Borges Meets Dewey: Multi-Media Narrative in the Humanities Classroom

Barbara Ganley Writing Program & English

Middlebury College

Classroom Challenges

Members of today's digital generation of students have spent their early lives immersed in robust, visual, electronic media--home computers, video games, cyberspace networks, and virtual reality…They learn in a nonlinear fashion, skipping from beginning to end and then back again, and building peer groups of learners, developing sophisticated learning networks in cyberspace. In a very real sense, they build their own learning environments that enable interactive, collaborative learning, whether we recognize and accommodate this or not.

-- James Duderstadt

Contemporary Ireland Through Fiction and Film: First-Year Seminar

Pedagogical Underpinnings:

• To Build A Learning Collaborative through the Process and Outcomes

• To Enable Students to Connect the Course Content to their Own Cultural Context

• To Expand Viewpoints and to Deepen Understanding of Film and Literature

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Emergent Outcomes

Students fold multi-media narrative into collaborative research projects, using digital stories as a learning tool and as a means of serious academic discourse

Collaborative Research Project

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QuickTime™ and aSorenson Video 3 decompressorare needed to see this picture.

QuickTime™ and aSorenson Video 3 decompressorare needed to see this picture.

Digital Storytelling in the Interpretation and Analysis of Literature

A look at how the writers of Ireland have transcended the wrong of Ireland.

• Collage and Map• Journey• Digital Interpretation of From the

Frontier of Writing• The Paper• Extended Conclusion• Sources

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Creative Writing and Composition

Pedagogical Underpinnings

Students re-see and re-invigorate relationships between language, form and meaning

Additional Outcomes

Students move gracefullyand purposefully betweendiscourse levels and modes

Portrait of an Artist (excerpt)

My brother is mute. But not because he cannot speak. Not because he does not have anything to say. It is more as though he is muted—muted because most of us don’t know how to hear him…

Story Without Words

Beyond the Classroom

• Independent research projects

• Creative projects

• Service learning

Middlebury College's Contemporary Ireland in Film and Fiction inspired a continuation of the exploration of modern Ireland, cultural identity, and the use of the web as a forum for the exchange of ideas. Four students will travel to Ireland in July 2002 to create short films that look into the idea of an Irish identity and Ireland today. After returning to school in the fall, the students will edit the films and work with area school children in using webfilms as a learning tool.