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
