2006
Taking Seriously the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
Section Introduction
Gary J. Kornblith & Carol Lasser Article
Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey
Lendol Calder Article
Ways of Seeing: An Introduction
Michael Coventry, Peter Felten, David Jaffee, Cecilia O’Leary, and
Tracey Weis, with Susannah McGowan Article
Thinking Visually as Historians: Incorporating Visual Methods
David Jaffee Article
Confronting Prior Visual Knowledge, Beliefs, and Habits: “Seeing”
beyond the Surface
Peter Felten Article
What’s the Problem? Connecting Scholarship, Interpretation, and
Evidence in Telling Stories about Race and Slavery
Tracey Weis Article
Moving beyond "the Essay": Evaluating Historical Analysis and
Argument in Multimedia Presentations
Michael Coventry Article
Connecting to the Public: Using New Media to Engage Students in
the Iterative Process of History
Cecila O’Leary Article
Ways of Seeing: A Conclusion
Michael Coventry, Peter Felten, David Jaffee, Cecilia O’Leary, and
Tracey Weis, with Susannah McGowan Article
Moving beyond "the Essay": Evaluating Historical Analysis and
Argument in Multimedia Presentations
Michael Coventry
What might it look like if our media-savvy students expressed their historical analysis
through new media? What can we learn about how historical knowledge is created by
watching students make and present their work in new-media forms? Because at times
written description has seemed inadequate to communicate the richness of the visual
and aural record of popular culture, my students and I experiment with creating short
multimedia narratives as a way of exploring those questions. In these projects, students
intermingle images, music, and voice narration to form a multimedia, multidimensional
critique. Becoming interpreters and explainers of the cultural past and present, they analyze
their objects of study and create multimedia projects in order to tell interpretative
stories, to show the viewer examples and evidence to support their interpretations, and
to connect their stories to larger themes in culture and history studies. In this essay I use
tools from the scholarship of teaching and learning to describe my students' learning and
some of its constituent features through an examination of student multimedia experiments.
34
As the only historian teaching in an interdisciplinary media, technology, and culture
studies M.A. program, I introduce my discipline and its habits of thought to students. My
students come from a variety of backgrounds, possessing bachelor's degrees in journalism, film studies, political science, or business, to name just a few possibilities. Their degree
program exposes them to a broad range of issues raised by networked technologies and
new media. Most come into my courses with intricate frameworks for understanding media,
and they eagerly embrace opportunities to think about how to interpret and analyze
in formats that move beyond writing.
Using evidence of various sortsódigitized film or video footage, images, photographs,
musicómy students build multimedia analysis by the juxtaposition of this historical evidence
with their own analytic voices presented in recorded narration or titles. In written
narratives, historians present textual evidence through quotations, numeric evidence
through tables, and visual evidence through reproductions of photographs, maps, or cartoons.
We surround this evidence with interpretation, placing quotations among our
statements or directing our reader's eye to images or tables reproduced above or beside our
analysis. But too oftenóand this is most apparent in the case of video or musicówe are
forced to represent visual evidence and pinpoint our analysis to specific parts of it through
written description. Multimedia allows audiences to see or hear moving pictures or songs;
it allows authors to show multiple examples quickly with narration over them or to guide
viewers over specific parts of an image and show analysis directly beside or over a specific
point.35 When projects are successful, they engage in the sort of insightful, carefully considered
argument we expect from written work, but the means of expression can be very
different. Multimedia allows my students to show their subjects as they analyze them.
Such work thus illustrates both the possibilitiesóand some of the limitsóof multimedia
authoring for academic work.
Looking closely at my students' projects reveals that multimedia work in history depends
on the relationship of two key techniques: (1) the compression of argument and
(2) the use of simplistic cultural memories for complicated ends. The multichanneled,
multilayered nature of multimedia authoring allowsóindeed relies onócompression of
argument, conveying a great deal of information quickly and by a variety of means. Compression
intentionally invokes simplistic cultural memories to make its argument. It occurs
in all forms of communication, including writing, but multimedia authoring brings
compression to the fore: the viewer must recognize an era or associate a sound with a particular
cultural milieu. The best multimedia authoring projects will then explain, clarify,
or challenge the cultural memory in question.
Two student multimedia projects showed me how the two interrelated techniques are
central to the presentation of historical analysis in new-media narrative forms. Alyson
Hurt's digital story revealed the historical construction of simplistic cultural memories,
while deploying compression to show that the very cultural knowledge she invokes as
evidence is historically contingent. Malgorzata Rymsza-Pawlowska used a period style of
filmmaking to evoke, through compression, an entire era. She then mixed evidence and
argument to read her subject outward, into a larger historical argument.
