment but it will still cost between $30K and $100K to outfit a studio. However, there are a lot of community uses for a school based studio. A live studio call-in program is thrilling. It can teach students how to work as a team and how to solve technical problems on the fly. A portable studio that can tape high school sports is usually a prized community commodity. The most in demand local programming nation-wide is high school sports: not public meetings where government makes laws but high school sports.

Directing a live sport event is a cross between conducting a symphony and downhill skiing: thrilling and exquisitely beautiful if done right. I make a lot of money advising schools how to design a studio. However, with a studio, fixed or portable, the storytelling is left to those in front of the camera. A studio production class is not the best way to teach multimedia skills to the most students for the least amount of money.

A production team is made up of 6-10 people. So a production class is small, about 10 students. You can double up the students but you risk boring the ones not occupied with a production task. Production classes that teach only production techniques are not very cost effective. Editing classes on the other hand can use an existing computer lab, need only three cameras for 20 students to share, and can teach storytelling skills that are transferable across the curriculum. Editing classes cost a fraction of the cost of a studio. I advise schools to begin by create editing classes and at a later date build a studio for a production classes.

When I do design a production class, I design it as a media business class to teach students how to “manage” a business that coincidentally operates a television studio and produces television programming like sports shows, talk shows, game shows, and studio news. Students learn the business of media as well as production skills. The story in a production class is a business story.

The business of television is changing. As I have written in previous articles, consolidation is forcing media businesses to cut programming that produces the least revenue. Historically, local news was a public service provided by media outlets and not a profit center. As media businesses compete for ad revenue with websites and video games, local news will suffer.

This change will have major consequences on how we produce and consume news. The Project for Excellence in Journalism reported on the situation.

“In the future, we may well rely more on citizens to be sentinels for one another. No doubt that will expand the public forum and enrich the range of voices. Already people are experimenting with new ways to empower fellow citizens to gather and understand the news — whether it is soldiers blogging from Baghdad, a radio program on the war produced by students at Swarthmore College carrying eyewitness interviews with Iraqi citizens, or a similar effort by young radio reporters in Minnesota to cover local towns.”

Michigan has designed a set of curriculum benchmarks in an attempt to align the curriculum in Michigan schools toward a common vision. This is the preamble for the technology benchmarks.

“Learning with and about technology prepares learners to live responsibly in a democratic, technologically driven society. Students can use technology for knowledge acquisition, communication and information management, problem solving, creative expression, research and design. Learners become technologically capable when they apply technology across discipline areas and when technology is used across the content areas.”

I believe that as media educators we can teach new media as a language art and create storytelling practicums across the disciplines. By doing this we will have a vehicle in place with experienced student practioners that can present balanced, nuanced, stories about the complicated activities that go on in American schools. Our students can be change agents for school reform while becoming productive American citizens who are media literate.

If you have comments about this article please post them on my blog.

John Kotarski is a regular contributor to School Video News. He is currently a media consultant who worked for the Mount Clemens Schools for fourteen years designing media curriculum and developing the school’s cable television station. Kotarski’s program was recognized as one of the top three in the nation by the Alliance for Community Media. His work has also been recognized for excellence by the Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning, the Michigan Municipal League, and the Michigan Association of School Boards. Kotarski lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with his wife Theresa Tinkle, who is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan. He can be reached at kotarski@pobox.com