Remixing Melville

Amy Truter

CA
ET

Schwartz, K. (2013) Remixing Melville: Moby Dick meets the digital generation. MindShift. Retrieved from http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/03/remixing-melville-moby-dick-meets-the-digital-generation/

Henry Jenkins and Erin Reilly are working hard to create curriculum that teaches high school students Moby Dick on their terms. Inspired by Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, who taught Moby Dick to a group of incarcerated youth and had them reinterpret the novel to relate to their own lives, Jenkins and Reilly developed and tested a curriculum that uses "remixing, reinterpretation, and multimedia elements." The goal is to make the learning experience more meaningful to students by making it more participatory and creative, using immediate assessments that are part of the learning process.

I really love the idea of being taught literature in this fashion. I may have read everything assigned in high school, but I know I was not the norm. I think teenagers could really benefit from this type of curriculum and teachers who are open to the idea of trying something new and daring. I would definitely be interested to know more about their teaching methods and how you teach teenagers Moby Dick without necessarily forcing them to slog through the whole thing.