Forms of Adaptational Writing and How They Challenge Scholarly Analysis

I've just been attending another conference - the international F. Scott Fitzgerald event held at my home university.  The details are accessible at http://fscottfitzgeraldconference2015.baskent.edu.tr/.  It's been a tiring day listening to a variety of papers on a selection of topics, but inevitably the main focus of attention has centered on THE GREAT GATSBY, not just because it's Fitzgerald's best-known work, but because it has been adapted so many times for different media.  Even non-literary specialists can contribute to this type of event, especially if they're into the most recent version starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

The opening speech offered a close analysis of time in THE GREAT GATSBY, using the image of the broken clock in Nick Carraway's house in Chapter Five of the novel as a starting-point for a complex evaluation encompassing Einstein's theory of relativity as well as modernist concepts of science.  I admired the speaker for his dedicaton as well as the close structure of his piece, each point carefully illustrated with quotations from the text.

As the presentation unfolded, however, and the speaker talked about the interiority of Fitzgerald's prose, I began to wonder whether his form of academic discourse really could demonstrate how and why the novel has exerted such a particular fascination on readers worldwide ever since it first appeared in 1925.  I remember reading it for the first time in 1976, when I had to do a paper for my "O" Level English Literature course on "Flawed Heroes," and made a labored comparison between Fitzgerald's piece and Thomas Hardy's THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE.  Since then the novel has never failed to move me close to tears, through repeated readings and viewings of adaptations across different media - radio, cinema, television.  The theme of Gatsby's basic optimism and trust being gradually exposed in a world of surfaces has always seemed enduringly popular in any world devoted to capitalist values.

While reading the novel or watching an adaptation, I believe that Fitzgerald's prose appeals to us not just on a conscious but on a subliminal level, reminding us of just how difficult it is to adapt to new environments, especially the kind of environments whose inhabitants remain largely indifferent unless you are fabulously wealthy.  It is Gatsby's trşumph, but ultimately his tragedy, that he seems to adapt to the world of Long Island high society, but discovers to his cost that he can never be part of it.  His exploits are ours; whenever we move to a new culture, either by emigrating or simply shifting to a new city (or even suburb), we have to learn how to adapt ourselves, while the worlds we inhabit have to adapt likewise to accommodate us.

Such issues, I think, help to explain why THE GREAT GATSBY is a great work of literature, prompting us to look beyond the words on the page and imaginatively empathize with what Fitzgerald is trying to tell us.  It's a prime example of what might be termed the "beyond-wordism" of great texts, engaging our subjectivities and prompting us to find a lot of ourselves in Gatsby.  We all have our Gatsbyesque stories to tell; they might not be as spectacular as Fitzgerald's, but they are similar in tone and outcome.

Listening to the speaker offering a Leavisite exegesis of Fitzgerald's text, I wondered whether perhaps this form of analysis might miss the novel's subliminal quality: detail might overwhelm the design, so to speak. I certainly admired what the speaker had done, and the amount of time and energy he had spent putting the piece together, but I did feel there was something Casaubonesque about it, reminiscent of that unfortunate character in George Eliot's MIDDLEMARCH who spends his entire life imprisoned in an ivory tower and becomes all but impervious to the life unfolding around him.

What I'm saying is that perhaps close textual analysis is counter-productive to the experience of a novel or film or any fictional text.  Maybe we should learn to sit back and let them wash over us; to savor the brilliance of the writing and understand how it has the capacity to change our lives, or at least make us reflect on our existing lives and learn how to adapt to new experiences.  Leave aside scholarly objectivity and let subjectivities roll - or, better still, forget the distinctions between the two and just ENJOY!!

Adaptation Studies and Adaptive Learning

It’s amazing what we can find while trawling the online archives.  I came across a blog recently entitled Adaptive Learning in ELT, a guide to alternative forms of ELT and language learning written by Philip Kerr, a teacher trainer, lecturer and materials writer (https://adaptivelearninginelt.wordpress.com/category/a-guide-to-adaptive-learning/). The blog describes a kind of approach that apparently will “impact on the lives of language teachers very soon,”; if they do not become more aware of what’s happening, they might be out of a job very soon.  It involves a (re-)consideration of educative methods “in the bright light of particular, local contexts.”

