Transfer across Media

Chapter 5: A Pedagogy of Teaching for Transfer across Media

5.1 Evan

In Chapter 1, I offered a definition of transfer across media as a process of considering, (re)using, choosing not to use, applying, and adapting compositional knowledge through various digital and non-digital technologies and within the surrounding practices and norms of the compositional context. The video composition experiences of participants in this study further illuiminate several aspects of this definition, providing snapshots of what happens when transfer across media occurs. The data highlighted in Chapter 2, for example, indicates that various kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing were both applied and reconstructed, to use Nowacek's terminology, as students completed video and written essay assignments within a course. Some students in the study, however, made only early steps toward transfer across media: they began a process of considering their knowledge, for example, or they took a first small step toward the application or adaptation of what they knew.

The student experiences described in Chapter 3 indicate that much knowledge that falls within Selber's framework for multiliteracies—that is, knowledge of functional, critical, and rhetorical literacies—helped students make transfer moves or set the stage for future transfer across media. Functional and rhetorical literacies, in particular, became part of a compositional knowledge base that was then ready to be considered, reused, discarded, or adapted. Notably, students demonstrated the development of a critical multimodal literacy grounded in video production that extends beyond Selber's politicized critical literacy. This critical multimodal literacy often involved a look ahead, as students reflected on past production experiences and imagined future rhetorical situations to which their multimodal knowledge might transfer. Finally, the data in Chapter 4 provides an in-depth look at several moments when students considered their compositional knowledge, built different kinds of meta-awareness, and envisioned that awareness as useful as they looked to the future.

In this chapter, we'll focus on the video composition experiences of one advanced student, Evan Kennedy, a graduating senior at Oakland University who was a student in the Introduction to Writing for Digital Media course I taught in winter 2017. Evan's experiences with video are a bit different from those of others described in Chapters 1 through 4. Evan was not a first-year student, and he elected to enroll in the Writing for Digital Media course. He also had the opportunity to work on his video composition for many weeks and take the project through at least four revisions. Perhaps because of some of these differences—high investment, extended time—Evan's process and products demonstrate and clarify many of the complexities involved when students transfer knowledge across media. As you will see and hear below, Evan considered, reused, discarded, applied, and adapted compositional knowledge as he composed and revised, building a critical multimodal literacy along with other kinds of literacies that helped him to make effective authorial decisions and to prepare for the future.

Evan’s video composition, “A College Collage: Not Going Back,” is fantastic. You can watch and listen to it in its final and in-progress versions below. The impressive editing skills and layered techniques on display in Evan’s work are, in part, what first led me to begin to pay closer attention to Evan’s composition process and the ways in which he was learning through extended work on this project. As I observed and interacted with Evan throughout the semester and through our interview once the semester was over, I became even more impressed with the ways he developed meta-awareness about composition and then put that meta-awareness to work as he transferred skills and knowledge from draft to draft.

Take a few minutes and watch and listen to the final draft of Evan’s video, “A College Collage: Not Going Back.”

You'll notice that Evan uses the whole of Demi Lovato's song "Old Ways" in his composition. Because this song is under copyright, Evan decided not to upload his work to YouTube during our class, thus publishing it beyond the course. I believe, though, that Evan's use of copyrighted content is most likely fair. Following Dustin Edwards, who argues that it is important to pay attention to "digital-material systems that support and constrain digital flows of content" (62), I'd like to pause to analyze Evan's use of "Old Ways" according to the four factors judges consider when resolving fair use disputes in court.

While Evan's use of the entire song weighs against an argument for fair use (one factor to consider is the amount and substantiality of the portion taken), Evan transforms Lovato's song as he combines it with images, video clips, and animations, speaking through the song along with other media to express his own message (the purpose and character of the use). Evan's synthesis of these materials aligns with advice from compositionist Martine Courant Rife, who states, "[R]emixing another's materials with bits and pieces you have created yourself, as well as more than one outside author's work, will make your use more likely to be fair use" (149). In "College Collage," Evan melds "Old Ways" with clips from documentary films, selfies, original footage, animations, and effects.

Evan's use of "Old Ways" opposes fair use principles because the song is a highly creative work and not a factual or nonfiction text, but it aligns with fair use principles because Lovato's song is already published (the nature of the copyrighted work). Rife addresses this factor as well, advising authors, "[I]f you are taking a position on an issue, or creating a history or documentary meant to comment and criticize an issue or events, your use may be more likely to be fair, even if the copyrighted materials you remix are creative" (149). Evan indeed uses "College Collage" to construct a history of his experiences that make a commentary on the importance of paying attention to the mental health concerns of college students. Evan's video makes the song accessible on the Web to numerous other users, which opposes fair use, but this use does not deprive the copyright owners of income, nor does it undermine new markets for the work (the effect on the potential market).

