The use of the poem in voice-over, as well as the students’ meticulous work with matching the voice-over with the visual material, indicate that the poem is of importance to the overall meaning of the digital video, not just a prompt or a point of departure to be inspired by.
Noticeable is also how the students substantiate their responses by referring to the poem, particularly during the first phases of initial responses and writing of synopsis and making the storyboard. They are continuously reading and re-reading the poem in their attempt to co-construct meaning for the literary text. This way of substantiating their interpretations does not, using Faust’s (2000) terms, reflect the courtroom metaphor with consistent reference to textual evidence as an end in itself, a procedure aligning with the notion that literary texts bear witness to hidden meanings that can be revealed through questioning and cross-examination. Rather, it illuminates the social spaces where they “speak up to account for their own reading and listen up to what others have to say about their experiences with literature (Faust, 2000, p. 29; italics in original); an approach of emphasising different interpretations.
6.2 Video poetry as exploring and establishing social
viewed as not just technology-related activities or extra-curricula activities (made if time and interest emerge), but as potentially meaningful learning experiences (see also Shanahan, McVee & Bailey, 2014).
The students in this study develop their thematic interpretation of the poem as being about showing one’s true self by creating a storyline about a homosexual who reveals her sexual orientation. By these choices of theme and motif the students address and make a statement of a social matter that is of importance to them at the particular time. This refers to the students’ social agency (Kress &
Jewitt, 2003; Jewitt, 2009b); students are active meaning makers who act from their interests in a specific situation and to their situated use of semiotic resources. Besides being an issue commonly related to identity explorations among adolescents, the theme of finding and showing one’s true self and the motif of homosexuality is in this case also related to a topical interest at that particular time; a debate on same sex marriages in Finland. For the students, the video poetry project serves as means to bring forward and explore matters that are of importance to them. They are explicitly taking stand in an issue, with a clear standpoint and attitude in the actual matter;
acknowledging their social agency. They are eager to inform the viewer about their reading of the poem, indicating their agentive role in the video poetry project by their creation of a symbolic and metaphoric messages that point to their understanding and interpretation of the poem and what they want the viewer to know about their reading of the text.
These findings are supported by several previous studies on youths’
film and videomaking related to identity (see e.g. Bruce, 2009;
Gibbons, 2010; Halverson, 2010; Lindstrand, 2006; Öhman-Gullberg, 2009). The possibility of expressing subjective attitudes is an important issue, but as Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) stress, the subjectivity does not necessarily exist in the sense of individual or unique attitudes, but often socially determined attitudes and values.
The students’ choice of theme and motif for their digital video is their collective standpoint in a matter, but that matter is at the time being a topical interest on a societal level. Thus, the students’ choice of motif
reflects socially contested attitudes and values. The students’ thematic interpretation of the poem as being about showing one’s true self and performed as a storyline about a homosexual revealing her sexual orientation, suggests a more societal ideology of how sexual identity is viewed and implies that a larger discourse is at play and in need for consideration.
The collaborative work of filming a poem, with all the different phases it involves, is itself an act of literary interpretation. The students went beyond literal meanings and co-constructed and negotiated the poem – and their digital video – as complex texts. The students negotiated imagery found in the poem and constructed their own symbols by sketching and drawing; they interpreted the poem in terms of intended and unintended decisions about use of sound, acting of the represented participants and linking of voice-over with image sequencing, and they showed awareness of how resources such as sequencing, framing, colour, angle, transitions, and sound affected the meaning. The interpretive acts became a continuous negotiation and follows similar findings from previous studies that shows how digital videos go beyond illustration and move towards close reading and interpretation of new meaning (see e.g. Schwartz, 2009; Jocius, 2013).
Previous studies show how a multimodal approach to literature instruction increase students’ agency to support them in interpreting literary works and addressing social issues (see e.g. Ajayi, 2015;
Smagorinsky & O’Donnell, 1998). With reference to this study, the students’ social agency was clearly noticeable both in the digital videomaking process as well as in the final digital video itself and is an example on how a video poetry project can acknowledge and encourage students’ social agency. Besides serving as means in positioning themselves, the findings also indicate negotiations as a means in becoming and being human, or as Gibbons (2010, p. 12) notes: “(t)he youths’ modal choices in their video often reveal as much about their own sense of themselves as youth as they do about them as youth filmmakers”.
Turning to dictionaries, agency is described as “action or intervention producing a particular effect; a thing or person that acts to produce a particular result: action or intervention producing a particular effect”36 and is described with synonyms as action, activity, effect, influence, force, and power. Following the theoretical framework of social semiotic theory, social agency refers to the connection between meaning-making and the social interest of the individual (Kress &
Jewitt, 2003; Jewitt, 2009b). Agency could be defined as a “willingness to act”, as individuals recognise, resist, or change the values, ideologies, or discourses they are a part of and in accordance to their own interest and semiotic resources available. According to the dictionary, agency derives from agent and “doing”, emphasising the active role of individuals, coinciding with a performative approach to meaning-making.