Adaptive learning is apparently driven by technology – an “online learning and teaching software that uses an Intelligent Teaching system to adapt online learning to the student’s level of knowledge.”  Software can deliver individualized study programs; following a simple test of different reasoning skills, it can provide a personalized curriculum that can be measured against that of other online learners.  It might involve a process of gamification – in other words, obtaining points for having completed various tastes – but this might prove of limited interest. 

To work out the parameters of adaptive learning, it is necessary to obtain particular data about learners: identity data (who are you?); user interaction data (finding out one’s online habits so as to improve user experience and retention); inferred content data (working out how a piece of content ‘performs’ across different users); system-wide data (grades, disciplinary records, and attendance information); and inferred student data (what does a learner know and how do they respond?)

Once such platforms have been created, textbook companies will be able to produce and modify content according to context; providing greater contact between companies and individual educators.  This should lead to more individualized learning, with a consequent improvement in particular outcomes and testing methods.  Educators and learners can avail themselves of the software to forge new alliances, taking into account their local needs, and hence adapt themselves continually using the software as a basis.

There are snags: language educators might find it difficult to use this software with mixed ability classes; who will pay for the training needed to implement the schemes using the software; how will educators respond to materials that might threaten their future job security; and how will learners respond to adaptive learning, once it becomes something “different”?  Kerr recommends that problems should be identified and prioritized before adaptive learning is presented as “the solution.”  Commercial interests should not be allowed to assume more significance than the needs of individual learners.

Kerr draws a distinction between “theory” and “practice,” and suggests that any educational ideas such as adaptive learning need to be subject to adaptive processes – for example, perceived significance (the idea must answer a question central to the question); philosophical complexity (adaptive learning must mesh with educator beliefs); occupational realism (it must be possible for the idea to be put into immediate use); and transportability (the idea must be rendered accessible in a form that educators can access).  Kerr believes that “big bucks” might win the educational debate; their emphasis on introducing the software might instigate the “creative disruption” that adaptivity promises.  Turkey provides an ideal venue to experiment with this new software; it has “a large and young population,” with a large government-funded project designed to increase English awareness in schools; it has launched one of the biggest EdTech projects in the world; and it has one of the world’s highest proportion of internet users.

Kerr’s discussion is highly intriguing, focusing on a conflict between individuals and institutions that lie at the heart of every adaptive exchange.  Yet there seems to be inherent complacencies at the heart of his arguments that might prove disconcerting for some.  First, he assumes that computer-assisted learning will be the bread-and-butter of all classroom exchanges in the future.  I am no ostrich, hiding my head in the sand from new technological development; but it is a fact that the majority of language learners in the Turkish context have only limited access to technology.  Second, the model of learning he proposes is inherently top-down, despite its emphasis on learner empowerment.  They have to make use of technology provided for them by the textbook and/or computer companies.  The fact that learners have the power both to subvert and challenge strategies determined in advance by the companies.  Third, Kerr’s arguments make no mention of the relationship between adaptation and communication at the verbal and nonverbal levels.  Anyone conversant with the work of Piaget and Bruner understands that adaptation lies at the heart of the ways in which we come to terms with the world and the people within it.  To assume that adaptivity centers solely round the relationship of individual learners to the software they might use is to omit the fundamental basis on which we learn how to adapt.

Perhaps most significantly, Kerr’s blog makes no mention of how “adaptation” might work in other disciplines, especially adaptation studies with its focus on transmediality, transformation and the viewers’, artists’ and writers’ relationship to the process of (re)shaping texts.  The way in which people come to terms with the texts they watch, write or film is much the same as the way in which they learn English; it’s a lot to do with mental processes, drawing on the imagination as well as the creative instinct – the kind of things that no textbook publishers can ever really regulate.