Weighing all these factors, I believe Evan's use of "Old Ways" is most likely fair. Thus with Evan's permission, I uploaded his videos to YouTube for inclusion here in this eBook, and when I did, YouTube flagged the videos with content ID claims for the song. I disputed the claims, providing detailed descriptions of how Evan's use of the song most likely fell under fair use, and thirty days later, YouTube removed the content ID claims because the song's copyright owners had not responded to my disputes (I assume that the non-response was the reason for the removal, but YouTube did not provide any explanation—the content ID claims simply disappeared thirty days after I submitted the disputes). This dispute process required a great deal of work and time, but it is important work to exercise Evan's and my right to the fair use of copyrighted content. As Edwards writes, "[W]hen it becomes increasingly difficult to circulate compositions that make fair uses out of copyrighted materials, digital cultures become more constrained" (62). By including Evan's video work here, I support a digital culture in our field and beyond in which authors can use and build on existing content under fair use principles.

Evan’s video is chock-full of highly advanced rhetorical and compositional techniques, the synthesis of "Old Ways" with other pieces of media being only one example. He uses audio collage, visual and aural timing, color associations, metaphor, symbolism, musical rhetoric, photo and video manipulation, anchoring with written text, repetition, contrast, juxtaposition, and more.

Let’s rewatch Evan’s composition now layered with comments about his compostion process taken from his interview with me for this study.

Evan’s meta-commentary makes it clear that his process of transfer across media through this project involved considering, using, discarding, applying, and adapting knowledge to fit this particular compositional context. As the semester went on, Evan’s understanding of the context—himself as author, real and potential audiences, the assignment(s), and the purpose of the text—was continually evolving.

First, Evan considered his compositional knowledge and the tools he had at his disposal when he got the assignment in our course to create an open-topic video composition. He had made a music video before in a sign language class, and he later told me that he felt comfortable making a similar product. He knew a little bit about iMovie, and he could get an older version of it on his laptop. He wanted to make a video that mattered to him at this particular time in his life, during his last semester in college (after eight long years of completing coursework, transferring, losing credits, and continuing), and he knew he had a lot of old selfies he could use to represent his journey. Thus was born Evan's vision for "A College Collage." Take a look here at his first draft, which he brought to class for peer workshop.

As you can see in this initial draft, Evan used the compositional knowledge he brought into the course (part of a process of transfer across media), and he was developing new knowledge through course readings, lessons, and discussions that he was to use, reuse, and adapt later as well. As the project began to take shape and Evan received feedback from his peers and from me, he chose which elements of this draft to develop and which to discard. On workshop day, I took particular notice of Evan's work because he and two classmates remained after the class was over, discussing his draft for at least fifteen minutes after everyone else had exited. The group had run out of class time for discussion, but his classmates thought this project was worth the extra time and effort required to stay and talk about its ideas. This was in part because they had misinterpreted the message: Evan's peers initially thought the video was simply about being in college and partying. As we remained in the near-empty classroom, I listened to Evan and his peers discuss this draft. They talked about which images were confusing and which were clearer. They talked about the possibility of adding written text to the images, of adding different kinds of images, and of timing the images more purposefully with the music. As the students analyzed the rhetorical effect of many multimodal elements within Evan's draft, I could see and hear the development of critical multimodal literacy.

Evan left the workshop that day knowing his message was not yet clear and that he had to revise. Take a look at this next draft, handed in as Evan's final draft for the video composition assignment:

We see and hear evidence in this draft that Evan was applying and adapting his knowledge as he worked on the video: the choices of images and their sequencing reflects an effort to respond to his peers and to me, his instructor, to be clearer about the message of the video. Toward this end, we also see and hear a more developed use of certain techniques such as timing and juxtaposition with some photos and certain parts of the music.

