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Program Ideologies In Action

Assignments And Preparation


Student videos were produced most immediately in response to course assignments, which posed constraints in diverse ways. Assignments varied in terms of the required genres, project length, production time, number of participants, roles of participants, and specific techniques. Suburban and Urban Highs had some similar assignments—assignments that appear to be typical of video production courses—but the ways in which the production process was structured and the teacher’s expectations about the finished products remained diverse. Most of the constraints imposed by assignments were consistent with the dominant ideologies, but evidence of alternate ideologies was also present.

One characteristic that varied across courses was the affordances for and meaning of practice with cameras. Suburban High gave students time to practice but with specific constraints. As a vocational program, the course displayed its ideological focus on technology and technique with multiple assignments requiring demonstrations of particular camera uses. Students were encouraged and given sufficient time to practice, but the activities were narrowly defined. Boarding High’s affordances for practice, on the other hand, were relatively unconstrained. Only in the first course was there a specific practice assignment, but most students did whatever they chose. This lack of constraints enabled students to infuse practice with their own meanings and to incorporate practice into the “real” camera work. At Urban High, however, “practice” was specifically discouraged. All the camera work was expected to be project based, though the Media 2 teacher had reportedly worked on non-project based shots the previous semester. The Media 3 teacher specifically said that he did not want students “practicing” their projects with the camera, placing the emphasis on activity in front of the camera as he encouraged rehearsals before obtaining a camera.

Two types of practice are distinguished apart from real camera work. Teachers promoted practice when they established time and access to equipment for evaluation-free activity that was not expected to result in a product. Thus the absence of evaluation or expected product define official practice activities. Boarding High had a distinct shortage of time that precluded much official practice, but the nature of the course was essentially one of providing students with the opportunity for evaluation-free activity. Nevertheless, a product was expected. Suburban High by far provided the most official practice time—highly constrained as it was—and Urban High provided none, communicating multiple messages about why. The message that was consistent with the values of the reform project and most prevalent in Media 1 was that video activity should always be meaningful and thus purposeful: The projects themselves were practice. The two advanced courses contained other messages, however, about a distrust of students and a need to protect the equipment from theft and damage. Practice was viewed as students wasting both material resources (tapes and access to equipment) and time. The absence of official practice time is thus enhanced by a consideration of the other type of practice: off-task activities.

Off-task activity with video cameras can be viewed as useful in the sense that it provides additional practice and an exploration of a wider range of camera uses. It can also be viewed as “horseplay.” At Urban High, off-task activity was strongly discouraged, though not evenly across courses. Access to equipment in all three courses was dependent on having “pitched” a clearly defined project. The Media 1 teacher furthered this assertion of frivolity in one instance by trying to reason with a group of students that needing a couch was not an adequate reason to check out a camera for the weekend, but when off-task material appeared on tape, he was never observed to comment on it. In this course, camera work was never supervised. In the other two courses, however, students were not allowed to take cameras off campus and activity was far more supervised. They authentically had a problem with equipment being damaged, but particularly the Media 3 teacher adopted the strategy of preventing damage through additional controls over access rather than promoting greater responsibility among students—the strategy the Suburban teacher employed. Off-task activity—and specifically practice with the camera in Media 3—were not acceptable. The constraints on practice were thus prevalent at Urban High, particularly in the advanced classes.

These constraints were non-existent at Boarding High even when, in Course 3, interns participated in all activity. The set of unedited video available from Course 3 shows considerably less off-task uses of the camera, being always in the presence of an intern, but there was some. Interns, program directors, and the art teacher were never observed to constrain camera uses in real time or in unedited video. The art teacher’s constraint reached its height with her call to departing students, “No civil disobedience!” At Suburban High, there were similarly few constraints imposed directly by the teacher to limit off-task activity, but the time alloted for projects and lack of other affordances (i.e. activities to record) imposed a less direct constraint. 16 One student is known to have taken a camera home for no particular reason—with the teacher’s knowledge of its lack of purpose—and the videotape showed mostly “play,” indicating a certain experimentation with camera uses that resembled the unsupervised activity at Boarding High and in the pilot study (Beaty, 1998). The teacher thus showed some indications of valuing off-task activity. Future research could specifically consider the value of “practice” or “play” for student development.