Although couched in the terms of being a “brave new world” of ELT, adaptivity, with its emphasis on top-strategies, contains occasional echoes of the world created in Huxley’s famous novel of the same name in which learners are given online soma so as to restrict rather than promote their creative (and hence subversive) instincts.  Call me antediluvian if you wish, but I’ve come to learn in recent years that no one can predict the way “adaptation studies” as a psychological as well as a textual process will affect people.

Self-Reflexive Adaptation: The Significance of "Mesearch"

I was intrigued to read a recent article in the Times Higher Education Supplement (19 March 2015) about the rise of “mesearch” as an academic field of study.  Created out of a desire to deconstruct academic master narratives, it can be best defined as a study of “the intimate and inextricable connections between […] life experiences […] and academic research.”  This requires individuals to write about the uniqueness of their experiences in terms of encountering literary and other texts and articulating them through their bodies, their psyche or other aspects of one’s personality.  Such approaches prove exceptionally useful in articulating one’s sense of self; but often they can be dismissed by one’s academic colleagues as “inappropriate.”  The attempt to force a wedge between self and scholarship can be ultimately incapacitating: “The duality of research as, on the one hand, a process of engagement led by rationality and, on the other hand, a disavowal of me and my irrational and unconscious emotions and senses, evoked bodily responses.  These responses have no physical explanation, but at the same time they have a physical manifestation.”  To deny the element of the personal in academic research can prove debilitating.  On the other hand, to acknowledge the importance of the “I” can enhance our practice at three different levels – with oneself, with one’s research and through interaction with learners.  Our teaching can prove better, more meaningful and more engaged, because we are researching at the same time – in other words, providing that crucial link between teaching and research that often seems sadly absent in contemporary academia.  bell hooks once wrote: “The classroom […] remains a location of possibility […] we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart […] to move beyond boundaries, to transgress.  This is education as the practice of freedom.”  “Mesearch” provides that vital component of defining who we are and what we teach and research.

Since the traumatic experience of my cancer treatment last year, I have become more and more aware of the importance of “mesearch.”  Using the theories of Piaget and Jerome Bruner as a guide, I have come to understand how “adaptation studies,” is not simply restricted to the process of transforming texts but requires us to (re)consider the relationship between the self and the text.  How we view the text, and how we are transformed by it, is even more significant than looking at how the text itself is transformed across media.  The word “text” is also highly ambiguous; it doesn’t just refer to the written text used in film and television adaptations, but can apply to any object we encounter.  Learners can be considered as texts; so can other works of art such as paintings, music – even food.

Perhaps more importantly, I have come to understand that “mesearch” is not just confined to the academy, but can occur at any time.  It is part of a process of lifelong learning, based on the belief that we are continually adapting to changing situations around us.  Hence “mesearch” can be perhaps more precisely defined as the study of a continuous process of self-adaptation.

I became acutely aware of this process at work when I recently visited the Nev Gallery in Ankara to view the paintings of the Turkish artist Selim Cebeci.  The works were fascinating in themselves; the artist possesses a unique quality to capture people involved in a series of domestic tasks – cooking, conversing, or sitting by the window – with their faces illumined in a variety of light and shade.  He values the ordinary, and by doing so transforms it into the extraordinary.  As I considered the paintings, however, I became aware of how Cebeci asks us to enter into an unspoken conversation with his subjects (and, by extension, Cebeci himself).  We bring to mind similar domestic situations that we have experienced in the past, and use them to evaluate the subjects represented in his work.  In that process of evaluation, we respond at a visceral level to color, light and shade, the thickness of the paint, and other artistic techniques, as well as to the “stories” told in the painting.  This process of communication between artist and viewer is emotional rather than detached; we value the immediacy of our responses. 

As I walked round the gallery, I became aware of how Cebeci’s work stimulated me to reflect on my past experiences of similar domestic experiences and re-evaluate them.  Did I adopt the same poses when I sat by the window?  Was I as fond of spontaneous conversation as his subjects seemed to be?  And were the subjects of such conversations “important” or simply “trivial”?  Did it really matter?  By encouraging me to reflect in this way, Cebeci was helping me to continue the process of “mesearch”; to understand at a deeper level how I was redefining the narratives by which I make sense of the world around me, and hence performing a process of self-adaptation.  This process has been well explained in Jerome Bruner’s seminal work on adaptation studies.  Once I had quit the gallery, I wrote down some notes in my diary, which later encouraged me to listen more closely to what my learners were saying (or not saying) in class. 

