April 22-24
Students Who Teach Us
Selfe uses the term “new media texts” when referring to texts in multiple media: film, video, audio, and others. Visual elements are emphasized, and she introduces these sections in bold print: This chapter argues that this system should be in classrooms “to teach new literacies. She believes that David taught her about composition using the new media texts as she learned about him and his life. The author devotes over four pages informing the readers of the “turbulent years” in which he was moved from one family to another in different states. David had no access to computers until high school and took “a computer literacy course.” It was here that he became successful in moving ahead. In later years, however, despite his success in web work, his Standard English was not developed, and as he continued Web design, his GPA dropped, he failed and was out of the university because of English standards. Selfe believes that David’s case proves that “new forms of literacy” have life spans and compete with pre-existing forms of literacy. Understanding of new media texts is necessary in a “postmodern world…” 51. In the closing pages, the author poses questions and exercises for teachers’ use (59-65).
I found the story of David Damon very interesting and proof that other alternatives using new media texts are necessary.
Paradigms Lost and Found: The “Crisis of Representation” and Visual Anthropology
Lutkehaus and Cool refer to the “paradigms lost” of the problem that occurred in the 1980s. There have been implications that anthropologists in a “postmodern, postcolonial, post feminist erosion of paradigmatic authority” have resulted in an authorative challenge in anthropology. The experiments in the “new ethnography,” however, have influenced recent ethnographic films, and many of these films and videos are the successful products of filmmakers and anthropologists working with the Center for Visual Anthropology (CVA) at the University of Southern California. This effort at CVA began in the late 1970s (435). Lutkehaus and Cool present a “dialectic relationship” that occurs with both the written ethnography and ethnographic film. The authors refer to the “narrative structure” in the video created by Sensiper of “stereotypical representation” such as those in Hollywood’s version of Tibet as “Shangri-La” in the classic film Lost Horizon. Sensiper discusses how the effects of these “romanticized images” and there effects contrast dramatically with the Tibet culture of today. Sensiper also meets a Tibetan refugee whom she accompanies to Tibet, where he has not visited since he left as a child in the 1950s. The anthropologist’s video of the refugee and his return home as an adult portray “an additional layer of irony” to the simplistic hopes at the beginning of the video (439).
Interestingly, I am old enough to have seen the film Lost Horizon, and it was a wonderful dreamlike environment, unlike the Tibet of today.
