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Evaluation Of A MethodologyStudent-made video projects create new affordances for research, serving two purposes: to investigate development within the context of high school video production and to advance a way to reveal microgenetic processes. The first of these purposes used video projects in the same way numerous other artifacts have been used. The videos were concrete evidence of what students did, perhaps of what they were capable of doing under the circumstances of production. The projects were placed within the context of their creation, based on observations and relevant other materials, to specify students’ activity and the ways in which the contexts constrained and promoted different aspects of production. The quality of projects was found to be so interwoven with the general conduct of the classes that the search for development could not meaningfully be undertaken without constant reference to the context. The analysis revealed that the elements studied as parts of a quality video vied for attention, and that the elements students focused on varied with project meanings. Thus the effort to reveal development in the diverse and few projects that were acquired was to some degree an effort to understand the process of video production as it varied between programs. The differences in student participation and the agency they asserted were the greatest areas of change and the strongest indications of development. A more in depth analysis of development in video communication would require more works by the same students, and future research needs to be brought into relation with the extensive research in literacy development. The more novel use of informant-made videos is to investigate social relations. Student-made video projects are found to yield information about student-school relations that tends to be consistent with observations but far more detailed. These details are essential to understanding the microgenesis of the student-school relationship, but video projects obtained for analysis yielded few opportunities for considering this level of development. The specific orientations of two of the programs frequently limited the value of videos for this analysis, but when students engaged in a production process involving exploration, the dynamics of social relations, their dependence on context, and some suggestions of microgenetic changes were visible. Integrating the different parts of analysis and finding meaningful ways of maintaining the detail while pursuing evidence of systematic changes must continue. A number of steps are recommended: First, the video programs to be included should promote numerous projects by their participants, and ideally the projects would all be recorded within the school and have the emphasis placed on the recording phase rather than the planning phase. Additionally, greater freedom in genre selection may yield projects in which students more fully develop their own agendas and the ways of using video cameras to alter their position in the school, thus demonstrating microgenetic processes more fully. And an essential first step in furthering the analysis would be to include more people, including if possible the videographers, in all stages of research so that more interpretations can be explored and a consensus sought. A great deal more analysis can be undertaken of the video projects obtained for this study, but other eyes and ears will reveal meaningful moments that would otherwise be missed and will further test the validity of the approaches thus far taken. Moreover, the richness of the data prevented the pursuit of every significant moment. Additional videos and a return to these will further the task of establishing patterns and remarkable moments, which in turn will facilitate movement from disconnected moments toward a framework for threading them together into more meaningful stories of contextualized development. The possibility of using student-made videos to access a much wider range and number of schools exists because video production has become so widespread, but such efforts would be advised to proceed cautiously. To investigate development, some background information about assignments, course ideology, and the students would be essential. For further exploration of social relations, the information yielded about particular schools and students would be very limited without a thorough understanding of the contexts of production. In this study, the analysis of many parts of video work would have been served by being able to go back to the students who produced it or to the places in which they were recorded to check details that were not available (such as specific locations and the arrangement of classrooms in relation to one another). If anything, the best way to further this methodology would include more involvement with the schools and students of the study—to know the buildings and grounds and to ask students in greater detail about their intentions and reflections. Ideally future research could truly collaborate with teachers to shape the program to serve both research and student needs. On the other hand, a survey of video work from many schools would facilitate the discovery of common patterns and changes over time. Though only a beginning at attaining a new, more detailed yet dynamic way of studying social phenomena, the analysis that has been completed thus far demonstrates the semiotic richness of informant-made videos, and because the “data” can be presented in its raw form to wide audiences, there is the potential for engaging many people in theory building. |
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