Teaching Multimodal Ethnography with 'New' Media Technologies for WMSCI 2010

摘要

In "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures," the New London Group established a four-step platform to transform students' approaches to learning and literacy. The authors of this paper build upon that vision, combining it with those of Richardson, Reed, Borsheim, Jenkins, and others who insist that novel approaches to pedagogy are needed to ground budding anthropologists in the emerging setting of digital scholarship and its visual, audible and interactive settings. Initiated in 2008, the College of Charleston's "Center for Expressive Culture" has engendered new approaches to teaching and learning that address critical media literacies for students of the social sciences and humanities. New and readily available technologies enable the documentation of cultural objects for a fresh generation of ethnographers; they also enhance the collection, organization and visualization of data. In this paper, we discuss the experience of creating multiliterate students from a number of disciplines; we consider the expansion of field sites to virtual communities and explore the lessons learned after three semesters of a course aimed at teaching expressive cultural research methods to undergraduates. Best practices are examined in light of obstacles like the time-consuming nature of ethnographic research and multimedia production, the importance of teaching both theory and practice in depth, and the need to address ancillary but important issues like ethics and social responsibility. The paper explains how, within the changing landscapes of social media, intellectual property, and information literacy, students learned to operationalize ideological theories in praxis; in the process, they confronted language and its relationship to culture and society even as they tackled the fundamentals of producing ethnographies and documentaries in the emergent world of new media technology.