The Living Newspaper Project Meets Multimedia Technology

For those of you looking to invite students to interact with different media, you might consider adopting and adapting the lesson plans conveniently provided as part of the Humanities Institute’s Living Newspaper Project. In this case, the four kinds of media are printed news reports, play script, oral reading, and theater performance.

The Living Newspaper Project seeks to literally make the news alive. Students research a sociopolitical or economic issue and pull quotes directly from news reports about it in order to write a play script that makes a particular argument about that issue. They then dramatize this script, paying particular attention to powerful words in the quotes. They use these words to generate actions or movements in the play, or to compose moving or still body montages in the play.

The Living Newspaper Project originally began as part of the New Deal’s Federal Theater Project (FTP). Power, a play about the rise of the electric utility industry and the fight to control that technology, was one of the FTP’s most popular living newspaper productions. New Deal Network: Power (http://newdeal.feri.org/power/index.htm) is a website that introduces the history of the FTP and the Living Newspaper Program. It also includes the accompanying material to this performance such as an essay, “Electricity in the Limelight,” by the project director, the original script (illustrated with photographs from historical productions), a lesson plan, and a host of bibliographical and online resources.

Recently, the program was revived at the University of Texas at Austin with the help of the Humanities Institute, the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, the Performance as Public Practice Program of UT's Department of Theatre and Dance, and Theatre Action Project. The idea was “to reinvigorate civic education in Austin-area high schools through the dramatization of current human rights issues.”

As the Humanities Institute Living Newspaper Project states: (http://www.humanitiesinstitute.utexas.edu/programs/living/)
“The program's main component, Living Newspapers Across the Disciplines, provides high school teachers with the tools to guide their students through a Living Newspaper unit in an English, Social Studies, or Theater Arts classroom. Because a Living Newspaper—literally, a newspaper brought to life—combines research on current events, critical and creative writing, and public performance, students gain important skills and a greater ability to understand and affect the world around them through an interdisciplinary, hands-on, collaborative project.”

The Humanities Institute Living Newspaper Project Resource Guide online (http://www.humanitiesinstitute.utexas.edu/programs/living/resource_guide.html) offers several sample lesson plans. There are lesson plans focused on research, writing, and on performance individually or cumulatively. They are scheduled for 2-week, 4-week, or 6-week intervals, and can be adapted to suit different class calendars.

There are several adaptations to the existing Living Newspaper Project that could be done in order to emphasize the forms and functions of multimedia technology.

For one thing, one might think of broadening the types of media being used from newspapers and theater to other types of mainstream media (television, radio, cinema) or to alternative media (independent blogs, zines, citizen video). In terms of sources for research and writing, using mainstream and alternative sources could highlight different perspectives on one issue, resulting in a more complete or at least more complex understanding of the sociopolitical or socioeconomic issue.

In terms of performance, working with film footage and radio recordings, for example, could result in an informative or provocative multimedia presentation that accompanies the performance in the background or that is incorporated into the performance itself. Drawing from different media in this way could also underscore the particular strengths and limitations of various media, as well as reveal their diverse communities of audiences.

There are some strong possibilities created by the Living Newspaper Project for teaching rhetoric, argumentation, critical analysis, and composition or writing. The most important teaching opportunity is that students are invited and guided to deconstruct, quite literally the texts they consume, the content these texts hold, and the form in which they are packaged. And then they are encouraged and prepared to reconstruct these bits of texts and ideas in another form and forum for a different purpose.

Students also become practiced at analyzing, critiquing, and using primary source material to make informed arguments. Their research and reading further exposes them to the different stakeholders in a given controversy and these parties’ perspectives and reasons for their position. Their efforts to dramatize ideas and represent arguments on stage also encourages them to at once recognize stereotypes as a culturally-loaded symbolic tool of representation and manipulate them in ways that can revise or reclaim these reductions of identity and community.

The “real world,” “coolness,” and “creative” aspects of composing a performance that others will see and interact with also make a huge difference in getting students excited and motivated to engage with their controversy. Instead of a paper that goes no further than being read by a peer and a teacher, this performance has a life beyond the classroom. It is a “living argument.”