upward bound

Upward Bound

The tale of my first real venture in multimodal composition in a basic writing classroom is full of hope and dread. I was hopeful that my students would use new media creatively to accomplish their own goals for public writing. And I was terrified that my abilities (both digital and pedagogical) might be insufficient for making a full-color magazine and website complete with images, podcasts, and videos come together. It was the summer of 2007, and I was honored to be teaching a creative journalism class for the Upward Bound program at the University of Idaho. Upward Bound is a federally funded Trio program aimed at helping high school students (14-18 years old) from low-income families become successful first-generation college students. This year’s students’ family incomes, for instance, will range from an average of $16,000 for a family of one to $55,000 for a family of eight (“TRIO”). Throughout the academic year, Upward Bound provides students with tutoring and counseling and helps with college and financial aid applications. The school year culminates with a free, optional summer immersion program in which students spend six weeks living in dorms, and taking classes on a local college campus.

Most of my students during that summer resided on reservations and farms in rural Washington and Idaho and had never before been to a university’s campus; they were working class, or rural, or students of color–those who might go on to enroll in basic writing classes in college. Over the course of the summer program, each student in this particular Upward Bound program would participate in complex projects, from drawing up plans for a new college facility in a real local space and presenting those plans to the mayor in the architecture class, to creating a full-length documentary-style film by sorting through, editing, and splicing together hours and hours of video footage in the film class. Each of these projects require the types of literacies that students from these representational categories are often denied direct instruction in, or are taught watered down versions of to meet the needs of low-skilled trades jobs associated with wage labor. While many teachers believe that they must help struggling, underperforming, or at-risk students to master the most basic of skills before advancing to complex, multitasked, project-based literacies, success in this summer program materialized in its challenge for students to perform in real world-type work environments while producing texts for real audiences.

To meet the goal of project-based learning, I originally proposed a handmade zine project involving students in strengthening written and visual expression while exploring topics of their own choosing. I imagined the melding of print and visual literacies that would accomplish the “uphill task [of] reconciling text and images as modes of discourse and subjects to be ‘read’” and written (Gregoire1). However, as a rare miracle the program had more resources than one might expect, giving us the financial ability to make a more professional looking magazine, as well as a complementary website including images, video, and podcasts. With these resources in mind, I reimagined a six week, two hour per day, course with a digital do-it-yourself goal.

Like any self-taught amateur, I was terrified by the idea of teaching Adobe Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and InDesign, as well as iMovie and GarageBand. As I faced teaching this course, I worried about how little and how much my students already knew. I was concerned that they wouldn’t know enough about the basics of computers to even begin to learn the software; and, just at the same time, I wondered if they might know so much more than I did that my ethos would be all but swept away. But the struggles and realities of the summer laid the groundwork for an even better experience with teaching digital writing down the road, as I describe in more detail below.

The Word

The summer in creative journalism went roughly like this:

Week One: Planning

As an editorial team, we generated topics (which students selected individually) and decided on general goals of the publication and audience.

Week Two: Writing

Students used diverse resources to develop, research, write, and edit their stories, often working in groups for brainstorming and revision sessions.

Week Three: Photoshop and InDesign

I taught the program interfaces, while Google and free online Adobe video tutorials helped students accomplish more specific goals. Students learned to use the necessary page dimensions and to include visual elements such as “photoshopped” images and backgrounds that were rhetorically appropriate for the goals of their individual projects while matching the coherent aesthetic of the overall magazine.

Week Four: Podcasting and Video

I introduced the program interfaces for iMovie and Garageband, while students again used Internet searches and free online resources for further support (check out Lynda.com for professionally produced video tutorials, some of which are free). Students developed storyboards and conceptual maps to plan and then execute videos and podcasts that would serve as appropriate accompaniments to their particular projects.

Week Five: Dreamweaver

I demoed the basics of HTML design in Dreamweaver, specifically table-drawing, linking, and embedding of images, audio, and video. Students developed individual pages that served as both portfolios to showcase their work and also as multimedia pieces that enhanced and complemented the ideas presented.

Week Six: Editorial Review

The students and I collaborated on final edits before publishing, distributing, and presenting content.

In keeping with the program directors' goal of proving-through-doing that these students belong both in college and in the contemporary working world and that such learning can be accessible to Upward Bound participants, our class modeled itself after the office of the local newspaper, which we had visited on the first day. After generating ideas about the type of magazine we wanted to make and the general design, students picked areas they felt capable of writing about and developed their own topics and methodologies. They took seriously their goals of appealing to their Upward Bound community, including peers, teachers, and parents, as well as their unknowable online audience and campus audience members.

In formulating goals for The Word (as the project came to be called), we (program administrators and I) hoped that the writing would matter to such a degree that the students could conceptualize themselves as actively constructing and commenting on their own social environments. For instance, in “Homeless Teens,” Jose writes about another student’s homelessness and experience of domestic violence, which he later contextualizes in the social situation that leads to homelessness in the first place. He admits to having erroneously believed that homelessness results from laziness; in coming to understand his friend’s circumstances, Jose encourages his audience to join him in critiquing ideas about homelessness and its causes. He and his classmate–Joey–depict homelessness with the ironic humor of a center image of Joey sleeping on the sidewalk next to a sign requesting money for ninja lessons to save his family. Reading the narrative in which Joey admits to being homeless “because his mom had hit him and he couldn’t take it anymore,” allows readers to consider the meaning of the central image, with its fantastical reversal of the use of violence (ninja lessons) as a force for bringing a family back together (Bentley et al.).

