Digital video creation

A learner-centred, hands-on approach is at the core of the video-creation activities and projects in this chapter. Activities vary in length from short 30-minute tasks to project-based learning ideas that can remain ongoing throughout a whole term or semester. Many of these do not fit into neat categories. They are multi-modal projects designed to engage learners in the creative process. This often requires practices that embody complex contexts and procedures and encourage collaboration. Often the end result of these activities is of less importance than the process leading to it. The primary goals are situating language through practical engagement in the creation of digital artefacts. This is achieved through the process of guided reflection, critical thinking, performance, debate, design, creativity and other competences often referred to as ‘21st-century skills’. The role of the teacher becomes one of learning facilitator and project manager, rather than content deliverer and, as is typical with any form of active or project-based learning, notions of timing and control need to be flexible.

While language goals are explicitly defined, these are in no way intended to be prescriptive. Many of the activities can easily be adapted to focus on a wide variety of language points and skills development. By working through the projects and activities, learners are encouraged to identify patterns or trends, examine perspectives and alternate points of view, predict, analyse causal relationships, and create original content both in and through English.

In Hard Times , Charles Dickens explores the ideology of an education system that views students as empty ‘vessels’ needing to be filled with ‘nothing but facts’. Imagination, play and creativity are aggressively discouraged as a wasteful distraction, the teacher's responsibility being to ‘kill outright the robber Fancy lurking within’. Although over 160 years have passed since its writing, this, unfortunately, still sounds painfully familiar. A Google Image search using the term ‘classroom’ reveals that the organizational structure of the typical Victorian classroom is still very much alive and well, and, embedded in the design of these face-front learning spaces, is still the tacit notion that knowledge is transmitted from a ‘sage on the stage’.