Does transforming poetry into film (or other types of mutimodal text) deepen pupils understanding of poetry or detract from it?

I’m currently writing a paper on this and reflecting on some of the projects that we did at the City Learning Centre with Key Stage 2 pupils across three primary schools.

BBC director Peter Symes and Tony Harrison almost singlehandedly created the film-poem and Symes is quoted as saying ’still words combined into lines are doing for the ears what single frames are doing for the eyes’.

What we were trying to achieve in the Primary Virtual Poetry project was, in a sense, combine still words with image, sound and movement and create film-poems as a way of deepening understanding of the form and language of poetry - rhythm, intonation, imagery, metaphor and word play.

Gunther Kress (Communication Now and in the Future, English 21, 2006) argues that multimodality demands new ways of reading and writing and that ‘the increased use of images is not making texts simpler, as is often claimed.’

This mirrors one of my concerns that the pupil’s lack of experience in reading and writing multimodally  might inhibit how they deepen their understanding of poetry. (Here I disagree with Kress who asserts that pupils have become naturalized in multimodality. I see passive consumers where some see digital natives)

I feel that some explicit work on visual / multimodal literacy, a broader experience (wider genre than currently used in Primary) of reading and writing poetry coupled with this kind of activity would greatly enhance their understanding.

What are your views? Have you tried creating film -poems with pupils and how has it worked out for you? Do you agree with the view of pupils as digital natives or see them as passive consumers?

I’ve just been having a play with Voicethread which is is an online media album that can be shared and that allows users to comment on each other’s media using either voice (recorded through a microphone), text, audio file or video (using a webcam). I’m quite impressed at first peek.

We’ve been using iMovie alongside Garageband on Macs recently with students to create ‘ virtual poems’. Essentially students have taken images using a digital camera or uploaded images from a site such as pics4learning to interpret a poem that they themselves have written or that Craig Bradley (great local poet that we’ve been working with) has written and then added background music and a voiceover.

The results were impressive but in hindsight the tools although flexible may have been a little complex for what they were trying to achieve in a short space of time. We’ve also had a look at Windows Photostory 3.

What I particularly like about Voicethread is that it encourages collaboration by allowing users to comment on each others creations. I can see some possibility in using it for a similar project and have created a sample one here.

I can see a couple of issues (not major!) - text comments are only captured at the side of the voicethread rather than as titles or subtitles and you can only add one audio file/recording to each image so can’t add continous music in the background. It seems more suited to commenting on individual images rather than entire movies/presentations. It would also be good if you could post from a mobile (UK).

However, all in all, I’m pretty impressed.

Is anyone else using Voicethread? If so how? Have you found any innovative ways of using it or have you found issues when trying to do things the way you want? Any comments welcomed!