Alyson Hurt's digital story explored a contemporary television program starring actor
Ben Sander in drag as Brini Maxwell, a "domestic goddess" who guides viewers to perfect home life through exemplary cooking, cleaning, and decorating. Hurt's story used
multimedia capabilities to establish a historical context for her subject. Hurt illustrated
the continuity of domestic goddess ideals in American culture with a montage of 1950s
and 1960s photos and TV footage of Donna Reedóan actress famous for her popular
television portrayal of a perfect housewifeóand similar TV and magazine images of the
1990s celebrity domestic expert Martha Stewart. Hurt then introduced Maxwell, a crossdressing
television personality whose use of the domestic diva tradition helps show the
historical construction of gender, particularly the performance of housewife and domestic
goddess. Working in new media, Hurt could accentuate the ways Maxwell self-consciously
performs and destabilizes the domestic diva tradition. Maxwell's clothing and sets exist
in a no-man's-land between contemporary style and the aesthetic of the late 1950sñearly
1960s, when Reed's show was popular. This is intentional: according to Hurt, "Maxwell
cites Reed as one of her biggest inspirations."36 The connection to Martha Stewart is effected
through Maxwell's blonde wig and statuesque height. While both connections
could be conveyed in writing (as I have just done), multimedia allowed Hurt to demonstrate
her point more vividly. Viewers could see in chronological order the domestic icons
from whom Maxwell creates her satirical performance. In this sense, multimedia provided
the cultural evidence alongside Hurt's analytic voice.
Just as she simultaneously showed Maxwell performing a particular femininity and
documented its construction, Hurt used the show's intentionally simplistic cultural memory
of the history of femininity to demonstrate that memory's instability. As she wrote
in her reflective essay, the show "both celebrates and satirizes these 'old-school' values.
Brini's sensibility seems intentionally anachronistic, provoking dissonance between Brini
and the perceived sensibilities of 'modern' women and further underscoring the fact
that Brini is a constructed persona."37 Throughout the project, Hurt relied on this dissonance
between the viewer's sensibilities, the mythical womanhood Maxwell portrayed,
and Maxwell's outrageous and self-referential performance in order to make a critique.
Hurt assumed that the viewer would recognize the satire in Maxwell's performance. In
this sense, Hurt was working with key features of new-media argument: the multimedia
author relies on the viewer's store of cultural knowledge and uses images, music, or other
keys to evoke that knowledge and to show complex juxtapositions of meaning. Yet compression
works only if viewers possess the cultural knowledge needed to give a story the
intellectual and emotional effects the author intends. Compression functions paradoxically
as a limitation and strength of multimedia: when Hurt "reveals" her subject's "true"
gender, we are forced to question all the assumptions we have brought to bear in viewing
the entire piece.
In her multimedia project, Rymsza-Pawlowska used the style of a silent newsreel to
evoke the 1920s. She interwove still images, clips from period movies, and full screens
of text (intertitles) to present her analysis of smoking as a symbol of women's modernity
and relative freedom in 1920s popular culture. Her choice of genre allowed her to present evidence and analysis together. "The film clips and advertising stills speak for themselves,"
she reflected, "and with the help of the intertitles, indicate a strong case" for historical
change. She chose the "gushing style" of the newsreel as a way of "conveying the excitement
of the modernity that was very much a feature of the decade."38 Through the creative
use of the newsreel format, Rymsza-Pawlowska both evoked the era and made her
argument seem to come from within that very era.
Michael Coventry’s student Malgorzata Rymsza-Pawlowska evokes the 1920s by mixing her own intertitles with historical film clips and accompanying them with period music. She connects women, smoking, and female performances of modernity and independence. “Lighting Up at the Dawn of Modernity,” digital story, Communication, Culture, and Technology Program, Georgetown University, Dec. 2004. Clip segments: above from Possessed, dir. Clarence Brown (Warner Brothers, 1931); and below from Three on a Match, dir. Mervyn Le Roy (Warner Brothers, 1932). Courtesy Malgorzata Rymsza-Pawlowska.
Like Hurt, Rymsza-Pawlowska opened her piece with a rapid montage of images: a
headline about woman suffrage, a headline about shortening skirts, and a clip of women
typing in an office, signaling some of the "large-scale socio-economic and political transformations
that would profoundly affect the lives of American women" in the early twentieth
century.39 Thus she set the stage for her overall argument: the connections between
smoking in popular culture as a symbol of women's independence and the real changes
in women's lives in the 1900sñ1920s. Again like Hurt, Rymsza-Pawlowska used compression
in her opening montage to establish context. But while Hurt sought to establish a
lineage showing the ways gender is a historical construct, Rymsza-Pawlowska evoked and
established multiple historical factors using artifacts from a single period. She then placed
her subjectósmokingóin this context as a symbol and expression of white middle-class
women's "new freedoms" in the decade.
Also like Hurt, Rymsza-Pawlowska relied on and attempted to undermine our prior
cultural knowledge of the era. After evoking the context of social change, Rymsza-Pawlowska showed how smoking signaled the flapper's freedom while symbolizing more significant
developments. She used images of a variety of women engaged in relatively new
public leisure activities (with and without men) while smoking to help us understand the
broader reach of this symbol beyond the flapper stereotype.40 But unlike Hurt, who, reading
inward or deeply, focused on one subject in detail over time, Rymsza-Pawlowska read
one subject (modern woman/flapper/female smoker) outward through advertisements,
still images, and movie clips. She connected her subject to a variety of discourses to show
that subject's ubiquity and the force of its meaning across 1920s culture.
