MotivesAndUnmotives

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	Motives And Un-motives In Resistance And Cooperation An essential part of what has captured educational reformers’ attention about video is the potential for it to capture students’ interests and to increase school’s relevance, but the studied programs were not equally or consistently effective in exploiting this potential. In fact, many of my observations revealed the opposite, that the programs were capable of lowering the interest students had in video. At times, it was intentional: The teacher at Suburban High explained that he spent the first month in particular trying to convince students to take the course seriously rather than as a way to have fun making videos. Sometimes the de-motivation was the result of relying on a standard practice. Boarding High’s use of the iMovie tutorial in the first course was such an instance. The courses at Urban High in particular contained so little production-related activity and traditional obstacles to beginning production that the creativity and enthusiasm shown in some of the projects seem remarkable. Students expressed interest and enjoyment in video production at all schools, but obstacles arose—such as the need to maintain working equipment, having too little time, and establishing an acceptable curriculum—that interfered with students’ and teachers’ interests. Though the teachers were generally the agents of these obstacles, their origin was in the larger system (see Fine, 1991, for a discussion specific to systemic obstacles to education). A clear connection between the constraints and promotions encountered and the level of enthusiasm expressed can be drawn from these observations, but the connection is not a direct one. Some projects, as evidenced by the quality and content of edited videos and student participation, inspired an enthusiasm that corresponded with the project’s tendency to exceed the assignment’s constraints. Students employed tactics to pursue more personal interests and consequently increase their motivation for these projects, but it seemed that it was the discovery that a project could take on personal relevance and be an outlet for creativity despite the limited assignment that inspired some students. This corresponded with more enthusiasm than a simple reduction in project constraints. Projects with these qualities were evident at each school, but Media 3 at Urban High had some of the clearest examples. The teacher’s later assignments to do commercials and public service announcements became interesting to students when they introduced satire or unrelated creative expression into them. The teacher expressed mixed messages about the acceptability of the satires, encouraging two groups of male students to develop their ideas further while dismissing them as silly. Since most of these dismals were expressed to me (although in the presence of students), he may have found value in them that he believed was not valued by authorities. It is particularly the teacher’s relations with his students that highlighted the difference between the projects enthusiastically produced and those completed as quickly and easily as possible. The Media 3 teacher routinely interacted with one portion of the students, who formed two or three groups throughout the semester. He would joke with them as well as talking to them about their projects. In whole class discussions, it was only these students who regularly participated, though it was generally with significant humor and diversions. All of the commercials (3) and the one PSA observed by these students were satires and contained other forms of humor: One commercial was for auto insurance that insured anyone, including drunks and “wetbacks,” another was for a bracelet that turned people into superheroes, and the last was for a drink that made people smarter. Students during the production of the first two projects in particular had fun and created surprisingly high quality projects. The PSA followed up on the “Prof. It” insurance advertisement to do a piece for the “Drunk E. Foundation,” asking for donations. Both included a technique of editing shots together so that the head and torso of one person appeared to be on the legs of another student. The message and reason for the latter being a PSA was somewhat garbled, but the events it included were clear. All of these projects were technically well done and interesting to watch, adding to a certain carnivalesque climate (Bakhtin, 1968) in the classroom. By contrast, the group of students that the teacher had introduced to me as the ones whom he could “count on” to do something, were rarely spoken to. This “good” group did all the projects but with little devotion or signs of creativity. One day, while recording their commercial just outside the classroom, the students tried different shots and to overcome lighting and sound problems, but the effort was minimal and everyone expressed a desire to finish quickly. They were struggling with how to deal with the enormous height difference between the actors when the teacher arrived. He offered inadequate advice (having them move the camera but not the actors from the shade into the sunlight), gave them a newly acquired microphone to try, and left without further interaction. He also did not return. The students did not compare the quality of sound using the new microphone with that produced with the built-in microphone, nor did they look at the effect of moving the camera. On a later project, similar efforts to finish as quickly as possible were observed. I also was unable to copy any of their work because the projects were lost, and upon my return the following semester, I learned that the girl in the group had virtually stopped coming to class. She had also disappeared when I intended to interview her during the last class. The differences between these two sets of students and their work are primarily differences in the student-school relationship: The “good” students had a relatively positive relationship with school, at least in the fact that they did most of their work. They were “serious” students and took a serious approach to assignments, but they became increasingly