Teaching Television: Reflections on a new curriculum

Teaching Television Blog

A reflective practitioner case study attempting to teach key aspects of media education through process drama

Am I Teaching Anything?

This entry was posted on 9/19/2006 12:00 AM and is filed under uncategorized.

Tuesday, September 19^th

I realized right away that doing “one word” story with them was too much too soon. I’m not even sure why I put story in my curriculum before everything else. It seems to me a more natural progression to move through setting, characters and relationships first—and then begin to brainstorm story ideas. So, we didn’t focus on the idea of story for very long. Instead, I skipped right to environment/setting work.

I first asked them how we could combine the two genres—novella and sports, and they were bursting with ideas. This surprised me, as I genuinely couldn’t think of many myself. It shows me the creativity these kids have—and also how important it is to ask questions instead of just leading activities. Although I hate sitting with the kids for too long talking—I want to get up and do drama, there seemed to be benefit in us really discussing what our show would look like. We didn’t decide until Friday’s class, when they voted to combine the shows by beginning with the novella, interrupting with a news broadcaster, and then showing part of the soccer game. Everyone agreed that this would be a way to please both the novella and the sports crowd. I said that it was a kind of trick I haven’t seen on TV before—interrupting programming with the goal of keeping and building a larger audience. It should be interesting to see where this goes as the week’s progress. In some ways, it seems like more work—thinking about two very different genres. I’m not too concerned about the newscaster, since it seems more of a transition role and not an entire ‘news cast.’

In the back of my mind, I am still thinking, “Am I teaching anything besides basic story structure/composition?” I think the key lies in my asking more questions and always bringing it back to the idea that we are creating a brand new show—and that we want to make it unique. This forces us to think about how the shows on television right now are similar and how we can make ours different.

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8/12/2007 2:33 AM Selena wrote:
Kristy-- I believe your fair city has a show that combines Sports and telenovellas. It is called "Posh and Becks move to LA"-- oh wait, never mind, I'm thinking of the news.

In all seriousness, I think it's great you were able to talk about how not just fictional shows, but also sports shows are constructed for an audience. How did your second graders respond to this discussion? How did it play out in the final project?

I'm also wondering, it seems like you have a significant Latino/Latina population in your classroom-- and if they are watching telenovellas/choosing that as the genre they want to write, I'm guessing a good number might be bilingual students who are including Spanish language channels as part of their their tv viewing. Or am I guessing incorrectly? I guess I know in Seattle, you'd only be able to watch a telenovella on the Spanish language channels, of which we've only got a couple. Are you making any discoveries about the particular student population you teach and their tv viewing habits and tastes? Were you able to talk about different channels and who their target audience is in your discussion of advertising at the end of your unit? And finally, out of curiousity, did your final telenovella that the kids acted out have any Spanish in it? Because the choice of what language to do the show in brings up a whole slew of other things to talk about with the students!
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8/15/2007 8:01 PM anon wrote:
OK...maybe i skipped around in reading the progression of this project too much but what is it exactly that you're trying to get the students to "learn"? And in answer to you question NO...you are not teaching anything. If you're doing this process in a real and authentic way you are as Freire would say..."facilitatiing the learning process" which really is the whole point in process drama is it not? So what becomes most important here is not if you're teaching anything or not but how you're facilitating the process and WHAT the students are getting out of it. So what are/have they gotten out of this. It seems to me that they are doing some amazing work for their age and i for one applaud your courage in taking on this kind of project with a group of students this age.

However...i'm still more interested in maybe what didn't work as well as what did work and how you delt with your struggles throught the process. I find that this is where the real jewels of knowlege are.
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