The discipline of history and social studies emphasizes using a variety of sources to get students to understand a theme. Transmedia storytelling is a perfect match for this. From a teacher’s perspective, we might use the textbook as our text resources, add video interviews or newspapers as primary sources, and use photographs of artifacts or paintings as visual resources. For example, a unit on World War II examining the causes, processes and effects of war might include:
- newspaper editorials from British newspapers (causes and processes)
- Roosevelt’s Declaration of War speech (available on YouTube) (causes)
- playing a level from a World War II video game, like Call of Duty (processes)
- radio broadcasts from the end of the war (effects)
- images from The Atlantic’s World War II archive (effects)
Or, you could have students organize a transmedia campaign about a specific event. For example, my students just studied the French Revolution. I could have had them tell the story of the French revolution by:
- Finding paintings of pre-revolutionary life to illustrated the causes of the revolution
- Mashing up documentaries from Youtube and popular movies to tell the story of one stage, such as the terror.
- Finding primary sources to talk about the ideas of the revolution – the writing of Enligtenment philosophes, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, etc.
- Creating a comic book to tell the story of another stage
- Telling the story of yet another stage from the perspective of the participants, but through a series of Twitter posts
Come to think of it, maybe this is something I should consider for History Circles 2.0!
Links:
Transmedia Storytelling and the Multi-Dimensional Brand
Transmedia Storytelling 101