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Development In Suburban High’s “The Good, The Bad, And The Techies”The development of Suburban High students as visible in the focal project has been discussed throughout the chapter. This group’s participation more than the quality of their projects demonstrates their development. But in the final project created officially by Luke, Valic, and Catherine, Luke's development in videography becomes visible, allowing some elaboration. His development is thoroughly tied up with his identification as a “screenwriter” and his role as a home-schooled student experimenting with public schools. As such, his affiliations with school and its students remained loose. The final project was not typical of the school, first, because the roles students officially held usually assured a more equal distribution of participation and ownership. Several students worked alone on their projects, but in these cases they officially worked alone. This project was also unusual because it was the product of an explorative approach to recording, which was clearly discouraged. Lastly, the project was flawed at every level, making it quite unlike the other projects in the class, particularly since the failed hard drive was in no way to blame for the flaws. These unusual characteristics serve to highlight issues around conflicting ideologies that in turn reveal signs of development. The first conflict arose in the allotment of resources. The project was not fully finished because the students did not have enough time with the computers. The students had to forfeit half the editing time they had reserved explicitly because the teacher did not believe any student should need that much time, though having only two working computers forced some limits. The project in fact ended up being over seven minutes long and was graded down for exceeding the five minute limit. Many deficiencies of the edited project can be attributed to the time problem, but the project was found to show noticeable deficiencies beyond the editing. These deficiencies do not necessarily convey a lack of development, however. The lack of another project in which Luke was a central participant prevents a search for changes that would clarify the matter. The first project Luke worked on was stronger across characteristics, as was the project Valic and Catherine first worked on, but it is the changes in Luke’s participation that mark his development, a development that ran counter to course ideologies such that the conflicts in part produce the deficiencies. An exploratory approach to recording, while ideal for the purposes of the next chapter, was neither supported by the program nor easily accomplished within its constraints. The level of exploration Luke attempted, in particular, required more time. Luke had only vague ideas of what he wanted from the footage he shot. He could have logged in detail the two hours of videotape he ended up with—that was the assignment—and that might have made selecting clips easier, but that too would have required far more time than they had. The lack of time was an enormous obstacle for this project. A more ideological obstacle ran throughout the course and failed to prepare Luke for what he was attempting to do. The technological focus of the course emphasized recording under very controlled conditions: using studio lights, multiple microphones, and audio mixers. These tools were not compatible with what Luke attempted to do. On the other hand, he failed to use the information that was given him or to practice some basic techniques he had previously worked on: He did not white balance the camera. He shot with light coming from the back. He stood too far away from people for the built-in microphone to adequately record the sound and made no effort to use other microphones. Perhaps it was a problem of working within such a different context, or perhaps it was simply the difficulty of incorporating so many practices into one's activity when they are taught and practiced apart from meaningful production activity. The course had clearly not worked toward preparing students to act as a solitary camera operator, shooting in a chaotic environment. The project, nevertheless, contains indications of development because Luke had a low starting point. Luke never displayed technical proficiency within the context of a project. He never worked on a documentary before; conceiving of such a project was even outside his experience in writing screenplays. He tried something different, and like the group at Urban High, trying something new to the producers and new to the program led to more deficiencies than might otherwise have occurred. Luke had no models of how a documentary might be done within a school. And his decision to work almost entirely on his own added to the obstacles. There are so many attributes to attend to in videography that an inexperienced videographer can be expected to lose sight of some while focusing on others. Thus the video indicates development in communication because of the agency Luke asserted in try to do something that was his: his camera work, his style, his class, and with a genre no other student was observed to try. Moreover, there were signs of self-expression and aesthetics that ran contrary to the dominant ideology of the program. Asserting a message and finding coherence, which are so central to communication, became lost in the experiment of capturing the “reality” of the student news program and diverted by the non-communicative purposes Luke sought. It is these non-communicative purposes that become central to the next chapter. The analysis of these three cases supports other observations, suggesting that video projects are so heavily influenced by their contexts and the ideologies of their programs that a student's “abilities” are secondary. Therefore agency, self-expression, and efforts to find a style—while important in video communication—can become obstacles to other aspects of development in videography if the dominant program ideology conflicts with the orientation students bring to the class. |
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