In the current study, the affordances for practice were found to be consistent with the overall climate of the courses. Boarding High, wanting to introduce digital media as a creative medium, imposed the fewest constraints: The only real constraint was time, resulting in the inability of students from the first course to complete their projects and leading in the last course to interns contributing frequent suggestions and adding some finishing touches, such as credits. Creativity was promoted instead through examples of other high school and college students’ projects. At Suburban High, the main projects were required to include specific features, thus maintaining the technological emphasis and encouraging creativity and meaningfulness only as secondary concerns.

Urban High, as described in the previous chapter, displayed shifting ideologies, but in the constraints imposed on projects, the program remained faithful to the reform: The greatest requirements were in the planning stages, therefore stressing the meanings to be expressed in the projects. No technological requirements were made (with minor exceptions in Media 3). The greatest problem was that too many students never got to work on an actual project and even fewer with the camera due to requirements. The emphasis on traditional literacies—which were not these students’ strength—and insufficient support and interaction became obstacles to the motivating influence of working with cameras.

The assigned genres imposed less consistent constraints. The greatest difficulty posed by the Boarding High project was in the students’ lack of familiarity with video as art; it did not contradict the program’s agenda but became an obstacle to it, given the limited time. Most of the completed projects looked like artistic music videos, which are the only example of short “art” videos in the main stream media. In the third and most successful course, the interns provided concrete guidance in selecting material to record and themes for uniting them. Nevertheless, several of the students chose to drop out of the project.

By contrast, the genres at Suburban High were familiar to students, though the two projects reflected opposite extremes in genre constraint: A commercial was the only option for the first project while the second was a choice from nine genres. The first project was also constrained by a 58 second length requirement, while the second was permitted to be up to five minutes. In so doing, self-expression and creativity was promoted in the final project through a reduction in constraints, having been encouraged previously only through rare comments and the slogan, “Think outside the box.” A clarity of message was required of both projects but little discussion was given to how to create this clarity. Thus the shift from one assignment to the next and the expectation of clarity did not represent the dominant agenda but rather acted as a nod to other ideologies.

The assigned genres at Urban High reflected the experimentation of the teachers and the Media 3 teacher’s attempt to adopt what instructors from other schools had used. In Media 1, students were given a great deal of freedom in interpreting assignments, and since only one project was edited all semester, the emphasis came to be on the process of planning and recording. The attempt in advanced courses during one semester to have students do fictional videos was viewed by the teachers as disastrous, and they gave all appearances of being relieved when production was halted. One reason they expressed was that students all wanted to do stories with violence, drugs, unwanted pregnancies, or other subjects with which the teachers were embarrassed to be connected, and they had legitimate concerns about the potential reaction of parents and staff. The potential of self-expression became a threat to teachers’ standing in the school because the “selves” students wished to express were unacceptable. In essence, the teachers increasingly sought to constrain the extent to which the world of their students entered the classroom, the opposite of what Goodman (2003) has sought in video production. During the next semester, Media 3 included a variety of mainstream assignments, but the teacher expressed dissatisfaction with each, planning in the end to stick with news items because the others were too “silly.” When I spoke with him and then visited at the end of the next semester, however, it was evident that he had tried something different again—videos about historical events using only still photographs for the last assignment—and was still not satisfied. Though the Media 3 teacher made a connection with the Varsity Television website and had some student projects posted there, he again sounded relieved that a vocational instructor would be taking over.
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 16 For the couple weeks that the Suburban High drill team practiced during the class period, cameras frequently turned toward the girls, activity that the teacher jokingly supported. This activity stood in contrast to the usually empty campus.
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