Overview: Project New Media Literacies is developing a teacher's strategy guide focusing on integrating new media literacy skills in the English classroom. The guide focuses on the new media literacy skill of appropriation--the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content--and provides a set of lesson plans that use Herman Melville's Moby-Dick as the sample text and a theater adaptation by Ricardo Pitts-Wiley entitled Moby-Dick: Then and Now as an example of a contemporary adaptation. Components of the strategy guide are described below and schools will begin testing the material in Fall 2008.
Unit I: MOTIVES FOR READING (Entering the Text)
This unit explores the various purposes we bring to reading a text, exploring especially two very different purposes for engaging with a text such as Moby-Dick: Performing a "close reading" of the text in order to develop a thorough understanding of its themes, messages, and use of literary devices; and following a more meandering path through the story in order to make loose but interesting connections.
Unit II: ADAPTATIONS AND TRANSLATIONS (Collaborative Storytelling & Transmedia Storytelling)
This interdisciplinary unit emphasizes the role of context in adapting a creative work. Students will adapt a literary text to a variety of contexts and will be encouraged to consider and articulate the decisions they made and why.
Unit III: MULTIPLE VOICES (Characters & Sources)
This unit emphasizes the new media literacy skill of negotiation--the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms-as it applies to the kinds of multiculturalism we confront in interpreting creative texts. Students will not only consider the negotiation that occurs between characters but also the negotiation a reader must engage in when working with any literary text.
Unit IV: HOW IT'S PUT TOGETHER (Seamlessly or Violently)
In this unit, students are encouraged to dissect a text by looking for and pulling at the threads of its seams and edits. Students will manipulate and rearrange the text in order to come to a stronger understanding not only of how each part contributes to the meaning of the whole but also of some of the choices the writer made in compiling the text.
Unit V: ALTERNATE ROADS (Choices in Artistic Creation)
This unit asks students to step outside of the text and explore the choices any artist makes in crafting a creative work, including roads taken or not, contextual decisions, cultural and historical pressures, and so on.
Unit VI: Violence and POV (The role of perspective in understanding violence)
This unit explores the importance of perspective in how we perceive and come to understand violence. This unit links to contemporary discussions of violence, especially in relation to video games and other forms of popular media.