“Mesearch” might be considered “unacademic” or “unscholarly” by many of our colleagues, but to me it is exceptionally liberating, forcing me to consider at a deeper level my rationale for doing research (am I doing it just to further my career, or can it help me to grow as a personality) and reconsider its relationship to my pedagogic practice.  It helps me to understand how and why adaptation studies is such an important area of academic inquiry – provided, of course, that we are prepared to move away from that rather tired nexus of literature-film-media.  

More on Adaptation Studies, Case-Studies and "Theory"

I am encouraged by the level of comments generated by an earlier post on the subject, where I concentrated on the importance of recognizing cultural difference, as well as relating adaptation studies to Jerome Bruner’s notion of story-making.

In re-considering the relationship between the “theoretical” and “practical” aspects of adaptation, I was reminded of a panel, staged in Ankara in 1997, designed to look at the “theoretical” and “practical” aspects of cultural studies.  At that time I was quite vehement in my opposition to postcolonial theory, based on the belief that, as the Republic of Turkey had never actually been colonized, it had little or no significance in the local context.  Those local academics who practiced it might have willingly allowed themselves to be colonized by western-originated theories.  I asserted instead that perhaps we should concentrate on the “real business” of inter- and/or cross-cultural analysis.

Now the intellectual pendulum has changed completely.  Perhaps we need to theorize a little more about what “adaptation studies” actually is, and the effect not only on the texts adapted, but on those who instigate the adaptive process – writers and other creative personnel.  Perhaps this can be accomplished through a profusion of case-studies, or perhaps we need to stand apart slightly from the minutiae of what is “gained” and “lost” through adaptation and consider in more abstract terms questions such as “why adaptation?” 

This may involve a rethink of the way we “do” adaptation studies.  In looking at how source-texts are transformed – in the media, for instance – maybe we need to move away from plot and/or characterization and focus instead on the relationship between psychology and adaptation, and the way in which that relationship influences the ways in which a text is transformed.  The rationale behind this approach is based on the belief that “adaptation” is something unique, different from “translation” or “appropriation” in its emphasis on the ways in which human beings learn how to make sense of the world around them (as Piaget has repeatedly observed).  On this view an adapted text represents something of an intervention, a comment on the world in which it has been produced as well as received.

In this model, the question of equivalence is irrelevant; the adapted text is a text in its own right, produced for quite different purposes to the source-text.  Textual analysis might be significant, but only insofar as it helps us to understand the purposes of those involved in the adaptation.  Authorial intention is fundamental, despite what Patrick Cattrysse tells us.  More importantly, by looking at how the adaptation has been received by audiences, critics and other members of different groups, we can understand the importance of cultural difference; what a screenplay writer intends, and how an audience responds to that intention, are often completely different.

In terms of the debate I engaged with many years ago, the issue of “postcolonialism” retains its significance, based on the belief that different readers and audiences have different views of what the term involves.  By comparing and contrasting such views, through discussion and/or analysis, we learn to “adapt” our views of what postcolonialism actually is.  Through such discussions, we are inevitably conducting inter- and intracultural analysis.  There is no real distinction between “theory” and “practice” in this model; they are simply two sides of the same intellectual coin.

The same process also applies to the case-study.  If that case-study addresses the issue of “adaptation” and what it involves, rather than simply conducting a comparative analysis between source- and target texts for their own sake (i.e. what is “gained” and “lost”), then it has the potential to make a serious contribution to our theoretical understanding.  Likewise a theoretical analysis of adaptation that uses case-studies to make its points helps us to appreciate better the transcultural possibilities of the discipline.  There is no real binarist distinction between “theory” and “practice”; the two are inseparable.

