I was in search of a way to teach students in a unique way. Last semester, as an RA, I was trying to think of how to present personal safety tips to students just before Halloween festivities. After long deliberation, I decided to show clips of danger scenes from horror films, and after each clip, I asked my residents to analyze the scene in terms of what went wrong and what could have been done by the main characters to prevent being harmed. My residents loved this event, and I didn't want to accept that this would be the only time I ever presented information in a unique way.
Through this course, I have learned how to affectively connect texts with film, music, video games, and other contemporary texts, such as graphic novels. As I learned about each of these forms of media, I realized that text is more than words on a page: texts are everywhere. This has made me think differently about movies and music, as it has caused me to look deeper into the meanings of the stories being presented to me. Further, I have learned to analyze literary references in alternative media for future lesson plans.
I have even noticed more of my teachers using multi-modal texts in the literature classroom. For example, my British Literature professor connected Tennyson's poem "Lady of Shalott" to a current song by Emilie Autumn called "Shalott", which actually quotes parts of the poem. This strategy helped connect Victorian culture to themes in current media, but more importantly, it made the poem seem much more meaningful and much less boring to me. That is what multi-modal teaching is all about-engaging all students in a lesson and helping them relate the meanings of a text to their own lives.
As a movie and television junkie, I was relieved by this class because it helped me realize that my love for visually stimulating texts can be transfered to my teaching practices. Not only can I implement videos, music, websites, and video games into my teaching in the future, but I also plan to write a final paper for my British Literature class that connects The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to the film Fight Club. Thus, this class has not only benefitted me as a future educator, but it has also affected me as a student by helping me connect film, a medium that I love to analyze, to text, a medium that I spend most of my time analyzing (which can become rather mundane).
Finally, another discovery I made through this course is that I absolutely love graphic novels. In fact, I could see myself teaching a course that strictly covers the analysis of graphic novels as well as a course that connects canonical texts to graphic novels. Additionally, I plan to incorporate assignments that require students to create their own graphic interpretations of a text.
Throughout this semester, I have learned about a number of multi-modal resources that I can incorporate in my classroom instruction and in my alternative assessments. In addition, I have developed a greater appreciation of diverse forms of texts. However, the most important lesson I have learned through this course is that in order to be an effective educator, I need to delve into teen media in order to connect with my students, and I also need to continue to adapt my teaching strategies as technology continues to experience breakthroughs. As education is continuous, so is technology. Thus, devotion to both needs to be incorporated in the classroom to allow students to grow as users of technology as well as readers of texts.
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