But even as the video composition assignment wrapped up, Evan was not done working—or transferring his knowledge across media. For the final project in the course, students could choose to compose a new project for an outside audience, or to keep working on a previous assignment, directing it to a new audience. After some initial hesitation, Evan decided to keep working on "A College Collage" for his final project. My feedback to him at this stage was mostly about the purpose of the video. While I was highly impressed with the technical elements, I encouraged Evan to be as clear as possible about his message. In my written feedback on the video composition final draft above, I stated, "Since the video is about so much, sometimes I wondered if it needed a little more focus and clarity—is it about college? Your changes? Your self-realization? Coming out? How others see you or how you see yourself? Or maybe all of these?" I also encouraged Evan to find a specific audience for the video that might help him refine and focus the message: an organization devoted to mental health or LGBTQ experiences or an online community that might use the video on its website, for example.

As Evan revised yet again, he continued to consider, use, apply, and adapt his knowledge. As he details in his meta-commentary above, he took concepts from class lessons such as color theory and applied them to his work. He listened to feedback from classmates and listened to and looked at their videos. He learned new functional skills with iMovie; continued to increase his critical multimodal literacies as he revised combinations of images, sounds, and words; and composed rhetorically through thinking about potential audiences.

Here is the version he workshopped again in class as a rough draft of the final project. Through the revised closing sequence in this version, we see Evan beginning to play with refining and focusing his use of color to line up more purposefully with the message of the video.

As is evident through these drafts, every time Evan handed in "A College Collage," it looked and sounded different—and better. As he worked, he fine-tuned juxtaposed sequences and nearly perfected his use of timing and musical associations. For the final version, he composed a new introduction and conclusion, in large part as a response to my and others' continued critiques that the message was still difficult to grasp. He omitted the images that were symbolic of coming out of the closet, focusing the video's message on the college experience as related to mental health. And he completed other imperceptible, time-consuming, yet meaningful revisions: he told me during our interview, for example, that the musical track that ran through the background of the introduction section was a highly edited and distorted version of Demi Lovato's "Old Ways," the song that plays throughout the "college collage" portion of the video. When I told him I was surprised by this—and of course I hadn't noticed all that work—he stated that he was glad, because he wanted the song to be unrecognizable.

Evan's extensive revision process and learning through this one project is not what we might usually consider to be transfer across media. Indeed, all this work went into making several drafts of one video composition. Evan's learning did not move from prose to video to blog, for example, nor was he composing many different kinds of texts. Even so, Evan's compositional process and products are a powerful example of many moments of transfer across media as defined here and demonstrated by all the student experiences in this eBook. Evan considered, used, chose not to use, adapted, and reconstructed images, sounds, video clips, animations, written titles, silence, and more in "A College Collage: Not Going Back." He developed functional literacies related to image, audio, and video editing, and he thought again and again about his purpose and audiences, often changing his mind and his approach. He revised portions of his composition that were very good to begin with—and these portions changed and morphed and got even better as he developed and demonstrated a critical multimodal literacy through production. In assigned reflections and during our interview, Evan looked ahead, supposing what might become useful as he left our course and entered a possible future career in digital design.

The final research question I had when beginning this study centered on the role of teaching practices in processes of transfer across media. Reflecting now on Evan's learning, I see that some of the moves he made within a process of transfer across media were enabled in part by my pedagogical design and prompting. Evan had extended time to work. He was required to complete many drafts and receive peer and instructor feedback on those drafts. He was assigned readings and participated in class discussions on video editing, multimodal rhetoric, and design techniques. He had to reflect several times about his work, out loud and in writing. He set goals to which I responded, and I pushed him to set alternate goals. When the first video composition assignment was completed, I encouraged and allowed Evan to choose to keep working on this video as a final project, providing him with even more time to think and work.

In the next section of this chapter, I further explore the intersections between teaching practices and transfer across media through laying out five best practices for teaching for transfer across media. Drawing on the learning and teaching experiences of study participants, I make suggestions for teacher-researchers who want to use digital media more purposefully as one path to and from transfer in their courses.

At the close of our interview, Evan told me that he was still considering sharing "A College Collage" with audiences outside our classroom. As part of the final project, he sent the work to an online journal, from which he didn't hear back. But he wanted the work to make a difference, as he explained:

I still kind of want to get it out to an audience, now that we've talked about this. I feel like I still want to get it out to an audience that can view it. Like I said, with all the other videos that I've seen, it's super helpful and super educational to be able to see other people's compositions. I don't know. I feel like if even one person was able to see that and that would stick in their mind or they learned anything from it, or feel like, "Okay, so other people can go through this thing, too," I feel like I would be proud of my composition, to be able to go out and be able to show that to other people.

Evan wanted his video to be an educational help for others composing their own videos and to speak to audiences who might be going through struggles related to college and mental health similar to his. My hope is that through my featuring his videos and his process narratives here, both these desires of his might be realized.