CI5472 Teaching Film, Television, and Media
Module 12: Integrating Film into the Curriculum ~ Interpretive Strategies . . .
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Another strategy involves adopting multiple voices and perspectives through making "double-voice" intertextual references or evoking or mimicking the languages or styles from other texts or worlds (Bakhtin, 1981; Knoeller, 1998). Speakers and writers employ these intertextual references to establish social relationships and identities (Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993). Through interaction with others, participants construct identities by performing in ways that position them in relation to others’ positions — “it is in the connection to another’s response that a performance takes shape" (McNamee, 1996, p. 150). As Bakhtin (1981) argued in his concept of “answerability,” people’s utterances reflect their relationships with others’ potential, anticipated reactions to their utterances. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
As noted in Module 4, different voices reflect or evoke different discourses or ideological perspectives. Characters adopt the voices of science, religion, medicine, business, war, politics, romance, education, merchandizing, etc. Examining these different voices leads to understanding underlying ideological conflicts between characters’ ideological perspectives. In the novel and film, The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby adopts the voice of the Puritan Ethic — working one’s way to the top, regardless of the means to achieve that goal. In the novel and PBS production, Great Expectations, as in all Dickens’s novels, characters adopt a range of different voices reflecting business, political, religious, and family discourses. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
In participating with a range of diverse perspectives and voices in a computer-mediated context, students learn to consider alternative perspectives different from their own. The more open students are to experimenting with alternative ways of being and knowing, the more open they are to entertaining alternative values, as opposed to a rigid, monologic perspective on the world. Middle-school students engaged in synchronous exchanges employed parodies of peers, teachers, and school discourses, for example, mimicking the pedantic language of textbook “discussion questions.” | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
As we noted in Module 1, students can also employ Web chat rooms in tappedin.org or nicenet.org or MOO, AOL Buddy Chat, IM, or Blogger sites to adopt and explore alternative voices and discourses. In addition, Cynthia Johnson (2003, A Few Cool Ways You Too Can Use MOOs, Kairos 7(2)) discusses some ways of using MOOs to help students explore alternative perspectives/roles. One central component of many MOOs or computer games such as Sims City is that students adopt different, alternative voices associated with their online roles. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
For example, in a Brave New World MOO students assume the roles of different characters from the novel who inhabit different spaces or rooms they create based on their reading of the novel. In these roles, they must then solve problems and conflicts associated with the thematic tensions in the novel. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
In their on-line book chapter, “The Individual Identity in Electronic Discourse: A Portfolio of Voices,” Boyd Davis and Jeutonne P. Brewer examine the ways in which on-line participants adopt a range of different voices associated with experimenting with different identities. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
In analyzing film adaptations, students could examine the ways in which the film captures the original “voices” or language of the text through how the actors perform those voices or perspectives. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
