Fluency and Acting

I just woke up, so this may not be the revelation it feels like now.

In my dream, I was at some kind of celebration for the newly relocated Tampa Zoo, with which somehow our research group was involved. K and S had just been introduced on stage and now the gathered crowd was watching a video on a large screen on stage. I was backstage watching it. Some of the people in it were actors - I recognized Dean Winters - but others clearly weren't. There was an older woman speaking, and she was really bad, like you sometimes see in community theater, not at all able to make her words sound like natural speech. As I was waking up, I thought about this woman and why she couldn't act. It's like she had no awareness of the difference between how she sounded and how people normally speak. That's weird because, of course, she's heard, and produced, countless hours of natural sounding speech all through her life. But, she's never been directed to examine the differences. The distinctive features of natural speech have never been pointed out to her.

I thought about A's review in class this week, talking about the components of fluency - pitch, juncture, and flow. That woman was acting the same way a poor reader reads - with no fluency, no understanding of how the ideas are represented in the text. Only she wasn't reading, she had actually memorized it without connecting the underlying thoughts. Or, she had memorized it, connected the thoughts, but never considered the distinctive features of fluent, natural speech.

When we teach movie-making to kids, we touch on acting as a discrete set of skills because they are the actors in their own movies. When we do that, we need to use language that ties the ideas that we are teaching back to reading. We need to teach them to attend to the distinctive features within the text that cue pitch, juncture, and flow. We can do this the same way we teach reading fluency in the classroom. Let me qualify that by saying, we can use the engaging and effective strategies that are sometimes used in the classroom to teach fluency. The key is that, in the context of movie-making, they have a real purpose to learn how to read fluently. They want their movie to be good, so the fluency strategies that we are teaching serve the purpose of helping them make their movie better. In the process, we will be helping them become better readers.

This is another way in which the kinds of projects that we do can support the acquisition of traditional literacies. This connection has probably already been made in research about Process Drama.

Read for LMM

Stein & Albro 1997 Building complexity and coherence: Children's use of goal-structured knowledge in telling good stories. In M. Bamberg (Ed.), Narrative development: Six approaches (pp. 5-44). Mahweh, NJ: Erlbaum.

I'm interested in reading this to see how it relates to the composition process at the camp.

Miles Davis on Knowledge and Performance

"For example, the great jazz trumpeter Miles Davis is known to have told his band members: 'You need to know your horn, know the chords, know all the tunes. Then you forget about all that and just play' (Sanjek 1990, p. 411)."


Kamberelis, 1999
Genre Development and Learning

I realize this is a lot of layers of quoting. I should track down the original source of the quote, especially given the vague wording of "known to have".

Still, great quote. I think it applies to what we teach at camp. They need to know the camera angles, shots, framing, the techniques of editing, lighting, audio. Then they need to forget about all that and tell a story.

Defining Questions of Genre

At summer camp, we teach a lot of different aspects of film-making, and story-telling in general. One that I've considered but haven't yet included in any serious way is genre. I have a sense that genre is important in the creation and viewing of mainstream movies and that a better understanding of genre will help the kids in their productions. One group this summer made a classic heist movie. It occurred to me at the time, but I never had the opportunity to talk to them in any detail about this. Understanding that they were working within an established genre might have helped them make creative choices and might have given them a better understanding of how that particular kind of story works. A lot of movies made at the camp would fall into a horror or horror/comedy genre. Others fit the action/adventure genre. Many combine one genre with elements of parody, like the techniques seen in "Scary Movie", "Epic Movie", "Another Teen Movie", etc.

The second formative moment comes from an interview with one of the campers at the end of the week. In response to a question about making movies in school, he said that they don't make movies in school. Then he corrected, "well, unless it's like, a documentary."

Filmmaking constitutes a literacy skill that is newly accessible through digital video and computers. As filmmaking moves into schools, so far it takes the form of documentary films. Video is allowed, if you are creating a documentary about photosynthesis or the Civil War or some other content-area, documentary topic. That's great, but what about narrative?

Documentary filmmaking is analogous to expository writing. So, the analog to narrative filmmaking in the classroom would be narrative writing or creative writing. If we teach kids to write stories, why don't we teach them to tell stories with film? More to the point, why should we and how do we?

I began with the following questions and rationale:

Title: Genre in Film and Genre in the Classroom

Questions
What models of genre are used in the classroom with regards to reading? With regards to writing? What models of genre exist in the field of film studies? How are classroom deployments of genre similar to narrative film deployments of genre? How are they different? What concepts about filmic genre may be successfully ported over to classroom practice?

Rationale
Video production is becoming an accepted form for student productive behavior in the classroom. So far, most of that student-produced work takes the form of documentaries, i.e. a movie about the water cycle, a video report about Martin Luther King, Jr.

If video production is going to be an accepted form of literate production in the classroom, then the range of acceptable student work needs to expand to include narrative film production. If that is the case, classroom teachers need a framework to understand, teach, and evaluate narrative film production. Part of that framework involves genre.

A rich body of research and tradition of classroom practice involves the use of genre in literature and in writing. Genre is also a well-established construct in the field of film production. Finding the ways in which film genre and literature genre coincide and the ways in which they conflict is the first step in bringing a filmic understanding of genre into the classroom.

After a discussion with Dr. S about these topics, I narrowed the focus of my questions to look at two processes of composition and their models:

How is genre enacted in literature as a model for the writing process?
How is genre enacted in film as a model for the filmmaking process?