Josephine, on the other hand, writes primarily in memoir to reflect on the role of sports and mentorship in her family dynamics. In “C-Wall Inspired Me,” she concludes her piece with the line “My family gave me a nickname, which is fat-girl, so I know that they love me.” Through the course of her story, JoJo (the class’s nickname for her) deconstructs her family’s seemingly demeaning label in order to reconcile the positive influence of sports in keeping her family together with their desire to keep her fit. In her visual layout, JoJo uses stars in warm colors and an optimistic yellow background to portray a more positive understanding of her relationship with family members with respect to their sports activities.

Meanwhile, Lucas steps outside of the Upward Bound program and relies on government press releases and news articles to investigate the then-new hybrid vehicle technology. Using more commonly academic modes of research such as database searches, Lucas does his best to report to his audience the potential relevance and impact of hybrid technology on their lives and the environment. His use of a green background with yellow spotlights to get attention mirrors his topic of the hot, new “green” technology. Each story in The Word is relevant to the author and required multiple literacies to compose, including highly advanced rhetorical awareness due to the very sensitive and political nature of some of the students' topics. Additionally, each author collaborated with other students on the visual accompaniments to their words as they designed the layout of their texts, images, and backgrounds using Photoshop and InDesign.

In addition to the print articles and design layout, students’ work with various audio and video pruducts not only cultivated skills critical to college writing, but also helped students exercise many types of digital literacy often unaddressed in underfunded primary and secondary schools. Hands-on work with professional grade tools provided a learning process in which students can learn and use the real tools of a professional work environment while being relieved of the pressure of a high-stakes scenario (Gee). In other words, students could play and learn.

When I assigned videos, there was very little direction for content. I required that the videos be somehow relevant to the author’s magazine submissions, and that they contain text slides to show capability with the magazine medium. I tried very hard not to dictate content in any medium so that students would feel authentic creative ownership of the work. As a result, the movies were widely varied–including one video called “Stinky Sit-Ups,” featuring a student “passing gas” in a one-to-one ratio with his sit-ups, and another depicting JoJo showing her skills on the basketball court. They were lighthearted and fun, age-appropriate, and short.

The content of the podcasts was similarly informal. Students interviewed each other about the processes of creating their articles. Webpage designs were structured by my directions, but the design choices were left ultimately to the students. Elements included color selection, image creation and manipulation, constructing a reflection/introduction paragraph, and organizing introductory statements and link text for pdf files, videos, and podcasts. While the designs were determined by individual authors, we showcased and discussed drafted pages as a group to get a sense of continuity within our common site.

In the end, I feel our labors paid off. My students and I learned how to work through the tribulations of writing and design. And students challenged themselves to develop written, verbal, and visual pieces that represented themselves and asked brave questions about the complex worlds in which they live. We accomplished the mission of the Upward Bound program by providing students with “sufficient access” to literacies required for success in college. These literacies included creating products for public distribution–both online and in the physical spaces of the local campus and community--and addressing rhetorical questions of authority, space, voice, and audience that we expect developmental and first year composition students alike to explore in our classrooms.

Reflection

I had particular goals in mind for my students that summer. Below is a list of outcomes I imagined and my frank reflection on how they turned out. I offer this honest commentary as a way to highlight the material outcomes of the hope and dread of multimodal work. I wanted the material of my course to help students gain comfort with contemporary mediums and conventions of design and composition. I offer the following comments on my goals and on student achievements:

Goal #1. Gain comfort with contemporary mediums and conventions of design and composition

Well…students definitely learned the contemporary mediums of print magazine production. They experimented with diverse types of design and surely were not afraid of color. But aesthetically? I would say that the visual quality of the websites and articles were more akin to the conventions of the then-popular MySpace than to contemporary conventions of design. I now believe that a youth-oriented aesthetic is rhetorically appropriate for a youth-produced magazine, but it is something I worried would reflect poorly on our class at the time.

Goal #2. Learn to assess audience and rhetorical purpose from both the reading and writing perspectives

Students did pretty well in addressing this goal. They did what they could to adopt a journalistic tone, when appropriate, and for the most part were pretty successful.

Goal #3. Compose in diverse forms and mediums, learning both genres and ways to blend them

Learn to blend them? Not so much. I spent more time than could have been anticipated asking students to stop playing with Photobooth (a Mac program that allows users to take pictures of themselves and add fun filters to them) and just write. I was so stressed out trying to make sure everyone had all their necessary components each week that I didn’t perceive myself as having time to teach about the conventions of the media, the ways in which they complement each other, the politics of formatting, and debates in the field. We didn’t read anything about design or even journalism. This was a hand-on, non-critical class when it came to the tools and genres. We focused on making products and not on the relationship between form and content. The work that happened here happened spontaneously and according to students’ own intuitions and perceptions.