inattentive to their work: They seemed to some degree de-motivated. The students to whom the teacher gave lots of attention expressed their “dis-identification” with school and its values regularly (Hodges, 1998). They joked, insulting the teacher and each other, and they played with the teacher’s efforts to have students pitch their ideas, but in their ability to find a way of making the assignments also a joke, they became motivated to complete the assignments and to complete them with style. The ambivalence of these students was always on the surface and expressed with humor. Even the teacher’s ambivalence had an outlet when he interacted with these students, but the dominant school culture that rejects most humor was never fully absent. When the teacher assigned a news item as the last project, expressing a belief that these were the assignment to stick with, most students did less interesting and less creative projects. The exception to the lack of creativity demonstrated in the news story assignment arose in Spike’s work (Project 14). After having his production halted in Media 2 and not producing any videos all semester, he was inspired with the last assignment to do a project about the varsity football team on which he played. He did not really do a news piece, however: He artistically assembled clips of football games, using some special effects and setting this to a song. The video was officially done by three students. The other two students had recorded the games and sat with Spike during some of the logging and editing but did not contribute to its composition. Spike rarely spoke with the teacher and was observed to sneak out of the classroom more than once. He sat apart from the class, sometimes with another student nearby but marking his non-participation in his placement outside the class area. Even when he logged videotape (an activity he later abandoned without comment from the teacher), he did it outside the area routinely used in class. This was consistent with his participation the previous semester, but he had been truly excited about that project, despite marking his resistance by not writing a script. His sudden re-involvement for the last project is understood as arising from the permissibility of a topic that genuinely had his interest. He marked his continued resistance, however, in doing no narration or titles, effectively ignoring the actual assignment. Spike demonstrated a marked dis-identification with school. His eagerness to speak with me about his first project, however, suggests the degree to which he was a missed opportunity. Under different conditions, this student would most likely have enthusiastically embraced video production and developed a deepening sense of how to communicate with video. Media 3 was not the only one with such examples, and satire/humor was not the only technique used to broaden the constraints of an assignment so that the projects could take on greater personal value. Table 6 shows the breakdown of techniques identified by assignment, and Table 7 shows the breakdown by school. As these tables demonstrate, students were found to tactically seek personal interests outside the classroom agendas by introducing satire or other forms of humor, by inserting a performance or favorite activity, and by developing a personal message or story beyond the actual specifications of the assigned genre. Performances and favorite activities included skateboarding, martial arts, music, and auto mechanics. Targeted interviews of students may have led to more projects being characterized as having favorite activities and to the exclusion of others that were included: Cooking, for instance, seemed like the easiest project for students in Urban High’s New Media 1 and therefore were not considered for inclusion, but the group of students who chose to do a cooking show at Suburban High may have selected this because of an interest resembling that which led to other favorites. Some of the students at Urban High may have had a strong interest as well. Because additional information was not available, none of these were counted. Whenever skateboarding was included, however—which occurred at each school—this was counted as the introduction of a performance/favorite activity because it is an activity that is never officially brought into school and clearly has elements of performance. The general criterion for whether to count an activity as a performance or favorite was decided by the degree to which such activities were normally part of school activities, but additional interviews or observations specific to this category would strengthen interpretations based on this quality. For instance, one group of Urban High students was clearly devoted to skateboarding because they frequently talked about it and “practiced” with a toy skateboard, whereas its value to other students was not evident. Personal messages and stories were identified as being beyond the defining parameters of an assigned genre. This category arose during analysis of the “message” contained in videos, which will be discussed in the next section. Many of the art videos from Boarding High were found to have such a message that was not really part of the assignment, some having elements of a story. Wicket and Jerome's project displayed a church, a psychedelic poster of “Jesus” with multiple images, and an antenna, which all represented some form of authority, another had the hint of a plot as a student wearing wings seemed to become a crow and was followed by an image of a bird’s skeleton, and a third, entitled “aim,” showed a meaningful sequence of shots: the word “A.I.M.” (American Indian Movement), an American flag, red paint that had been dripped down a pillar and on a white rose, the flag, and “A.I.M” again. The problem of interpreting these images and art videos in general is more fully discussed farther on, but these interpretations have been applied to these categories. Each of these qualities are viewed as tactics (de Certeau, 1984) that individuals used to introduce change into established genres, allowing them to exceed the assignments’ constraints, though the “new” genres are not necessarily new. Commercials, for instance, have frequently