(Scroll down for an overview of The Digital Autodrama Project)
by Michelle Comstock 2/10/05
Last spring members of the Writing Program at the University of Colorado at Denver joined a community network aimed at providing Denver area residents with a forum for discussing digital media and storytelling. Unlike many community literacy projects, this one was not based in any one physical site, such as an on-campus or community computer lab. Instead, participants created a network of resources to help young people, teachers, and artists produce and deliver critical/creative digital work. The network included Nancy Linh Karls, Director of the UCD Writing Center ; myself; seven of my advanced composition students, including Sarah Shirazi, who designed this Web site; Daniel Weinshenker, Director of Denver's Center of Digital Storytelling; Alan Davis, UCD Professor of Education and director of Smiley Middle School's multimedia after school program; Jose Mercado, drama teacher at Denver North High School and students in his drama class; a non-profit digital consulting team called Digital Landscapes composed of corporate consultants, Philip and Mikela Tarlow, and digital videographers, Scott Slack and Scott Randolph; Adam Lerner, director of The Lab; Jake York, Professor of English at UCD and founder of denverpoetry.org; the PlatteForum Art and Learning Center; and many other local artists, teachers, and gallery directors.
Creating networks was a literate practice and academic labor primary to this project. For most of the participants it carried the political imperative of creating networks of public audiences, where people worked in a nonhierarchical way to deliberate upon and solve social problems, including the growing digital divides in the Denver community. The network metaphor, a metaphor we now largely take for granted, asks us to place our interest not in the actors themselves but in their relation to other actors (human and nonhuman). In actor-network theory, a theory associated with Bruno Latour and others working the area of technology and social relations, the term "network" was originally meant to capture a contingent and emergent form of organization in contrast to any given social and technical entities, such as institutions, societies and nation-states.
Nancy and I had been waiting for the opportunity to move the Writing Center beyond a traditional "office visit" organizational model toward a network model more responsive to the shifting literacy needs of the community, so we were excited about the prospect of equipping consultants and composition students with the knowledge and tools for learning and teaching digital literacy in local high schools, middle schools, studios, and galleries. While the network took a number of pathways, including a digital media festival called Artspace 7, my students and I participated most heavily in two projects: the Denver North High School Digital Autodrama Project and a media learning forum designed to bring teachers and artists together to discuss and exchange resources on digital media literacy.
On a winter afternoon, February 18, 2004, I sat at the back of a crowded classroom in an urban high school on the northside of Denver listening to drama teacher, Jose Mercado explain the next assignment--the digital autodrama (dramatic monologues that allow students to act and "speak from the heart" about an event in their lives)--to his students. Jose introduced "something that had never been done before" at Denver North: students would write, direct, act in, and shoot their performances. The autodramas would then become digital installations, created by the students for a community arts festival and media learning forum, organized by Nancy, myself, and our community non-profit partner, Digital Landscapes. At Denver North High School, where "almost 85 percent of the student body is Hispanic" (Anas B-03), the 2000 graduate rate for Hispanic males was 47.2% and 61.1% for Hispanic females (Colorado Department of Education--link to Web source). During our 2003 visit to Denver North, students were organizing a group called Jovenes Unidos or Youth United to charge that the school was failing them, claiming that they were underprepared for college due to lack of textbooks, tutoring, college counseling and library access (Anas B-03). Three of my students (including Sarah Shirazi whose work you'll see here) and I were documenting the effects of digital literacy instruction on this group of underrepresented, urban high school students. As Jose explained in an interview, he hoped the digital autodramas would "put tools in the students' tool belts from both traditional storytelling techniques and hip-hop culture."
After Jose introduced the lesson that winter morning, the Digital Landscapes videographers, Scott Slack and Scott Randolph, entered the scene to help the students digitize their autodramas into five-minute segments. Wearing t-shirts, caps, and cargo pants, the Scotts reviewed the key steps in the project--in four weeks (4-8 class periods) students would be able to "write a script, block it out, and shoot it," "tell a story," and "play with color and lights." Jose tells me later that he is convinced these video shorts will help students professionally beyond the classroom, as a kind of digital acting portfolio.
-Anas, Brittany. "Students at North: School is Failing Us." The Denver Post 17 Mar. 2004: B3
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