Goal #4. Connect creativity, school, and students’ own understanding of their worlds

This was the most successful of the outcomes by far. The students wrote powerfully engaging articles that reflected sophisticated political and creative sensibilities that were inherent in their own ways of being in the world. I believe my class only gave them one of many possible avenues for translating that sensibility into text.

Goal #5. Integrate various visual, auditory, and digital literacies

Messily, yes.While the timing of the course could have been more effective on my part, the students did integrate visual, auditory, and digital literacies through their work with the Adobe Creative Suite for print and web-based design in combination with making and editing podcasts and videos.

Goal #6. Develop critical thinking, questioning, and engagement with multimodal texts

Had I to do it all over again (which I recently did with upper level writing majors), I would hope to do a much better job of achieving this goal. I would like to have more time pushing students to ask even more critical questions and come up with even more critical answers to those questions in their articles, videos, podcasts, and web pages. Some were very successful here, but others could have gone deeper and I could have helped them get there. Next time.

Goal #7. Become comfortable working alone, in small groups, and in large groups productively

Check! I’m not sure how much the students or I contributed to achieving this goal, but we were successful in this area. The reason might be explained by the nature of the Upward Bound program and the students.

Goal #8. Experience and be proud of the materialization of something students imagine, create, and ultimately can hold in their hands and view on the screen.

Our achievement of this goal was very powerful. To hold your first six-page paper hot off the printer is an incredible feeling. And to see your first magazine article printed and distributed, and to look at your work on the Internet? Powerful stuff.

But what did the students think? On their webpages, I asked students to reflect on the process of making the magazine and website. Here are a few of those responses:

Mike: Journalism is a very software intense class. It is pretty enjoyable for me, because I like to learn about new software, and how to use it. In turn, I am getting closer to my ultimate goal of becoming a Network Administrator/Information Technology Specialist. Learning how to use new software is always fun and interesting. This has been a great six weeks in which I learned how to edit video, audio, and I have also further expanded my knowledge on the Abode product line.

Miguel: This year was my first year in journalism and to make a real magazine with my actual story in it was really interesting. It was an exciting experience to go through. I really learned a lot from this project, like making the MAC computer my next best friend because I had to learn how to use programs that I haven’t ever heard about in order to make this magazine look good. But other than that I really did enjoy making this project and I left this class learning how to use programs that might help me later on in my life.

Lucas: The article that I wrote about was cars and the fuel economy of cars. I spent a good amount of time researching this topic and I just enjoyed it because it’s about something that I love. Another experience that I have encountered is the fact that we had our articles published and with that we designed a magazine. The title of our magazine is called “The Word” all through out the six weeks that I have completed; I have enjoyed every minute and have not taken them for granted.

Jenni: I’ve been taking a class that I never thought I would be taking, Journalism. After attending this class, I have learned more about writing styles, as well as using different programs such as Photoshop© and InDesign©. It has been interesting experimenting with magazine pages, recording equipment, and writing in general. It was a great experience.

From these reflections, we can see that each of the students recognizes the difficulties of both writing and learning the new technologies, and yet they recognize the value of these skills for their futures. While I understand the likely influence of my role as part of their audience on their reflections, I know from other formal and informal conversations that the general sense here is true. The students hated working on Macs. I set a rule for one particular student that he was limited to complaining about the Macs twice per class session. But by the end of the six weeks, they had learned to maneuver the very different interfaces of the Mac operating system as well as the Adobe Creative Suite (and definitely Photobooth, though I never taught that one).

More important to me as a striving critical educator was the pride revealed by the collaboratively written letter from the editors. The letter, in which students announce themselves as writers, reflects at least an awareness (but I think an advanced one) of the work ethic and social complexity of writing. The magazine is rife with grammatical errors. As I mentioned above, I really wanted the students to be the editors in this case. But they made it and they put in an amazing amount of loving effort to get there. And so did I. And we survived.

Some of my fears of teaching digital writing were eased: the students mostly did not know more than I did, and those who did became very valuable resources for helping other students when I couldn’t. The funding of the program allowed the purchase of eleven new MacBooks with the Adobe Creative Suite installed, as well as the printing of 1500 copies of The Word. The resources of the Internet and the help center interface in the programs themselves helped me solve technical problems that came up, and a program director assissted with the web publishing part, which I had known nothing about at the time. The teaching was difficult. I found it hard to balance my teaching of rhetoric, writing, the software, and the fundamentals of visual composition. But I lived and learned and have continued to more effectively face many of these challenges more effectively since Upward Bound 2007, when I began my digital writing teaching.

I realize that the experience I've described here was ideal in many respects, and that there are material constraints that would prohibit this kind of project from taking place in most classrooms (basic writing or otherwise). In response to such realities, the next section on an assignment sequence involving PostSecret, Prezi, and Picnik addresses more fears and offers more hope for the average teaching scenario. Click here, or use the navigation menu at the top of the page to continue.