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126
Students were asked write about themselves by completing each of the ten
statements in the prompt with a single word or a longer phrase. Mr. Davidson had
begun the school year with this exercise for a number of years. In past years students
created a paper collage to illustrate their poems. During the time of my fieldwork,
the class was using iMovie to illustrate their poems using digital images and music
for the first time. This project was an ambitious way to start the year in terms of its
content as well as the technical skills it required. Although students interpreted the
prompts in a variety of ways, responding in ways that ranged from surface-level
representations of identity to extremely personal information about themselves and
their families, asking students to share information about identity and emotions at the
beginning of the school year with a group of students and a teacher who they may or
may not have known from previous years or schools, was a challenging request.
Students began the project on paper, copying the prompts down from a
whiteboard in the classroom. Several students struggled from the outset to fill in the
prompts and settled (in their first drafts, at least) on basic descriptors such as
completing the prompt “I am…” with their first names. In many ways, the difficulty
students experienced with this prompt reflects the social construction of identity; if
identity is constructed in relation to various subject positions and structures of
power, and if identity is dynamic, partial, and (as Hall says) slightly out of reach, the
statement “I am…” is difficult (if not impossible) to complete.
This initial part of the project is a good example of what Butler meant by
performativity, and what Gee calls I-Identities and D-Identities.44 The students
Object Description
| Title | Kids as cultural producers: consumption, literacy, and participation |
| Author | Stephenson, Rebecca Herr |
| Author email | rherr@usc.edu; bhs@hri.uci.edu |
| Degree | Doctor of Philosophy |
| Document type | Dissertation |
| Degree program | Communication |
| School | Annenberg School for Communication |
| Date defended/completed | 2008-08-25 |
| Date submitted | 2008 |
| Restricted until | Unrestricted |
| Date published | 2008-10-17 |
| Advisor (committee chair) | Banet-Weiser, Sarah |
| Advisor (committee member) |
Gross, Larry Seiter, Ellen |
| Abstract | This dissertation looks closely at the practice of digital media production within a group of special education students and their teachers. Using ethnographic methods of extended participant observation and semi-structured interviews with students, teachers, and parents, along with textual analysis of students' media projects, this work examines the types of learning that emerge from making media at school and the ways in which that learning relates to media and technology use in everyday life. Over the course of one school year (2005-2006), the students who are the focus of this dissertation undertook eight different multimedia production projects, ranging from designing PowerPoint presentations to digital video production and stop-motion animation. Through media production, the students found opportunities to practice traditional and digital literacy skills as well as to explore issues of identity and self-expression.; This dissertation provides empirical support for recommendations made by several media literacy scholars to include media production as part of critical media literacy curricula and contributes a unique case study -- one situated in special education -- to a growing body of work on digital literacy. Three interdisciplinary themes--consumption, literacy, and participation -- are used to organize the description and analysis of the students' media production activities. These themes connect the specific production that took place in the classroom to larger discourses about youth, media, technology, education, and access, working to complicate existing constructions of young people as either helpless victims of manipulative media or naturally savvy media and technology users. Instead, this research emphasizes that the relationships kids have with media and technology are complex, dynamic, intrinsically linked to their identities as consumers and participants in society. Media literacy is thus theorized as a tool for understanding and controlling consumption, participation, and the construction of young people as both current and future citizens. |
| Keyword | media literacy; media production; special education; middle school; digital media |
| Geographic subject (city or populated place) | Los Angeles |
| Coverage date | 2005/2006 |
| Language | English |
| Part of collection | University of Southern California dissertations and theses |
| Publisher (of the original version) | University of Southern California |
| Place of publication (of the original version) | Los Angeles, California |
| Publisher (of the digital version) | University of Southern California. Libraries |
| Provenance | Electronically uploaded by the author |
| Type | texts |
| Legacy record ID | usctheses-m1674 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Rights | Stephenson, Rebecca Herr |
| Repository name | Libraries, University of Southern California |
| Repository address | Los Angeles, California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Filename | etd-Stephenson-2393 |
| Archival file | uscthesesreloadpub_Volume29/etd-Stephenson-2393.pdf |
Description
| Title | Page 131 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Full text | 126 Students were asked write about themselves by completing each of the ten statements in the prompt with a single word or a longer phrase. Mr. Davidson had begun the school year with this exercise for a number of years. In past years students created a paper collage to illustrate their poems. During the time of my fieldwork, the class was using iMovie to illustrate their poems using digital images and music for the first time. This project was an ambitious way to start the year in terms of its content as well as the technical skills it required. Although students interpreted the prompts in a variety of ways, responding in ways that ranged from surface-level representations of identity to extremely personal information about themselves and their families, asking students to share information about identity and emotions at the beginning of the school year with a group of students and a teacher who they may or may not have known from previous years or schools, was a challenging request. Students began the project on paper, copying the prompts down from a whiteboard in the classroom. Several students struggled from the outset to fill in the prompts and settled (in their first drafts, at least) on basic descriptors such as completing the prompt “I am…” with their first names. In many ways, the difficulty students experienced with this prompt reflects the social construction of identity; if identity is constructed in relation to various subject positions and structures of power, and if identity is dynamic, partial, and (as Hall says) slightly out of reach, the statement “I am…” is difficult (if not impossible) to complete. This initial part of the project is a good example of what Butler meant by performativity, and what Gee calls I-Identities and D-Identities.44 The students |
