I recently had to create a Multi-Genre Autobiography for my Multi-Modal Literacies class. I was expecting the project to be tedious, but I ended up spending a lot of time on it because the topic was very personal.
It was interesting to explore my childhood memories and figure out how the different media I experienced back then affect how I see the world now. After watching my classmates autobiographies, I realize that many of us came from the same media background. It was funny to hear other people yell out when they remembered some long forgotten television show they religiously watched in their youth or some book that they remember being forced to read when they were in the third grade.
One consistent thing I noticed about the presentations was the lack of school influence. Most of my classmates remembered watching television or movies that they had not been exposed to at school. Also, many of the books they mentioned were books that they had read for fun. They were not often books that had been required to read for a class.
While I do not think that students should be watching television and movies in school, I do think that schools should have a greater impact on their students when it comes to media exposure. Students should remember the books they read in high school because they actually enjoyed them. Instead, students forget the books they read because the teacher presents them in a boring way.
To solve this problem, teachers can incorporate technology into their classrooms to expose their students to new media. Then, maybe students will remember the media they experience in the classroom, just like I remembered the television shows I watched in the third grade. On the other hand, teachers can continue to present literature in a boring way, watch out-dated videos and have students play Oregon Trail on a DOS system. Maybe the students will pay attention. Maybe not.
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You're completely right. I didn't even realize that the books presented from our childhoods were usually read for fun and not in school. I have to wonder what that says about our elementary schooling. You would think that we would remember a lot of books from our elementary years because those are primarily the ones in which we learn to read. Even as I'm responding to your blog I'm wracking my brain trying to think of books I read in early school. The only thing I can really think of was my 2nd grade teacher always read Bill Pete books to us, but I'll be darned if I can even remeber one of them.
ReplyDeleteHi Christine! I absolutely enjoyed your presentation! I love how you try to relate literature to history in whatever sense you can. I think literature should be applied to real world and the lives of our students.
ReplyDeleteI thought of you yesterday because I heard that cable companies are doing away with basic cable and now relying on digital. Have you heard about this??