Transmediation: Understanding across Multiple Systems

Over the past week, we have enjoyed some creativity in our learning experiences. After reading our book club books and learning about the solar system we sought out ways to take our learning from discussions, readings, and written work to transfer them into other ways of seeing and perceiving them. One of my educational research beacons is a man named Jerry Harste. He has done work in educational research around literacy and expanding ideas of what it means to learn for many years. In one of his writings, he adds, "As defined earlier, to take what you know in one sign system (language) and recast it in another (art) is a process called transmediation. While talk mediates experience, taking what you talked about and drawing a sketch “transmediates” it," (Berghoff, Egawa, Harste, & Hoonan, 2000).  I find that engaging this process supports students in constructing knowledge at a depth that just looking at something from one angle or in one way does not.

In our book club groups, we have discussed how our characters handled conflict throughout the plots of the stories. We uncovered many ways that these characters handled their conflicts (outside of the war happening around them). We were often surprised by the ways that conflict was managed in ways that did not fix a given problem outside of a person, but changed the way they experienced the problem themselves. Regardless of the conclusion each group came to we all found that different characters handled conflict differently. 

I then charged each group to create a project that would show in sum what they had learned about handling conflict from the characters in their book. The project could be a skit, song, piece of artwork, tableaux, poem, or anything else that might portray this learning creatively. Throughout the week we sought to find materials and creations that would show the complexity of their learning. 

Enjoy these photos of their work this week!