I think I have really come to understand this in a recent graduate course conducted with teachers of English, where they use their classroom experiences of how their learners tried to adapt (or failed to adapt) to a text as a basis for re-evaluating their pedagogic practice.  This kind of reflection helps them to become more “adaptive” in orientation, and thereby appreciate better the link between adaptation studies and psychology.  I wonder if the same happens in the media studies classroom?  I do hope so.   

Adaptation Studies and the "Much Maligned" Case-Study

I’ve recently received two calls for papers that both imply that there is something intellectually questionable about the case-study model of adaptation.  One describes it as “much-maligned”; the other calls it “rather limiting and limited,” especially when compared to the “big questions” of adaptation, the history of adaptation, and on adaptation as scholarly practice.

Patrick Cattrysse has a lot to answer for.  In his recent Descriptive Adaptation Studies (2014) he derides the “endless accumulation of ad hoc case studies,” which hitherto have dominated much adaptation studies research, and advocates instead a general focus on “corpus-based research into wider trends of adaptational behavior and the roles and functions of sets of adaptations.”  He cites my edited collection Adaptation, Translation and Transformation (2012) as an example of the former approach, in which the various contributors offer diverse interventions as to what the terms “adaptation” and “translation” might signify in various contexts, and how practitioners have tried to develop a relationship between the two.

What disturbs me about all these observations is that they assume some kind of binary opposition between the particular and the general; the particularized “case-study” cannot address the more “general” questions of adaptation studies and its future theoretical developments.  Such oppositions, I believe, inhibit rather than benefit future research, as they impose a western-originated framework on a discipline which, by its very nature, should be transnational in focus.

My attention was drawn once again to this issue yesterday, when I visited the Ankara State Museum of Painting and Sculpture (Ankara Devlet Resim ve Heykel Müzesi).  Opened in 1930 in a purpose-built structure, it houses a rich collection of Turkish art from the late nineteenth century to the present day.  As in all museums, the work of individual artists is prominently on display; they include Şeker Ahmet Paşa, Zekai Paşa, Halil Paşa, İbrahim Çallı, Hikmet Onat and Namık İsmail.

What is perhaps more significant, however, is the purpose for which the museum was intended.  Opened by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, it was designed to foster the cultural development of the nation by providing an outlet for artists to show off their work.  This was considered highly significant: many of them had studied abroad, and Atatürk wanted to show how they had absorbed the lessons of other artistic traditions (in the west and elsewhere) and used them to create new forms.  The exhibits show distinct Impressionist, Cubist, and Dadaist influences, for instance.

Although the individual artists adapted their knowledge to create idiosyncratic, often striking works, their paintings served a more general purpose of advancing the nation’s sense of cultural well-being.  On this view, the relationship between general and particular is not oppositional but symbiotic; one cannot exist without the other.  As I walked around the gallery, looking at the paintings with subjects as diverse as Anatolian landscapes past and present, İstanbul sea-views, Ottoman dignitaries and Atatürk himself, I could not help but recall how many creative individuals practiced (and continue to practice) their work in the belief that they are serving the nation.  They might be recognized as artists in their own right – great actors, film stars, painters, and so on – but they also claim a higher purpose. 

While Ayşe H. Köksal is right in claiming that this model can be considered exclusivist insofar as it is designed “not so much to shore up an existing [Ottoman] social order as to provide the script for a new [Kemalist] one” (although this is not always the case), the fact remains that the case-study (in this case, the individual art-work contained within the framework of the Ankara State Museum) tells us a lot about the relationship between adaptation and cultural politics.  Moreover this model is defiantly transnational; how many other regimes have employed similar strategies in order to reinforce state ideologies?

In Making Stories (2002), Jerome Bruner offers a model of adaptation based on an interplay between individuals and the communities they inhabit.  Individuals learn how to “adapt” to their environments through socialization – learning behavioral, artistic and psychological conventions.  At the same time they initiate a process of adaptation within their environments through a variety of strategies, including cultural products such as films, paintings, or plays.  These products can help transform the way people think about the world around them.  This continual process of give-and-take - of individuals adapting to and at the same time inspiring others to adapt – is how societies evolve.

