English Teaching: Practice and Critique

Embodied memory and curatorship in children's digital video production

Volume 9 Number 1 May 2010

John Potter (Centre for the Study of Children Youth and Media, Institute of Education, University of London)

Digital video production in schools is often theorised, researched and written about in two ways: either as a part of media studies practice or as a technological innovation, bringing new, “creative”, digital tools into the curriculum. Using frameworks for analysis derived from multimodality theory, new literacy studies and theories of embodied identity, this study examines a video production made by two children who were taking part in a video project on the theme of self-representation and identity. Evidence was collected in the form of production notes, video interviews and the media text itself. The findings suggest that this way of working in new media can be thought of as a new literacy practice, metaphorically conceived as a form of “curatorship” of children's own lives in the uses of multimodal editing tools for the intertextual organisation of digital media assets and their subsequent exhibition to peer groups and beyond.

PDF pdf