An Instructional Example: A Multimedia Exploration of the Titanic
In the final section of this article we describe a multimedia lesson exploring the Titanic, the ill-fated ocean liner that sank on its maiden voyage in 1912. The focus of the exercise and activities promotes greater student engagement and richer readings of the diverse type of texts available to them, including still images, sound, music, video, and print. The skills being developed are consistent with state and national standards of both English Language Arts and Social Studies. Table 1 provides a list of the media resources for this lesson.
The elements of this Titanic activity have been used with students and teachers and school administrators. It addresses a topic students are familiar with and engages different learning styles across multiple texts. It can be used as an individual activity, but we believe richer readings are derived from group work and social constructivist pedagogy. Crump, Durand, Hooke, and Kelliher (2002) described the process in this way:
To discover the meaning of a text, you need to uncover various layers of meaning…these layers can change their meaning overtime—and from one place to another—and so change the meaning of the text for new audiences…. A written or visual text has layers of meaning, such as the time in which it was produced, the medium available for its production and the attitudes of its audiences over time and place.
Using the T, or Text, side of the T.A.P. model, we can classify the Titanic resources by type of text. In this case they include a song, an editorial cartoon, a documentary clip, a film clip, a newspaper account, and a pop-up book. The song may be from a genre described as folk, traditional, or ballad. But how would we classify the blockbuster Hollywood film As a genre is it romance, historical fiction, epic Thus, after categorizing and classifying this information, students must then justify their answers. The richer readings that result should create more than one potentially correct or plausible response. These various texts also contain inconsistent values and ideology. The film Titanic clearly is sympathetic to working class characters below deck. It could also be argued that ideologically the film is more sympathetic to art and creativity than to business and materialism. The Discovery Channel documentary clip focuses on science, logic, research, and debunking myths about the ship’s sinking. The song, from earlier in the century, seems to point the finger of blame at the captain, which is not the view of the editorial cartoon from the The San Francisco Examiner at the time of the sinking.
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