Creative Voice: Laura Fleming
I don’t think it’s a controversial stance to say that our education systems need help, especially with digital technology advancing so quickly. Well, Laura Fleming is the kind of teacher I would have loved in school. She truly understands how education can be improved — and implements it in her own classroom every day, using transmedia storytelling methodology to weave curricula together across subjects and engage her students in ways mere textbooks simply don’t. She’s also involved in Lance Weiler’s Robot Heart Stories — and was kind enough to answer some questions for me.
What excites you most about transmedia storytelling?
What excites me the most is the opportunity to use transmedia storytelling techniques to create a rich LearningWorld (or many LearningWorlds) with a global reach that expands and extends learning beyond the hours of the school day and the confines of the four walls of a classroom. Students will be able to move online to offline to online in a seamless and integrated way to fully immerse themselves in their learning and create a totality of learning experiences that encompasses the school, the community, and the home.
How did you get interested in transmedia as a storytelling method and possible tool for education?
My interest in transmedia stems directly from my teaching and my classroom and seeing how the implementation of these methods creates transformational learning experiences. I am very much interested in how these methods help to break down the barriers between students and teachers, making everyone learners learning together, and how they leverage the distribution and the proliferation of knowledge.
How did you first learn about transmedia storytelling?
I first became interested in transmedia storytelling after reading Patrick Carman’s novel, Skeleton Creek. My students responded to that book in a way that I had never seen before. After much investigating, I finally discovered that Skeleton Creek was an example of transmedia storytelling. Once I discovered that, I took a year to investigate, research, and experiment with my students to discover how these techniques could be used to create an immersive learning experience across the curriculum.
Your passion has always been the potential of transmedia storytelling in education, and I’ve always agreed that this multi-platform, engaging, digital, and community-based form of storytelling is a great way to help fix many of the problems with modern education. But for a teacher with a limited budget and limited time as it is, how do you put together something as engaging and complete as it needs to be?
I have often considered what a transmedia methodology means for the average classroom teacher. Although I don’t feel teachers need to know all of the complexities of transmedia, a basic understanding of these concepts is important. By nature educators are expert planners, and teachers can take it upon themselves to draw upon their existing resources to plan for and create their own innovative transmedia LearningWorlds.
In education, where does the money come from to produce a transmedia project? Is there a way for a production studio to put something together for multiple teachers around the country or world to use, and get the budget to do so?
I think there are multiple ways to finance the production of a transmedia project. Right now, I am involved in a fantastic independent project with Lance Weiler and his collaborative team. The project is Robot Heart Stories and it is raising its funds through Indie GoGo. Kickstarter is another great place to get a crowd-funded budget. In the case of Robot Heart, it was felt that the crowd funding mirrored the collaborative nature of the project. It seems that more and more digital media and learning funding priorities are focused on models of 21st century learning and are attuned specifically to creating these types of participatory learning experiences.
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