ABSTRACT
This book is an analysis of a film and video project carried out in a middle school in Atlantic Canada. The project was a two-year action research project (2008–2010) entitled A Lens on Community: Video Ensemble Process in a Rural Middle School, which was initiated by the research team and a school administrator at a community middle school who was interested in challenging his staff to develop more creative, place-sensitive literacy pedagogy drawing on the potential of new informational technologies, particularly film and video. Like many contemporary educators, he was trying to make sense of how the new literacies and new literate technology that was at the time becoming ubiquitous in most students’ out-of-school lives could be used to enrich their experience in schools. This study documents and analyzes teaching and learning in a small-town middle school in a predominantly rural region of eastern Canada. At the same time, this study represents a look into the situated literacies, lives and long established routines of schooling and schooled literacy at a time of tremendous technological and social change.
