Literamovie – creativity in multilingual
and multimedia e-editions of classic texts
John
Tzoumerkas, tzoumerka@sch.gr
Philologist, MSc, MPA, 2nd High School, Tripoli, Peloponnese
Vassiliki Petropoulou, vpetropou@sch.gr
Philologist, English Language
Teacher, MEdu, MPA, Experimental Gymnasium, Tripoli
Abstract
This article aims to enrich the
conversation about the colonization of students’ horizontal discourse by the
vertical discourse in school, according the Bernstein’s distinction, researching
the creative work of students in the context of a project, as a significant
factor to this colonization. LiteraMovie Cartoon story©
is a hybrid creation combining literature, movie and visualization based on
cartoons. The reformation of the classic texts in a post-typography educational
environment should be considered as a recreation of the text, based on new, as
well as on old literacies. So, during two successive projects in the last two
years, students of different grades were led to edit classic texts, creating a
multilingual and multimedia e-edition with a cross-cultural perception.
Finally, it is proposed that this creativity in producing e-learning objects
could be the meeting point of formal and non-formal education, of the claim for knowledge acquired after a planned
educational procedure and for learning in-action.
Keywords
Literamovie, hybrid multilingual
e-edition, horizontal and vertical discourse, classic texts, creative learning
Introduction
Language teaching in traditional
educational systems was mainly book-centred, based on the age-long classic
tradition and the large scale typography, using a teacher-centred method as
well. Nowadays, a great variety of textual genres are used in language teaching
and student-centred methods are adopted, claiming the authentic creation of
learning objects. Classic texts are present in contemporary education, although
they are supposed to be left back as teaching material of the typography age.
In other words, the essential issue of the tension between local and global in
contemporary education seems to arouse (Χριστίδης, 2009), as locality is
examined under the light of the use of ICTs in education, the new literacies
and the globalization.
Furthermore, the review of teaching
old-literacy-texts in the post-typography educational environment of new
literacies (Reinking et al., 1998) should be neither self-limited to a
discussion about the writer’s skills or the on-going needs of the reader, nor
should new literacies be considered as an external goal that the student has to
achieve. For, according to Leu, there is a classified scale of out-of-context
skills and knowledge of new, as well as of old literacies (word recognition,
knowledge recoding, dictionary skills, understanding, inductive logic, writing
procedure, orthography, response to literacy), as a concordance of neutral
skills, producing new skills’ gateway (Leu et al., 2004). On the contrary, for
the New Literacy Studies researchers (Gee, 1990; Street, 1995), reading and
writing are considered as formative factors of a conductive social activity
through in-context practices, connecting people, language resources, means and
strategies and aiming to produce meaning in context. This concept supports the
study of the above concordance as a nationally-oriented social practice.
As research focuses on learning methods and
practices, it seems to underestimate creativity as a crucial factor in language
teaching. In modern post-typography environment, students have the opportunity
to deconstruct, reform and recreate texts in a multimodal e-edition using ICTs
and to communicate with other communities in order to co-create e-learning
objects. This activity may be considered not only as learning by practicing,
but also as learning by creating with the claim of a final reading of the text
by an educational community and of producing a piece of art and literature to be published.
Textual genres and learning objects
Teaching texts of a specific genre leads to
the problem of the strict correlation between the text’s structure and the
defined opinion (or a sum of opinions) that it proposes about life. Teaching
literature sets a different
series of issues than teaching sciences, and it sets them differently. As
Martha Nussbaum put it, we must take into consideration the genre of the text,
as well as to view texts as an extension (or redefinition or refutation) of a
genre: novels, for example, in contrast to the complex, as well as formalistic
examples by moral philosophers, make the reader participant in and friend of,
using punctiliousness, emotional fascination, exciting stories, variety and the
uncertainty of good myth-making (Nussbaum, 1990). Additionally, the reformation
of a classic text as an e-learning object by an educational community involves
students to an alternative learning method, rendering them, apart from
learners, co-creators of the learning material. But, should teaching classic
literature using ICTs and editing e-learning objects based on it be considered
a relative other of the same family or an opposite other? For the more we look into
the procedure of the transformation of a classic text in a new communication
environment, the more we focus on its deterministic progress to a new genre,
obfuscating possible asymmetries between them. Of course, this discussion
focuses on the educational use of classic texts, not only on their philological
research in general.
The main claim in this correlation is to
highlight possible asymmetries between the two, because a presupposition for
the activity theory is that the nature of an activity is partly constructed by
the tools used in it (Cope & Kalantzis 2004; Engestrom et al. 1999). Two long
term projects in teaching language for first-grade-high-school students were
planned on this claim: the former, a comparative analysis of the ancient Greek
historian Xenophon (Hellenica, 2.1.16-32, The battle in Aigospotamoi) with the
ancient Chinese general Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, and the latter, The civil war
in ancient Corfu by Thucydides: holocaust or Nash’s balance (Τζουμέρκας & Πετροπούλου, 2011 [English version in http://en.tzoumerkas.gr/?page_id=26 ] ; Τζουμέρκας, 2011). Both of
them aimed at a Literamovie Cartoon Story production, based on the classic
texts with a cross-cultural point of view, as a multilingual and multimedia
e-edition (in a tetra lingual e-edition in Ancient and
Modern Greek language, English and Latin). A Literamovie e-edition claims not only to represent a
text using authentic multimedia, but also to synchronize the multilingual
edition of the text in order to facilitate language teaching. This way, when
studying a text of the common heritage in a multilingual edition, authenticity,
interaction and cultural equity are more feasible. Hybrid e-editions like these
set again the issue of the meaning of multimedia in a multilingual environment as an internal factor in the phase of
creation, not as an external criterion when assessing the results of the
implementation or the suitability of the means used in it.
