Over this past summer, I married my
best friend on a beautifully sunny (and hot!) afternoon in July. Throughout the
beginning of our newlywed bliss, I have taken it upon myself to become just a
little more domestic.
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| Of course I can! |
Now, I came into college and
married life hardly knowing how to cook anything. The last couple of months of
matrimony have tested my perseverance as I have toiled through bland, tasteless
attempts at meals and menus. And just as I was about to throw my hands in the
air, this first little blog post assignment actually produced an answer to my
problems like glorious dew from heaven.
As I was staring intently at both
the National Standards of Theatre Education and the Core Principles of Media
Literacy, I realized that I was looking for parallel threads in both documents—as
if the most common themes obviously ought to come to the forefront in our
future English and Theatre classrooms. For instance, the CPMLE opening
statement caught my eye, in that it declares its purpose as “to help
individuals of all ages develop the . . . skills
of expression that they need to be critical
thinkers [and] effective
communicators” (emphasis added). When I saw the words “expression,” “critical
thinkers,” and “communicat[ion]”, I knew that was exactly what Theatre
advocates and strives to teach its students. Checking the catalog of National
Theatre Standards before me, I saw similar language jump from off the page: “experience,”
“imagination,” “communicating,” “conceptualizing,” “interpretations,” “evaluating,”
“artistic choices,” and “analyzing, critiquing, and constructing.”
I know that as prospective
educators we sometimes get very overwhelmed when confronted with the National
Standards in our field. We pore over the list of standards and wonder how we
will ever decide what subjects to teach and how best to teach them. But I believe
that referencing two sets of standards—the CPMLE and the standards specific to
our field—offers us the opportunity to crosscheck our instructional priorities,
streamlining the criteria and emphasizing the lessons of greatest importance.
For example, Content Standard 2
from the National Standards of Theatre Education asks teachers to foster
students’ “acting by developing, communicating, and sustaining characters in
improvisations and . . . productions.” In my weaker and less brilliant moments,
this task can seem impossible to pin down—just how many ways are there to teach
students how to develop and maintain a character? Which methods should I
emphasize? However, crosschecking this standard with core principles found in
the CPMLE helps me narrow my pedagogical focus and better understand which
aspects of acting and character development I should accentuate in my
instruction.
“Media Literacy Education affirms
that people use their individual skills, beliefs and experiences to construct
their own meanings from media messages,” reads the sixth core principle from
CPMLE. With this in mind, I am reminded of some of the guidelines presented in Seeing and Writing about reading and
interpreting visual texts. Helping students understand the range of messages
and analyses we can glean from media is something I can incorporate as I teach
them about developing a character. Using critical thinking and modes of
expression, I could have my students create photo essays for the characters
they are portraying in an upcoming scene. As they carefully select which
photographs best represent the attitudes and perspectives of their characters,
students will reinforce their knowledge of both media literacy and character
development by “analyzing, critiquing, and constructing” the various beliefs
and experiences of their characters through media art.
So how does my opening tangent
about newlywed domesticity and home-cooked dinners relate to these comparisons
between the National Theatre Standards and the CPMLE? I have discovered a way
to beat those “what-should-we-have-for-dinner-tonight” blues! Just like taking
a sampling from both documents in order to configure the most useful ways to
utilize Theatre, English, and Media education standards in our pedagogy, I have
learned to scan my cupboards for some essential and interesting ingredients and
then ask, “What common themes can I see here?” A second look at a container of chili
powder hiding on the top shelf, the opportunity to make use of a bag of fancy
pasta gifted to us at Christmastime, and a hankering for the delicious block of
young gouda cheese we recently bought just might inspire creativity in the kitchen
and yield some of the most successful and appetizing batch of homemade macaroni
and cheese I have ever before produced in my life.
The husband was very pleased, in case you
were wondering.
I’m so glad that things are happy in the kitchen again for you! I too noticed words such as “critical thinking”, “reflective”, “analyze”, and “integrate” in both the CORE standards for English classrooms and the CPMLE goals. I think that finding these similar words in both documents highlights the responsibility we have as educators to teach our students how to make sense of the world around them. Doing so enables them to not only observe, but contribute to the world.
ReplyDeleteThis is why this class is so important—because one of the greatest ways to teach children to think critically is by exposing them to different forms of media. It is important that we use a variety of mediums because students will experience a variety in the real world. Photos in a magazine, paintings in a museum, articles in a newspaper—they will experience all of these, and we need to teach them to not merely take them at face value, but to question how valid they believe the claims made in these pieces of media are.
The questions we read about in “Seeing and Writing” are exactly the type of questions we should be teaching our students to ask. For example, why discussing a poem in class I could use the questions the book suggests: Who is the speaker? What images are presented in the poem? What does the poem sound like? What is the setting of the poem? How does it look on the page? All of these sorts of questions take the poem from being something that was nice to read and transform it into a vehicle to think about an idea or experience. The goal is to help the student develop the skills they need to break something down and then reconstruct it in a way that is useful to them.
I mentioned that using a variety of media was important earlier. Besides the fact that they will experience a variety of mediums in the real world, I also believe that this is important because using different forms of media helps us to see things in different ways. Just the other day in my teaching writing class, we had to write our feelings about our feelings on writing, then we had to create a collage about our feelings on writing, then we had to write our feelings again. Bringing in the visual effect of the collage made the assignment so much more meaningful to me. The images I picked had no dictionary definitions like the words I had just put on the page, so when I selected pictures, the “definition” was something I had to make up. There was no right answer—the pictures I selected could have meant something very different to someone else, and that was okay. This experience I had exemplifies that media is more effective when it works together rather than in isolation.
As a teacher, I hope that I will provide my student with many different opportunities to learn how to critically think by teaching them to ask good questions and by exposing them to a variety of media mediums.