With this week's reading, I struggled with thinking about digital story telling, and not just using the ideas as interesting ways to teach narrative in my English classes. I still struggle with using this information to relate to other content besides fiction.
I really liked the idea of "story storming." I thought that this is a great way to get students to feel comfortable writing ideas down, even if those ideas are not what they ultimately go with for their story. I feel like my students have been programmed to want the "right" answer rather than developing ideas based on their own assessment of the material. I also really liked the idea of giving students questions to respond to that help them to find their own stories in their lives. For example, when soliciting a transformation narritive, Ohler suggested asking "When is the last time you cried or got really excited?" This challenges students to them reflect on the change or event that caused them to feel those strong emotions. Usually, a story lies behind those emotions. I also thought the story containing research box was helpful. Students get overwhelmed with every little detail and forget to keep their stories focused on exactly what growth or change they are describing. The research box helps them to get those ideas out, but keep their focus on their story.
As I was reading, I wrote in the margins "This all seems to be about narrative and not about other content areas! I need more examples about other content areas!" A few pages later, Ohler discussed documentaries vs fiction. However, I still feel like so much emphasis is on the narrative that I'm having a hard time thinking of it in terms of non-fiction assignments.
Another thing I liked was the idea of havnig students reflect on the DST process after they complete their project. Deb wrote about this in her post from last week, and then it appeared in the text! I love the idea of having students justify the choices they made for their project and the way the project affected them. It forces them into metacognition that is often difficult to teach!
In chapter 8, I liked the dicussion of transformation in terms of Bloom's taxonomy. Again, I liked this a lot in terms of teaching my students to read/write narratives, but it's difficult for me to apply elsewhere. However, I really agree that "effective transformation creates teh potential for memorability" (p. 108), and I think that the eight levels of character transformation could be really helpful in helping students to develop depth in their stories.
Lastly, I liked the idea of giving students a certain transformation and asking them to create the story that shows that transformation. This way, students know what they are trying to show, and they can focus on the details of developing their story to show that character's change.
I understand your struggle well. Fiction is one of the few places I can see DST working out well. As a math/science teacher, there are a few things I can sort of see like making a mythbusters type video, but that isn’t really telling a story as much as just recording an experiment. There really is no “hero” with a flaw that they overcome through transformation when we are trying to drop an egg off a building without it breaking.
ReplyDeleteThat said, there are super genius math people who make cool math videos like https://www.youtube.com/user/Vihart . Her videos are super fun to watch and would be really awesome to get from a student, but her level of understanding is so far beyond an algebra 1A or geometry student, that it would be unreasonable to expect something like this.
So yeah, I am in the same boat as you. I can see how this relates to art, music, digital imaging, fiction, and even social science; however, content areas that aren’t story/art driven by nature will really struggle to bring that creativity. I honestly would say that there are maybe 2-3 out of my 120 students that could reasonably be guided into producing a creative story that demonstrated a solid enough understanding of math for me to be really happy with the use of class time. However, turn the assignment into a trailer for The Outsiders or a creative storytelling assignment, and I think you would see most students be successful.
I too am struggling to connect what Ohler talks about to my content area especially since we try so hard to avoid the story approach and really have students learn to present an argument. Even as I type these words however, a little voice is whispering "it is definitely possible to use the story ideas to present an argument in an interesting way you just need to figure out how to do it!" I really would like to play with this idea but each week I am just trying to get the video assignment done on time.
ReplyDeleteI watched the video that Jeremy posted and I thought maybe the girl is the hero. Maybe the filmaker is the hero. The hero doesn't understand a math concept and then transforms into understanding throughout the video. In math, maybe the assignment is to create this weeks lesson into a real world problem. ie if the lesson is algebra ( 5 + x = 8) students will create a story where they have 5 friends, but need 8 play a game blah blah blah. I don't know if this makes sense but I think there could be a hero in any lesson.
ReplyDeleteYou pulled a lot of good ideas from the chapters, but the question remains on how to fit into the broad curriculum. How about as an assessment; part of a culture of assessment, students reflect on how they are doing but the reflection is a story of their progress; metacognition through storytelling. Now something like this would have to evolve over time and become part of the classroom culture and many questions about its use would have to be answered..
ReplyDelete