Research Proposal

Remixing and Rethinking the English Classroom

Working Thesis: The use of remixing (as a form of visual and digital literacy) in the secondary English classroom can aid students in developing a deeper, more critical understanding of a text, increase motivation, build a strong sense of community amongst the students, and enable students to engage in creative and reflective ways of learning that will help them become more successful writers both now and in the future.

Proposal:

For my final paper I would like to research the concept of remixing in the English classroom. By remixing I mean taking something that has been read and discussed in class and creating something new that has been fashioned out of new or pre-existing materials. Like mash-ups on YouTube, performances from the perspective of another character, or flash poetry based on a novel, my goal is to learn how to have students use technology as a means of displaying what they have learned in one context and transforming that into another context through metacognition, or informed decision-making. As Lawrence Lessig said in his book Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in a Hybrid Economy, “For anyone who has lived in our era, a mix of images and sounds makes its point far more powerfully than any eight-hundred word essay in the New York Times could” (74). Remixing is so powerful because it makes use of images, words, sounds, and any other medium it needs, to make a significant impact on its audience. Through conscious decision-making skills, students can gain agency over their works and become “producers and participants” of a culture rather than just consumers of the texts teachers give them.

While working on this project I also plan on researching and bringing in the theory of metacognition and how teaching students about the decisions they make in their projects will illuminate their learning and the ideology behind their own thought processes. To me, if we are teaching students how to remix and create this new patchwork collage of work from previous ideas and concepts, it would be a good idea to make the students’ own thought process visible along the way. In their book, Metacognition, Strategy Use, and Instruction, authors Waters and Schneider say that we need to teach students how to think about the writing process, make conscious decisions about genre, audience, and purpose, and decide how and when to apply their knowledge, along with how to self-monitor their understanding and make sure their writing is meeting all the goals they set out to accomplish. Metacognition is vital to the teaching of remixing in the classroom because this digital literacy will be a new genre for many students and they need to think about the creative process as they go through it and make conscious decisions about their work from the time they get their assignment and plan it out all the way to the moment they revise it and turn it in.

Because remixing involves the changing of one thing to something completely different, I feel metacognition will help illuminate a great deal of the transformation process for everyone involved. For example, students could take a research paper they have been working on all year long and transform that into a 10-minute presentation that involves homemade videos, podcasts, pictures and more. Students could also take a novel and turn it into a flash poem or a short movie trailer. I like the idea of using remixing in the classroom because it not only allows the students the opportunity to be creative and use technology in the classroom, but it also forces them to think in new and exciting ways while using the best technology available to them. Through the inclusion of digital media in the classroom, students will no longer be able to simply regurgitate what they read for homework the night before (a process that does NOT help them think on their feet or “outside of the box). In recreating something new, students must begin to make conscious choices about the text and question its ideology. Remixing is NOT taking the original text and just redoing the exact same script in a new medium, it is the making of something new through conscious decisions throughout the creative process. Students must think of the best medium in which to portray their message, their purpose must be clear and concise, they must have full agency over their work, and they must have a strong sense of audience awareness. By bringing remixing into the classroom, teachers will be opening up the door for student success now and in the future.

For these projects students will be exploring texts and ideas in new ways and therefore will have the ability to uncover new material, new meanings, and a new sense of confidence over their original ideas. Henry Jenkins calls it the “convergence culture” where people will learn to interact with media in new ways and develop new relationships with the technology, showing how students will have an increased sense of motivation in the classroom. Pointing out that an audience will go to almost any length to converge with the media they desire to converge with, corporations are well aware of the power they hold within their digital hands (2). He says, “convergence represents a cultural shift as consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content” (3). If this is indeed the case, as I believe it is, students must be taught how to analyze the digital media they are bombarded with on a daily basis and the decisions marketers made in the dispersing of that information. We do not want our students to become homogenized consumers, but if we leave them to make connections between all this disjointed content on their own, without guidance, then they will have no other choice then to conform. We want students to be active participants of society who can dispel myths and find the hidden truths behind digital messages. If students are a part of creating their own multi-media campaigns and remixes, we might be taking one step closer to helping them become informed and armed against consumerism.

Remixing is a fun, exciting, and motivating practice that will allow students to become more thoughtful writers, practice writing and revising collaboratively, and give them a platform in which to share their work with an actual audience, thereby increasing investment in the final product and self-efficacy in their abilities to compose at all stages of the writing process and across numerous forms of literacies.

• Remixing
  • What it is
  • How to use it
  • Why use it
    • Authorship
    • Making choices
      • Overall goal/purpose/feeling
  • Integrity of original work
  • Audience expectations
• Ways to use it
• Metacognition
  • What it is
  • How to use it
  • Why to use it
  • Ways to use it
  • How it ties in to remixing
  • Technology in the classroom
    • Why its important
    • How it will help our students in the future
    • The future of the country and education