Introduction
In a modern Australian world, visual and digital landscapes have become an ever present mode of human storytelling, communications and relations. Such a setting has great power for sharing spirit in a media realm of almost infinite access to and manipulation of colour, sound, perspective and time. Understanding the intricacies in digital media is essential for students to recognise how digital platforms mediate communication, culture, and power. Knowing some day they’ll find themselves as participants. The Year 7 & 8 Music Video unit aligns with the Victorian Media Arts Curriculum as will be later expressed in this rationale. In doing so, students are positioned to expand their analytical, creative and technical skills into future years and beyond the schooling environment.
Curriculum Alignment
The music video project is very much so aligned with Years 7-8 Victorian Curriculum: Media Arts, addressing the four key content descriptors. Students explore the ways that music videos are used to communicate ideas & perspectives across cultures both now and in the past - with attention drawn to creations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. (VC2AMA8E01 & VC2AMA8E02) Students then analyse the techniques employed by visual and musical forms to elicit emotional responses from their audience. Such analysis is then progressed so that students can formulate their own representations. (VC2AMA8D01 & VC2AMA8D02) Guided through the production process via teacher example, students then engage with digital tools to realise their storyboards and enactments into the form of a music video. Students are encouraged to reflect on their works in progress to understand meaning making via the form of music videos; each decision affecting the whole. (VC2AMA8C01 & VC2AMA8C02) Students will then take turns to screen their music videos to the class, followed by a short oral presentation where they’ll elaborate on why they made certain creative decisions, demonstrating their considerations of genre, audience engagement and context. (VC2AMA8P01) The resource I have designed is there to support students throughout the learning sequence, assisting them in achieving curriculum-aligned outcomes.
The Resource
The step-by-step and final product resource will be integrated at the beginning of Lesson 2 during the pre-production phase. The resources will be displayed in order of, final product first (the music video collage), followed by a structured unpacking of the development process that I followed. This is an attempt to motivate and inspire students with the teacher's example. The students will then be encouraged to present their thoughts on the teacher's video. Hopefully, the students will be itching to create their own!
After this, the students will be guided through the production process, via the step-by-step visual breakdown resource. What otherwise an invisible creative process will be made visible! Students will gain the knowledge of the techniques used and how to create a media video utilising similar constructive processes. The resource will be revisited during Lesson 3 to help students with their own work as they begin to create their music videos. The resource is both an introduction to the task and also a reference point to be recalled throughout the production process; something to hold onto.
As an inclusive practice, the resources support diverse learners by showing them a clear, explicit, visually represented step-by-step process that they can mirror, as opposed to abstract verbal instructions. Students will not be left unknowing or lost. Students looking to extend themselves are in a good position to experiment further with more sophisticated production techniques. There’s plenty of room to move in the editing suite! Almost endlessly so.
Pedagogy
This learning sequence has been influenced by a mix of critical & dialogic, democratic and constructivist pedagogical approaches, with the ultimate aim of encouraging students to participate in a media arts culture.
Paulo Freire’s (1970) critical pedagogy states that education should move beyond the passive transmission of knowledge, instead students should be empowered as active participants to develop their own critical consciousness as they relate to meanings created in media arts. As a class, this will be best realised through classroom-wide discussions. Moving away from standardized and tired analysis preached by the teacher, students will be positioned as contributors to the discussions and their own intelligences allowed shine. This is especially on show in Lesson 1. Modern research supports this approach as studies show that dialogic teaching deepens student understanding, as learners build on each other’s ideas and practice justifying their thinking and reasoning. (Alexander, 2018).
As a non-Indigenous educator, I recognise that approaching Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander media with care is of deep importance. As teachers, our role is to help facilitate respect among students when they engage with Indigenous media, without appropriating or oversimplifying Indigenous voices through a Western analytical framework.
This approach has been informed by Indigenous thought form Martin Nakata, who highlights the concept of the “cultural interface” as a space where Indigenous and Western knowledge systems intersect, requiring educators to critically reflect on how knowledge is constructed, framed, and taught (Nakata, 2007). Good teaching practice supports students to engage deeply with cultural context and the deep well of First Nations storytelling practices and ways of knowing.
Frameworks such as the 8 Aboriginal Ways of Learning have been consulted. In particular, this learning sequence has taken influence from aspects concerning narrative-driven learning, visual learning processes, hands-on techniques, and the use of symbols and metaphors (8 Aboriginal Ways of Learning, n.d.).
This unit has also been influenced by democratic pedagogy, specifically in regards to shared decision making undertaken in group work. Beyond classroom discussions, the music video project calls upon students to exercise their responsibilities among their peers during the production process. Within their groups they will select music, dedicate roles to group members and negotiate a creative direction to work towards. John Dewey argues in Democracy and Education that learning is fundamentally a social and participatory process, where students develop understanding through active engagement in shared, meaningful experiences (Dewey, 1916). Recent academia suggests that democratic learning environments enhance student motivation and ownership, particularly in creative discipline where agency is central to meaning-making (Biesta, 2015). This learning sequence hopes to allow students to feel they are creators of the entire process, and that their final products are birthed from themselves.
This unit also draws upon constructivist theory, particularly Lev Vygotsky’s emphasis on learning through social interaction and scaffolding. Working in groups, students operate within their Zone of Proximal Development, which refers to the gap between what a learner can achieve alone, and what they can achieve with guidance from a more knowledgeable other (Vygotsky, 1978). In this unit, the teacher and the students' peers aid each other and provide this support. This is evident in the use of the teaching resource which guides students into unknown technical skills, then slowly releases students into student-led production. Scaffolding support allows students to enter into complex creative technical processes that would otherwise be beyond their capabilities. Research supports this approach, demonstrating that scaffolded, dialogic classroom interactions significantly enhance student learning, particularly for learners developing disciplinary language and conceptual understanding (Hammond & Gibbons, 2017).
Importantly, these pedagogical approaches are enacted through the DET High Impact Teaching Strategies (HITS).