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Program Affiliations And Official IdeologiesGoodman discussed three dominant strands of media education for youth: technology integration, media literacy, and community media arts (2003, p. 10). These serve to effectively distinguish the different intents behind video production programs, though many actual programs are not pure examples of any of these movements. Reformers’ interest in student motivation is also neglected in this scheme. Nevertheless, one program in this project can be tentatively put in each category, demonstrating their diversity. Suburban High had a vocational program with a clear focus on technology, and therefore is concerned with technology integration. Most of the technology, however, is particular to a vocation rather than being an introduction to computers: Editing on the computers was not introduced until the second semester, and most of the equipment is pre-digital technology. Officially, the program is a county one, and therefore one student (“Luke”) who returned to “home schooling” part way into the year was able to continue taking the class. The official names of the classes are “TV and Video Production” and “Advanced TV and Video Production.” The television program was central to the school in terms of location, its association with the performing arts department, and its function in school life. The classroom was “Room 1” and was in the middle of campus. (See Appendix C, Map 2.) The television production teacher also taught two unobserved courses and a theater “tech” course, running—with advanced students—all the technical equipment in the theater and during pep rallies and other assemblies. An end of the year awards ceremony for the performing arts included the television production students, and the annual video about awardees was created by a group of beginning students. The integration into the school was completed by the official requirement that all classrooms watch the five minute news program that was broadcast on an intranet four days a week. The people in front of the camera became well known. Thus the program was officially autonomous as a county program but was actively integrated into the performing arts program in particular and into school life more generally. Urban High officially fit into Goodman’s media literacy strand of programs, though the activities reflected an uncertainty about what this ideological stance meant. The school was one of several to begin a “New Media Academy” through a not-for-profit organization with goals of integrating video production into core classes and creating a smaller community. The “academy” at Urban High, however, never accomplished the desired integration: The classes, referred to as New Media 1, 2, and 3, were treated as electives by the administration, and the connections between classes and between students were not made, creating contradictions at an official level. The number of students put in classes was also prohibitive. One teacher directly asked students to leave if they did not want to be there. The two teachers who taught the advanced courses also taught English and achieved some degree of overlap, but it was English—through the reading of plays and assignment of grammar exercises during media classes—that came to dominate. The New Media 1 teacher also taught social studies and culinary arts, and though there was an effort to integrate culinary arts into New Media 1, there were no indications that this relation was reversed or included social studies. Thus the goal of creating an academy was not supported by the school and not fully carried out by the teachers. The disjunction within program ideals was also at a spatial level: When I began observing in January 2002, New Media 2 and 3 had just been assigned to a huge storage room that had once been the automechanics classroom, which they were to use while they awaited the building of a studio. This room was used for both English and New Media, occupying the room simultaneously. The teacher of New Media 1, meanwhile, used a classroom at the opposite end of the campus in the Science Building. The room had clearly been designed for culinary arts, having sinks, stoves, and refrigerators, but the teacher held all his classes there. New Media 1 was thus segregated from the more advanced classes, and the goal of creating a cohesive community was impossible to pursue. The following school year, one of the advanced teachers moved into another, more traditional classroom, choosing to have students read a script and watch how it had been made into a movie rather than doing any production. The teacher of New Media 1 limited his teaching to social studies and culinary arts. The teacher of New Media 3,as the only one involved in video production, spread out through the half of the room which had been cleared of stored items. When I spoke with him the second semester (spring 2003), however, he reported that the school was hiring a vocational instructor and that the studio, which he had believed would finally be built that year, had still not materialized. The New Media Academy would officially be dissolved in favor of a vocational program. The Boarding High program was clearly a community media arts program according to Goodman’s categories, being the product of two arts organizations, college art students, and a high school art teacher. The digital media group, whose purpose was to bring digital artists and community members together for the propagation of digital art, acquired grants from a not-for-profit funding agency to connect with local high schools. The funding agency was explicitly concerned with bringing art to the community. The digital media group was preparing to enter its second school when I made contact. Each course aimed to have groups of students produce complete videos in five sessions. Two such courses had been smoothly completed at another school the previous year, and the director of the program proudly showed me some of the pieces the students had completed, demonstrating program successes. Additional evidence of this success arose when this school purchased its own equipment. The Boarding High art teacher, who hosted the digital program, sought groups to visit and present a wider range of artistic experiences, telling me that the previous art teacher had taught only Native crafts such as beading. She believed it was important that students be introduced to a wide range of arts. The first course I observed had a representative from the funding organization, who had already done a short photography program there. There were also three college interns and the program director. The program and art class thus were a good match, but a degree of isolation from the rest of the school was apparent in the lack of connection between interns and the school and in the use of a classroom door on the outside of the building that prevented interns from even seeing any other interiors (except for the office where they signed in and out). |
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