To think otherwise – by favoring a “general” at the expense of a “particular” focus on adaptation - is to re-invoke a colonialist way of thinking which adaptation studies consciously seeks to avoid, as its practitioners try and find ways of understanding one another, as well as looking for transnational and transdisciplinary models.

I appreciate the amount of work being undertaken in the discipline, but I wish that some of the thinking could be a little more “out of the box.”

Adaptation and Power

The politics of power might seem an odd subject to discuss in relation to adaptation – unless, of course, we look at the ways in which socio-political conditions shaped the ways in which a text was transformed.

But perhaps there is another way of looking at this issue.  I was struck by this as I read a comment made on one of my pieces by a colleague; although I had quoted Jean Piaget’s views on adaptation as a psychological process, he insisted that “adaptation is text.”  I was a little puzzled by this observation, until I realized that he was simply rehearsing the basic premise behind most of the “adaptation studies” as currently practiced (and published).  The process of textual transformation predominates, with the bulk of attention being devoted to the shifting relationship(s) between source and target texts.  I am not trying to denigrate this mode of analysis (I still employ it myself in many of my writings), but I would argue that this is only one of a plurality of possible approaches available to anyone interested in “adaptation studies.”  I am also interested in the psychological aspects of adaptation, which only have a tenuous relationship to the idea of “text” – unless we interpret that term in its broadest sense to cover any phenomenon we encounter, both human as well as non-human.  I would prefer to use the term “encounter” rather than “text,” so that we can allow for a plurality of viewpoints as well as prioritizing individuals as authors of their particular stories (which we might define more precisely as modus operandi).

The term “plurality” is important here: to insist that “adaptation is text,” while allowing for no other (re-)constructions does not allow for individual possibilities, and risks imposing the kind of limiting discourse on a discipline that by its very nature resists such limitations.  To put it another way, we are allowing ourselves to be guided by our peers, rather than trusting in ourselves and our own judgments.  We are willingly subjecting ourselves to an external author, rather than accepting the fact that we are authors of our own stories.

The importance of this dictum was brought home to me as I received the latest issue of my departmental journal, the Baskent University Journal of Education (BUJE) (http://buje.baskent.edu.tr/index.php/buje/issue/current).  The majority of the articles employ a basic methodology of using statistical surveys and questionnaires to prove a particular educational point, based on the belief that education studies are “scientific” and can therefore be proved through hard evidence.  My contribution, written to mark the passing of Talât Saït Halman, a poet, translator and all-round Renaissance man as well as being the Turkish Republic’s first Minister of Culture, uses a variety of evidence to emphasize the importance of randomness in education; by acknowledging the unpredictable or the unplanned, we can learn how to enjoy ourselves and learn as a result (http://buje.baskent.edu.tr/index.php/buje/article/view/65).  I am not claiming for one moment that one approach is academically “better” than another, but rather allowing for the existence of both.  Giving individuals the space to grow, think, or adapt in their own way not only helps to develop self-determination, but allows for the development of spontaneous thinking – the possibility of creating “Aha” moments, through which we discover something about ourselves and our relationship to the work we are doing.

What I am arguing for is that adaptation studies is not just something we practice in the academy, but rules every aspect of our own lives.  It helps to bridge the gap between “work” and “play,” “home” and “school” or “office,” “science” and “art,” and by doing so helps us to reflect on the viability of such binary oppositions.  Perhaps we need to develop alternative ways of thinking and being, both inside and outside the classroom or the academy.  If such is the case, then we need to set aside any pre-ordained or pre-learned definitions of what adaptation “should” or “shouldn’t” be (which symbolize the powers trying to rule the way we think), and work out our own ideas.  By doing so we come to accept that change rules our lives: what we think adaptation represents for us today might not be what we think tomorrow.  The prospect is an enticing one – well, for me, at least.  

