Media, Curricula, & Socioacademics

This dissertation is inspired by the creativity in children’s books and films, and by the possibilities for education as they are advancing with modern technology and media. Research tells us that youth are spending less time reading books and more time watching movies and television, and there is a growing trend in our culture to translate popular kids’ books into movies. Given this, I wondered: How can fiction books and their Hollywood film adaptations be leveraged to educate youth? To answer this, I present two papers, both of which explore instructional approaches for using crossmedia (books and film) in middle school classrooms in pursuit of enhancing student engagement and socioacademic success. In Paper 1, I describe The Giver Project and share findings to show how a piloted crossmedia curriculum, called The Giver Educator’s Resource was implemented in seven sixth-grade classrooms across three states: Colorado, Massachusetts, and North Carolina. Using The Giver as a case study, I use teacher interviews and student writing to explore teachers’ evaluations of the instructional approaches introduced in that curriculum. My findings indicate that teachers positively evaluate lessons that are enjoyable for students, connect to students’ social realities, and synchronistically provide academic and social benefit. Further, teachers prefer lessons that are interactive in nature and allow students to collaboratively write and act out scenes from a book or movie. In Paper 2, I extend my analysis of an activity from The Giver Educator’s Resource that was most positively reviewed by teachers. Based on those findings, I introduce an instructional approach called the Storyteller’s Literary Arts Workshop (Storyteller’s LAW). I use teacher interviews, student writing, and classroom-discussion transcripts from The Giver Project—juxtaposed with theories of constructionism, research in dialogic instruction, and practices in fanfiction—as a frame for understanding 1) the socioacademic properties in the Storyteller’s LAW and 2) why the approach was so positively evaluated by teachers. The content of this dissertation has implications for the development of future K–12 curricula that utilize entertainment media as a means to bring informal media to formal learning environments.