Reflection on Narrative Assignment / Dialogue Editing Exercise (So Far)

As I’m at the halfway point in creating my Narrative Assignment and editing the Dialogue Editing Exercise, I’m realizing just how hard it can be to narrow the scope of an assignment to make the objectives clearer.  Along those same lines, it is difficult to find appropriate assessments that don’t require an inordinate amount of prior knowledge or a specific skill set ancillary to what is actually being assessed.  When we discussed what we had in mind for our Narrative Assignments on Tuesday, both Bob and I were to trying to get past certain hurdles with regard to the projects we’re trying to plan for our students.  In Bob’s case, he wants to teach continuity in film (including editing) without becoming completely bogged down in editing.  The problem, as he stated (and I’m paraphrasing), is that it’s kind of hard to separate one (continuity) from the other (editing).  The best way for students to demonstrate an understanding of continuity in film would be to shoot scenes and edit them together, following a rubric like Bob has in his lesson. 

I have a similar problem with my lesson, in that what I want to accomplish with my students might be thwarted by my students’ lack of editing skills and my school’s possible lack of resources.  Because I haven’t taught media to this extent in the past, I don’t know what kind of editing tools are on the school’s computers.  If I find out that we have appropriate tools at school, deciding how much editing to teach would be a different matter.  I would have no problem taking my Film Studies class into the computer lab for multiple class periods to teach them basic editing.  I don’t think I could justify doing that with my English classes, though.  Consequently, this lesson becomes an exercise in writing a shooting script for my English class.  I still think my students could learn some valuable things in this kind of lesson (identifying subtext as they adapt a short story into a screenplay and then a shooting script/essentially directing a movie on paper), but they would be missing out on the full authentic learning experience that my film class would get with this project.  After all, which is better out of these two options: writing a detailed shooting script for a movie that won’t be made (or at least edited together) or writing a shooting script for a movie that will actually be filmed and edited to look like a real movie?  As of right now, my Narrative Assignment is straddling between the Film Studies version (more extensive) and the English class (more scaled back).