Adaptation Studies and Active Literacy

Despite having written and published extensively in the field of adaptation studies and pedagogy (including two co-edited volumes THE PEDAGOGY OF ADAPTATION and REDEFINING ADAPTATION STUDIES (2010), as well as ADAPTATION STUDIES AND LEARNING (2013)), I have hitherto found it difficult to address the question posed by Thomas Leitch in his FILM ADAPTATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS, about how to use adaptation studies to promote “active literacy.”

For Barton Palmer, writing in Film Quarterly, this model represents a form of “Deweyesque engagement in rewriting” – which I take to mean a form of education designed to promote individual talents, as well as an ability to use such talents for the greater good.  Adaptation enables learners to experience and interact with the curriculum, as well as experiment for themselves in writing and learning.

In general terms, this is a laudable aim; but I have always wondered how this “active literacy” could be assessed.  In ADAPTATION STUDIES AND LEARNING, Tony Gurr and myself suggested that this should be done collaboratively, with learners and teachers participating in a give-and-take process of evaluation, eventually arriving at some consensus of opinion.  This might sound laudable in theory, but might be difficult to achieve in practice, especially when educators are faced with large classes at the undergraduate level.

After having read Stephen Apkon’s inspiring book THE AGE OF THE IMAGE: REDEFINING LITERACY IN A WORLD OF SCREENS (Farrar, Strous & Giroux, 2013), perhaps I am now in a better position to understand how “active literacy” might be encouraged in the classroom.  Apkon argues persuasively that, in a world that is awash in visual storytelling, we have to redefine our pedagogical approaches to take into account how storytelling works in the human brain, and on the practical value of literacy in real-world situations.

Rather than confining ourselves to written assignments, we should encourage learners to research, write, revise, edit and produce videos, using archival material as well as their own ideas.  This form of assignment teaches learners “not only how to read and write, but also how to listen and speak, in all the media that really matter” (212).  We do not need to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak (by rejecting written assignments altogether), but we need to redefine our educational methods through the prism of visual communication.

Modes of assessment should encompass familiar criteria – problem-solving and group participation – but also assess performative potential: visually-oriented projects can inspire a form of creative expression that some learners have never previously discovered.  Giving them the chance to show off their work in public, as well as perform in front of the camera, can inspire the kind of self-confidence that simply does not exist with exclusively written activities.

Perhaps more significantly, Apkon argues that visually-oriented activities help to establish relations between learners across social and cultural boundaries.  The realities of problem-solving, planning and communication (all part of the experience of filmmaking) provides a catalyst for the development of critical life-skills and “the kind of social and emotional learning our schools do not provide” (217).

Apkon offers a five-point plan for measuring visual literacy.  He believes that, when they graduate at the secondary and/or the tertiary levels, all learners should be able to:-

·        Write a script for a short video segment;

·        Shoot a coherent piece of film narrative with the correct literate elements of expression;

·        Edit video out of raw material into a persuasive argument;

·        Access channels of distribution, including the Internet;

·        Critically understand and deconstruct visual media.

Such objectives mesh in with the objectives of twenty-first century learning, as defined by the National Council of Teachers of English in 2008: learners need to a) develop proficiency with the tools of technology; b) Build relationships with others to solve problems cross-culturally and collaboratively; c) Analyze and evaluate multiple streams of information; d) Evaluate multimedia texts; and e) Design and share information for global communities for a variety of purposes.

In this educational model, “adaptation studies” not only requires learners to rewrite source-texts, but they have to learn how to adapt to one another.  Likewise educators have to redefine their roles; they are no longer sources of knowledge but participants in the collaborative process, guiding learners as well as offering encouragement in their own processes of self-discovery.

“Active literacy” as defined by Leitch and filtered through Akpon’s suggestions, emphasizes the importance of activity; everyone has to be involved in the process of creation, in the belief that their work is not just designed to pass exams (or obtain good grades), but represents a positive contribution towards cross-cultural understanding.  The Internet and/or social media provide an invaluable means to facilitate this process.  Adaptation studies not only involve a process of personal development but should foster the desire to share one’s insights and/or cultural products with others.  As the old saying goes, two heads are better than one.