Hybrid textual genres and Literamovie
Cartoon Stories
Additionally, the role of artistic
performance in reforming a typewritten text in its meta-typewritten e-edition,
not only as pictures on the margins of the text, but as hybrid e-edition should
be evaluated. According to Appadurai, the multi-dimensional people flows in the
age of the globalization provoke linguistic and cultural hybridation, so
that hybrid textual genres have risen in contemporary communication field:
infotainment, docudrama, dramedy, edutainment etc (Appadurai, 1990).
Literamovie Cartoon Stories constitute such a hybrid, constructed using
literature and cartoon stories inspired by and transformed in a dramatic
performance of the text. According to the principles of the so-called Learning by Design the
educational community of action must create e-editions, based on the results of
the research in the context of a project, with the students in the role of
creators and the teacher in the role of the editor. Doing so, students become
producers of knowledge in an authentic learning environment, not just users of
it.
Both the above projects were planned on
three claims: Exploration activities with multilingual analysis,
synchronization and representation of the text, researching the poetic function of language, as it is expressed by the
intonation and the word order in a free-word-order language, like Greek
language (see, http://en.tzoumerkas.gr/?page_id=164); Comprehension activities, claiming factual analysis of the
text, structured in assembling knowledge resources, and especially the
construction of a Hotlist with an interest for the knowledge resources of
the specific case, as for the time, the field and the facts of the battle, the
nautical technology in use (triremes, food supplies etc); and finally, the
construction of a Scrapbook and a Multimedia Collection including all the information found and aiming at the critical understanding of the
text, as well as a cross
literary and cross cultural approach. But, all these are just materials for the
publication of the final version of the text by the students. The third and
most important claim was the Creative activities requested:
§ Story
inside story – students inspired from the comparative analysis of the texts, wrote
an authentic scenario, based on a fictional conversation of the historical
persons in future time
§ War
diaries written by students, based on what if scenarios, as students played ancient Athenian and Spartan sailors on
their way to the battle
§ Authentic music and songs composed by students, inspired by the historical
facts
§ Radio Athenians, digital radio show in a
twelve-hour-show, based on fictional stories of the sailors, narrated by
students
§ Authentic cartoons by students and cartoon stories
inspired by the text, and photo stories edited as cartoon stories
§ Authentic choreography inspired by the text and performed by
students
§ Dramatic representation of ancient Greek pottery painting
§ Production
and publication of a tetra lingual and
multimedia e-edition , in ancient and modern Greek language,
English, Latin, as an e-learning object
As a
Literamovie Cartoon Story includes story timing, designing and creation of
authentic pictures and drawings, decoupage and acting, point of view and
narration, it is an authentic piece of art. Somebody, though, could raise a
plausible objection: is the principle of the uniqueness of a piece of art
required in the case of an educational e-edition, as a procedure and as a final
product, since it is to be reformed from time to time, and from this point of
view it constitutes a continually coming-into-being piece of art? A dramatic
historical narration isn’t just a narration of unique facts, but also their
hermeneutical conception. But, this conception isn’t yet an artistic creation.
If it is to be poetically reformed, it should be based not only on its
uniqueness, as historical narration, but moreover on its claim for ‘general
truth’, as Aristotle put it (1451b:29-33). This is the meeting point of
creating and learning.
In the
above projects, the final reading of the text and its e-edition has the
benefits analyzed by Kalantzis & Cope
(2009:56-58). Moreover, this analysis could launch a new tradition in editing
classic texts, based on the work of educational communities. Going back to the
ancient Greek philosophical controversy about the value of oral and written
speech, between Plato and Aristotle, it is the latter that, although Plato was
deriding him as reader, collecting, scrutinizing and annotating books of
his age launched the book-centered tradition, not Gutenberg. Even though the
arguments in the modern controversy about the value of new and old literacies
reproduce more or less this old discussion, it is the educational communities
that will launch a post-typography classic tradition creating multimodal
e-editions. Without this activity, the new discussion hasn’t got much sense.
Post-typography reformation of a text also
refers to its audiovisual and multimodal reconstruction. The necessary skills
in the audiovisual and media literacy, as well as in the grammar of the
visualization (Kress & Leeuwen, 1996), that students have to improve in
order to produce authentic visual materials, are the one issue of this
reformation. The
other issue is that, as writing skills give an opportunity for creative
writing, but they do not demand it, in the same way, the skills in audiovisual and media literacy are one presupposition for
planning and materializing authentic e-learning objects, but not the only one.
The authenticity in classroom (Stevens, 1992:15) is connected with the
opportunities offered to students in order to express authentic thoughts and
speech, to co-create an authentically reformed digital edition of teaching and
learning sources.
Conclusions
The above projects could be a proposal
aiming to cure the disability of school to exploit new literacies in classroom,
according to the hypothesis of the disproportion between home and school (Marsh, 2006). According to Bernstein’s distinction between vertical and
horizontal discourse, they are activities of the former, having a direction
towards the future, to the knowledge that is to be acquired at the end of a
planned educational procedure. Therefore the discussion about the colonization
of children’s horizontal discourse by the vertical discourse (Fairclough 2005;
Κουτσογιάννης, 2009) could be enriched with this question: which is the role of
students’ creative work in the context of a project, as a significant factor to
the colonization of their horizontal discourse? For colonization, as well as
pedagogy of immersion partly underestimate a significant parameter in
horizontal discourse, the unasked initiative and inclination of students to be
creative. The compliance to a discourse in context, according to globalization
from below (Fairclough, 2006) may include creativity in a local context as well, because real world is something more than a field of adaptation.
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