been satirized for the sake of comedy, and so it is no coincidence that commercials were the most common genre to be satirized or otherwise contain humor. Six of the eight commercials with humor were satires of specific advertisements or sub-genres. Technically, these satires did not fulfill the assignment, particularly if the intent was to practice using video as a tool for persuasion, but teachers did not object to them. The lack of objection from teachers—particularly with the varied assignments given—is evidence that teachers did not have specific criteria for student development in mind when deciding on assignments, though it may also represent a flexibility on the part of teachers and in what is considered persuasive. Uses of humor for other assignments tended not to be satirical, thus the basic assignment was not directly distorted. Most of these three qualities were introduced without affecting the appropriateness of the project for a strict interpretation of the assignment. Instead, they tactically made the subject more interesting while remaining true to the teacher’s expectations. It should be noted that the projects described in Table 7 as “Suburban High Other Projects,” most of which were products of advanced students, generally contained none of the three qualities for extending an assignment’s constraints. This is viewed as representative of the degree to which students had adopted the program’s ideologies as their own. The advanced students were serious about video and had no need to introduce other activities or humor to increase their interest. Because the news program was included as one project—rather than the 18 observed—it should be noted that one airing of the show in particular introduced humor: It was nearly the end of the school year, and there was an atmosphere of silliness that spilled over into the show. A female anchor dressed as a man while a male reporter dressed as a woman. Despite this, however, the show reported the “news” as seriously as it ever had done. Many of the independent projects by advanced students were not observed but are believed to have been similarly free of these qualities because many were submitted to contests, thus the possibility of winning the contest became yet another motivator. The absence of these qualities from projects, therefore, does not necessarily reflect a lack of personalization of projects. There were, however, other examples of mis- or re-interpretations of assignments that were not recognized by teachers or students. As already mentioned, some commercials were actually public service announcements, and at least one public service announcement was satirized. After a semester of satires and comedies by most of the students in Urban High’s Media 3, however, the last assignment—to create news stories—was approached seriously by all the students. Spike’s re-interpretation was without humor. Also at Urban High, one group of students—rather than doing something that was clearly a “how to” project—chose to do a “how to have safe sex” project, which seems to fall into another genre of educational video, particularly because of the length. The students clearly viewed it as educational, indicating during their interview that they wanted to educate the other students, who were mostly younger than they were. Most of what they recorded, however, was not truly educational but a series of opinions about safe sex practices without corrections. The interviews and skits did not contribute to the informational value of the project, leaving only the interview of the school nurse to demonstrate condom usage. During their interview, the students noted that they did not get from the interviews what they intended, but roughly 30 interviews (depending on where the boundaries between interviews is placed) were conducted, thus they must have found sufficient value in them to keep going. At Suburban High, by contrast, students for the most part requested special permission to work outside the constraints the teacher had imposed and were generally granted it. One project stood out as being of a specified genre but resulting from a process that avoided the detailed planning that was required: The project by Luke, Valic, and Catherine, a documentary of the school news program (#5), managed to have an impromptu approach to recording that was accepted by the instructor. The teacher required documentation of specific planning for projects, but this group found a way to avoid such specificity. Rather than plan shots, writing scripts, and controlling the sequence of events to be recorded, this group of students chose to record events without asserting a structure on them for the most part. This project highlights a difference in process that is discussed in the next section as well as representing another tactic that avoided assigned constraints. Other tactics from the planning phase included Spike’s lack of a script, Bob’s filling out a “log sheet” after the project was completed, and the silence in answer to requests for ideas at Boarding High. All of these tactics, whether implemented during the planning, recording, or editing phases, are examples of students taking directions in their activity that were not prompted by the teachers’ assignments or course practices. Students transformed the assignments, and in so doing seemed to increase their interest. Sometimes, resistance was clearly visible but tolerated, and other times, permission was sought and granted, but in all these cases, something from outside the course was brought to the projects. Even in the instances of cooperation—when students enthusiastically produced the projects as prescribed—students sometimes showed signs of personalizing or internalizing the values expressed by the constraints of assignments. That some students found ways of expressing their ambivalence toward school values while enthusiastically producing projects suggests that humor has a use often disregarded by teachers. The potential of video production to increase student interest seems clear, but the risks of losing students who are already motivated should not be forgotten.
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Motives And Un-motives In Resistance And Cooperation