Both Hurt and Rymsza-Pawlowska relied on compression of argument, and both evoked
cultural memories and stereotypes to produce their historical analyses. Yet, to most historians,
those very moves might at first glance seem to flatten intellectual complexity. How
do we know that accounts are critiquing, not replicating, the simplistic cultural memories
they invoke when they undertake compression? How can we tell when stereotypical images
reproduce old interpretations or when they instead open interpretative possibilities?
To answer those questions, historians can turn to the scholarship of teaching and learning
for methods that help us watch carefully as students make choices about bringing together
video clips, images, narration, and music to build their arguments. Due to the very compression
of the form, we might at first glance miss the deep complexity of the arguments.
It is easy for those of us trained to argue using words to focus solely on the narration of a
digital story, without paying attention to the ways the words work with, over, and against
the visual narrative constructed by the student. We need to learn to read new-media forms
so that we can recognize the intended argument within them. In addition to strengthening
our own knowledge of multimedia communication, another way to ascertain complexity
is to ask students to reflect on their own intentions, whether in written proposals for projects,
post-project reflective papers, or video- or audiotaped reflections. Like a successful research
paper, a successful multimedia narrative project in history is based on solid research
and analysis and is the product of multiple drafts and revisions. Asking students to share
draft scripts with the professor, to turn in bibliographies, or to write reflectionsóall are
ways of increasing our understanding of student intentions, sophistication of argument,
and (relative) success in their projects. The standards of argument are the same, but the
possibilities for making them are decidedly different.
34 For other explorations of digital storytelling, see Tracey M. Weis et al., ìDigital Storytelling in Culture and
History Classrooms,î in Engines of Inquiry: Approaches to Teaching, Learning, and Technology in American Culture
Studies, ed. Michael Coventry (1998; Washington, 2003), 397ñ413; Viet Than Nguyen, ìHow Do We Tell Stories?,î
ibid., 363ñ96; and Joe Lambert, Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community (Berkeley, 2002).
From the literature on new media, see Mark Stephen Meadows, Pause and Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative (Indianapolis, 2003); Gunnar Liestol, Andrew Morrison, and Terje Rassmussen, eds., Digital Media Revisited: Theoretical
and Conceptual Innovations in Digital Domains (Cambridge, Mass., 2003); Lev Manovich, The Language of
New Media (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); and Mary E. Hocks and Michelle R. Kendrick, eds., Eloquent Images: Word
and Image in the Age of New Media (Cambridge, Mass., 2003). On describing features of student learning, see Pat
Hutchings, ìApproaching the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning,î in Opening Lines: Approaches to the Scholarship
of Teaching and Learning, ed. Pat Hutchings (Menlo Park, 2000), 4.
35 On juxtaposition, see Nancy Barta-Smith and Danette DiMarco, ìSame Difference: Evolving Conclusions
about Textuality and New Media,î in Eloquent Images, ed. Hocks and Kendrick, 159ñ78; and Jennifer Wiley, ìCognitive
and Educational Implications of Visually Rich Media: Images and Imagination,î ibid., 201ñ15. On visual
arguments, see Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (New York,
1996); N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines (Cambridge, Mass., 2002); and Edward R. Tufte, Visual Explanations:
Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative (Cheshire, Conn., 1997).
36 Alyson Hurt, ìHow to Be a Domestic Goddess,î digital story, Communication, Culture, and Technology
Program, Georgetown University, May 2004; Alyson Hurt, ìHow to Be a Domestic Goddess,î reflective paper,
Communication, Culture, and Technology Program, Georgetown University, May 11, 2004, p. 1 (in Michael
CoventryÃs possession).
37 Hurt, ìHow to Be a Domestic Goddess,î reflective paper, 6. The theory of gender performance also influenced
HurtÃs reading. See, for example, Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New
York, 1990).
38 Malgorzata Rymsza-Pawlowska, ìëLighting Up at the Dawn of Modernity,Ãî digital story, Communication,
Culture, and Technology Program, Georgetown University, Dec. 2004; Malgorzata Rymsza-Pawlowska, ìëLighting
Up at the Dawn of ModernityÃ: The 1920s Woman and Smoking as a Performance of Social Change,î reflective
paper, Communication, Culture, and Technology Program, Georgetown University, Dec. 16, 2004 (in CoventryÃs
possession).
39 Rymsza-Pawlowska, ìëLighting Up at the Dawn of Modernity,Ãî digital story; Rymsza-Pawlowska, ìëLighting
Up at the Dawn of Modernity,Ãî reflective paper, 2.
40 Rymsza-Pawlowska, ìëLighting Up at the Dawn of Modernity,Ãî reflective paper, 5.