(Scroll down for an overview of the Media Learning Forum)
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.
Digital storytelling was a major component of the community literacy project and became an even stronger element during the media learning forum. As I mentioned, the Denver North Project was just one node in the layered networking of community workers, teachers, and artists. In February, soon after my students began documenting the Denver North Project, the UCD Writing Center, Digital Landscapes, and the Center for Digital Storytelling created a forum for the discussion and presentation of media projects in the community. After several weeks of meetings with individuals and groups throughout the Denver metro community - including representatives from middle schools, high schools, artists, digital storytellers/instructors, corporate sponsors, and nonprofit organizations - the Digital Landscapes team, Nancy, and I decided that it was time to bring together these parties. Each party had a clear yet distinct investment in digital literacy. Our aim was to provide a venue in which these parties could gather to discuss their past/current projects (including successes and challenges) and to assess the current state of digital literacy use and application across the metro area. Another underlying goal was to build the network, to determine whether these individuals and groups could come together to share resources for future projects, like the Artspace 7 community arts festival. For most participants the project was the network (to keep it growing), not the individual digital media products that were being produced all along the way.
One of the participants, Daniel Weinshenker, presented the digital storytelling after-school program that he and Alan Davis were doing at Smiley Middle School, an inner-city Denver public school trying to reverse its declining enrollments with special programs like Daniel and Alan's. The middle school students, who were also there to present their work, readily took on the role of performers, describing how they had written, shot, and arranged their digital stories, which focused on a change they had experienced in their lives. The mostly adult audience asked them questions as they would any featured director. According to Alan Davis, it was an empowering event for the students. We asked questions that prompted them to reflect on their writing and reading processes--material they hadn't previously discussed with the school's literacy researchers. Other participants discussed the Denver North Project, theories of digital media and the importance of storytelling for community building, and the need for storytelling spaces where the community can come together within a circumscribed place and time for the sole purpose of sharing stories. Click on these links to hear Daniel, Nancy, and Michelle's reflections on the Forum.
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