Transmediation

My happy place is using expressive arts to explore learning. These tools seem rooted in experiential learning, and even Dewey – founder of this philosophy – wrote an entire book on art and experience. As someone who identifies as a kinesthetic learner, perhaps part of why I so love to dance and sing, I know that for me the use of dramatic arts and somatic practices deepen my learning of new content. As Hoyt says in the article Many ways of knowing: Using drama, oral interactions, and the visual arts to enhance reading comprehension. “…young learners were able to process meaning in ways that allowed them to deepen and expand their understanding”. Two of my strongest memories as a young learner of about 12 are rooted in experiences that integrated these ideas – one was learning about the influences of African-American music in American culture by choreographing and performing a dance routine to Koko Taylor’s famous “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean,” and the second was participating in mock debates in a presidential race. A third was based in place-based learning – where we visited spaces related to the economic production of goods in my home state of Vermont (a marble and slate quarry and a sugaring house that produced maple syrup) as part of the curriculum. Although I was only 8 or 9 years old, I can still remember the look and feel of the marble eggs in the gift shop, and the deep sloping edges of the quarry where they extracted it from.

For this article, I chose to draw an elephant with my finger using a drawing app I have on my phone. Both drawing and technology are sources of anxiety for me, but I have a deep love of elephants and so it was the focus on that which helped me to utilize two of my weaker skills in “transmediating” the experience of reading the article.