Friday, March 9, 2012

Teaching the Moving Target: SCMS2012 Workshop

The current mediascape—from authors, viewers, objects, to platforms of distribution—is in a state of flux, and this poses interesting challenges for university level teaching. This workshop examines the limitations and potentialities for engaging dynamic media objects, from serial texts, to digital archives, to the tools and underlying coding systems that render these “texts” widely accessible, but also leave them fluid and unstable with respect to established formal models of analysis. Participants will consider a range of strategies for approaching course processes as well as course products: we will consider not only what we teach and how we teach it, but also how we guide the production of student texts.

Sean O’Sullivan begins by discussing the twin challenges of teaching complete serial texts (an entire season or entire run of a TV serial) and of teaching incomplete serial texts (either still in production, or unfinished in some other way).  The classroom can make contemporary storytelling limits and limitlessness a central topic; the problem of the elusive satisfaction of serials spotlights our choices in entering and investigating the unstable worlds of vast narratives.

Anne Moore then considers strategies for teaching serial narratives in the composition classroom, where she uses serial cult television as a way to examine the mutually productive relationship between reading and writing. By using fans as both a model and an object of study, students gain the opportunity to think critically about their own reading practices as part of their writing process.

Vicki Callahan extends the conversation by positing “participatory archives” as dynamic sites for student research, writing, collaboration, as well as community engagement.  This approach gives students an active role in research and writing history, as well as an understanding of their role in creating and circulating the cultural artifacts that shape archives.

Likewise, Virginia Kuhn argues that the boundaries between form and content are increasingly problematic in today’s media ecology, such that students must engage all semiotic registers: they must write both in and about the visual objects of analyses they encounter in class.

Finally, Craig Dietrich interrogates the digital media asset: it can be contained by multiple paths within the same text (aided by relational, or in some cases, semantic databases), providing opportunities for remix, reuse, and multi-vectored narrative.
________________

Virginia Kuhn's THREE premises:

I. ARCHIVES as alphabets
Iraqi Doctors Project

II. FILMIC media as books
Filmic Texts and the Rise of the Fifth Estate:

III. FORM as content
Speaking with Students: Profiles in Digital Pedagogy