It's About Individual Vision

What do the following have in common: curating an online presence regarding a particular topic or question, using creative commons footage to craft a video in YouTube Editor, or considering how best to employ digital technology to explain to others why a question is important?  Besides the fact that students in my classes currently are engaged in one of these activities, all three pursuits require people to be active producers of content and exercise their voices.

Take for example the work students are completing with YouTube Editor.  As a class, they decided to each film at least three clips during a typical school day, upload the footage to their YouTube channels with the title DITL (Day in the Life), and designate them with creative commons attribution.  With 40+ clips uploaded, they then searched for each other's clips and used this raw footage to each construct their own 2 minute movie of a day at Glenbrook South High School.

Of course, the trick is to take some really disparate footage and make it work like a narrative so that somebody watching the movie understands that there is more going on then random shots of teenagers at school.

One student, for example, wanted to show his weariness as a 4th quarter senior.  As he said in a reflection, he "doesn't hate school."  He just feels done after four years.  To convey this, he decided to repeat certain clips--students listening to a teacher lecture, students walking in the building. He also decided that he did not want to add audio, but, instead, wanted to retain the natural sounds captured in the clips.  This way, he could provide a truer version of the atmosphere that contributes to his apathy.  Another senior wanted to focus on how random the school day is, even though most people have the opposite view.  With this in mind, she decided on the first and last clips, but then let chance guide her decisions for the intervening material and the order in which it would appear.

To achieve these narratives, the students had many decisions to make: which clips work best?; from these clips, what five seconds are most powerful (a limitation decided on by the class)?; what order best expresses a story?; if transitions are used, which ones should they be and why (same with filters)?; what kind of audio should be included?  Navigating these possibilities requires students to maintain a focus on what they are trying to achieve and how best to get there.

Regardless of how well these movie turns out, and they are, of course, amateur creations, one might ask, "what's the point?"  After all, the amount of content uploaded to YouTube is staggering, so chances are slim that these movies will be viewed by people outside of the class.  This criticism, however, misses the point of the activity.  "Will anybody see this?" It doesn't really matter. And it's the wrong question to ask.  The right question is "how important is the creative act for the individual's sense of self?"

As I catalogued above, these students are deeply involved in every decision regarding how this film is constructed.  It should be obvious that this kind of control breeds a sense of ownership.  Once one feels ownership, there is a greater probability that one wants to make something worthy of the time spent.  And this sense of worthiness most likely fosters a feeling of pride in making something that never
before existed in this particular way.

I can't stress this last point enough.  Amateur or not, when an individual creates, even if he or she is remixing or appropriating from other sources, the process and product can only come to life in relation to the autonomy and dedication of the individual. True, there is a collaborative aspect to this YouTube assignment: students in the class are all working from the same collection of raw footage, so there are bound to be certain clips that show up in multiple films.  But in the midst of the creative process, students do not consider themselves as part of a group making a movie.

Creating, whether one is an amateur or profesional, is an act of idiosyncratic expression.  In this respect, it is the opposite of a standardized approach to education.  There is no objective test and the right answer does not appear on a form.  Instead, the right answer is the one that makes students feel they have presented their vision in the most powerful, articulate way possible.