Multimedia Literacy at Rowland: "A Good Story, Well Told." (the Rowland Animation Program at Rowland High School in Rowland Heights, CA)

The late anthropologist, Gregory Bateson, related this story to show how important stories are to the development of human culture. All people think in terms of stories. Storytelling is one of the oldest forms of communication and education, a primary method by which the accumulated culture of one generation is passed down to the next.. And modern mass media, especially radio, film, TV and video, have universal appeal because they, too, are used to tell stories. Most of us have never had the opportunity to use these media to tell our own stories. Nearly 20 years ago, it was an often-quoted statistic that the average student would have watched well over 16,000 hours of television before he or she graduated from high school. This is more time than a typical studient spends in the classroom during his or her formal K-12 education. Given the widespread access students now have to videos, cable TV and MTV, hours of TV viewing has surely increased over these earlier estimates. Media Literacy The aware and creative citizen of the future must be a visually literate "media viewer" and a capable "media doer." [2] The idea of developing media literacy in education is cenrtainly now new; it has been a standard part of the broadcast communications and film school curricula in higher education for decades. Many excellent school programs in animated filmmaking using Super-8 have existed since the 1960s. [3] However, the availability of low-cost portable camcorders, new desktop and digital video technologies, and related applications in computer graphics, animation and typography now bring the tools of professional-quality media production within reach of K-12 teachers and students. The educational challenge now is to creatively use these media and tools to teach students both creative and critical-thinking skills. To accomplish this goal, students should create their own films, videos and multimedia projects--to become active producers of media. This is a story about just one such program--Rowland Animation. Rowland High School is located in a small, lower-income, suburban community about 20 miles east of Hollywood. From its humble beginnings over 14 years ago, the Rowland Animation program has been about empowering the students of this community to be active producers of media. The Rowland Animation program uses a hands-on approach to media literacy, and its interdisciplinary and collaborative approach to learning provide an excellent model of how "restructuring" can be successfully accomplished and sustained. Animation and video production are both technical crafts and multimedia art forms. As a curriculum, they require interdisciplinary treatment, collaboration, peer teaching and critical thinking. In the program, students design multimedia productions--combinations of hand drawing, computer graphics, clay, film, still and full-motion video, and natural and synthesized audio. Working in such media involves painting, drawing, design, sculpture and composition as well as all the skills, disciplines and conventions demanded by these various arts. [2] But animation also reaches into realms more diversified than any single art form. In animated filmmaking, a student delves into literature, writing, drama, architecture, music, dance, mime, photography and cinema. Similarly, film and video editing have traditionally been either very tedious or accessible only to those with highly sophisticated equipment and training. Today, however, new desktop and digital video editing system are removing many of these technical barriers to teaching students about video production. Teachers and students may now focus more on the the underlying art and psychology of how film and video clips can be sequenced in different ways to effectively communicate a message, create dramatic impact or manipulate a viewer's perception of time and space, instead of struggling with the mechanical details of how to splice film. …