SpaceAndVideoProduction

Space And Video Production

In every aspect, this dissertation is about the centrality of social relations to education. It uses the “social semiotics” (Hodge and Kress, 1988; Lemke, 1993, 1995) of activities and material environments to define student-school relations as a way to understand student development. The social relations of a school or a course are theorized to be established by the type of space afforded students—by the amount of freedom within what is constrained and promoted—and manifest in the choices participants make. Places within schools were shaped materially by tools, furniture, and architecture and metaphorically by orientations, assignments, educational philosophies, and classroom activities. Lefebvre’s (1974) three layers of “spatial” meaning—“the triad of the perceived, the conceived, and the lived” (p. 39)—establish the unity between the concrete and metaphorical because the places, which may not be a part of students’ or teachers’ conscious experience, nevertheless structure educational activities.

The differences in the available spaces of the three programs were dramatic and across multiple dimensions. The strongest similarity was that each program involved students working in groups to produce video projects. The many directions this took is an indication of how similar tools and similar activities are influenced by the spaces afforded them. It is in this sense that this research represents a challenge to the current focus on “accountability” that expects very similar results from schools across the United States and expects standardized tests to reveal what students have accomplished. An important area of future research is to effectively demonstrate the impact of places on the accomplishments of students while seeking to explain the processes governing the impact.

The analyses of material environments, development in communication, and their intersection in the analysis of student video work demonstrate that the activity from which videos emerge and in which students have an opportunity to develop are shaped directly and indirectly by a wide range of other activities. Many of these activities, particularly the more distant ones, are embodied in the environment, which then mediate more immediate activities. The connections between people, between activities, and between times are thus maintained. Raising awareness of the role contexts have in education may lead to policies that are more suited to improving education.

The point is that meaning matters, and the messages perceived by students in the contexts of their education may not be what anyone intends. Discovering what they are requires an examination of what students do; asking students is insufficient. The messages tend to be below the level of awareness, and moreover they are not consistent among students. The histories of individual experiences as well as that of programs and schools create dynamic situations that are impossible to wholly capture, but the nature of student-school relationships is visibly interwoven with student development. The accomplishments of students were sought in this study and many were found that demonstrate an ability by students to exceed their surroundings, yet this study must go further to establish a body of evidence connecting activity to places and to advance a theory that will elaborate on the connections.

The challenge to developmental psychologists and educational researchers more generally is to maintain the connections between student performance and the contexts from which these performances arise. The places with their diverse meanings need to brought to the foreground in research, and student development must be appreciated for the complex set of interrelated processes that it is. The distinction between learning and development is the key to the inadequacies of standardized tests. Moreover, the additional obstacles that tests pose may further damage student-school relationships. Research agendas that examine contexts and utilize analyses of concrete but contextualized data, such as that advanced in this dissertation, need to be established to enable a new level of dialog—one that will promote more effective student-school relations.

More specifically, the process of finding ways to communicate with video was found to be complicated by competing agendas, both in terms of the list of qualities students could focus on and in terms of the potential conflict within the ways promoted by programs and those sought by students. For some students, the greatest indication of development was in particular uses of agency, and for others, the obstacle of trying to maintain solidarity interfered with fully defining personal agendas. It is in these cases that a focus on the subtext of power and solidarity gave a deeper meaning to student activity. “To show the ‘knowledge and competence’ students deploy through resistance requires that we shift our focus . . . and, moreover, that we search for meaning within the discoordination (Diamondstone, 2002, p. 3).” In this effort, however, it is also important to look for the hidden struggle when there are no visible tensions and discoordinations—to try to recognize the obstacles that confront the students whose silence and cooperation are all that is visible—because these also can be indications of resistance or indications of a problematic lack of resistance.

The most unexpected issue to emerge in this research concerns the utility of video technology in changing student-school relations. Others (Goodman, 2003; Miller & Borowicz, 2003; Reilly, 1998) have considered the more “academic” values of video production, which are not unrelated, but a revolution in the way students relate in school and to school is possible in video production. It will not happen unless teachers and administrators are oriented toward allowing change in the social structure of schools. The number of high school video programs and the number of orientations that have been observed suggests that it is like many other “revolutionary” technologies that lose most of their impact in application: “School contexts are powerful mediators and frequently powerful resisters of learning innovations” (Honey & Collins, 2003, p. 91). It is from this perspective that Urban High’s abandonment of the New Media Academy for a more manageable vocational program is understood. Nevertheless,

A shift in the assignment of who is to ask questions or pose tasks . . . almost always must occur in a context where some kind of institutional order (e.g., formal schooling) exists and where there are strong interests for maintaining and reproducing this order. Especially when mental processes are first played out on the intermental plane, it can cause major challenges to such an order. [emphasis added] (Wertsch et al., 1993, p. 350)

The greatest challenge to the institution of school posed in student video production is that of giving students (at least for moments) the control over who speaks and the freedom to move.

The study of video production programs allows a deeper consideration of what kinds of spaces will best promote development. In this sense, my actions as an instructor and as a parent have been heavily influenced by becoming aware of the power involved in constraining activity and the difference that arises when promoting rather than demanding desired behaviors. The power of promotion to bring about more direct internalization slowly took on more ominous qualities as the consequences of not “resisting” became visible. The evidence suggests that students who find the space to resist without damaging their relationship to school will experience greater personal growth. The potential for concrete and metaphorical space—those zones without overt constraints or promotions—to further development compels more investigation.

The consequences of having teachers enter that space to reveal multiple options or share in problem solving, which more completely resembles Gutierrez et al.’s (1999) third spaces, were not demonstrated in this study because instructors were never observed to relate with students in this way. Its absence was most notable in actual production and in the obstacles students faced to completing their projects. The traditional structure of school, even with such an untraditional subject as video production, poses a formidable obstacle to more equable relations. The evidence speaks to current strategies for reforming education and affecting other broad changes, but it is particularly in establishing a way to elaborate on microgenetic processes and connecting them with macrogenetic processes that this study contributes to larger agendas.

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