Reification

I feel like the multi model project has been a long process. Since the first week or so of class I have been anxious and nervous to create some movie about something I have learned. I chose to do my project about "My life as RA," for my job as a resident advisor is a HUGE part of my life and it is something that I have been learning for the past two years. Since my job is also my life, I spend a lot of time in my project explaining what I do. When I made my movie I tried to focus on my residents and other RAs who are in my affinity group as my main audience. My residents are the people I see everyday, the people I help, and the people that inspire me to do what I do. I believe my feelings towards the job show through my narrative because I talk about first year students throughout and my pictures are primarily pictures of events with my girls.

The labor for this project started with collecting pictures and writing my narrative. I spent about a week figuring out what I wanted to say and what I wanted to get across to my residents. I went through many drafts and had to cut a section out when I began putting my movie together for the sake of time. Having little experience with this kind of technology, I think most of my labor was spent learning how to put all the pieces together in the windows program. I sent emails out for help, I called my boyfriend, and asked many friends to show me how to use different features. I struggled most with having music and my narrative play at the same time. After watching my video you may notice the only music is at the end with the credits. I spent hours trying to match the two audio tracks but I couldn't get them to play together with the narrative clearly standing out. I thought the narrative was more important than having music to go with my pictures and video, so I decided to just add a short music clip at the end. Another labor areas was figuring out how to add video clips to the movie. I have had the same digital camera for two years and I had never once played with the recording feature. I had some of my residents help me figure out what clips of the floor I should take. It was neat having the people my movie is about help me in the making process. I think it was powerful to have my audience also see me in the process, and many of my residents enjoyed watching the movie when I was finished.

As I was making the movie I really wanted to show what my life was like. I feel learning the components of my job was a learning task in its own. Since my audience is my residents and fellow RAs my discussion on learning is based on Gee, but never directly stated. I categorized my learning into three components: patience, understanding, and humility. These components fit with Gee's concepts of self-knowledge and the bottom-up basic skill principles. I feel that in the RA job I have learned about myself and how to deal with people. Being around people and in your job constantly forces a person to find out what is important, how to juggle their time, and how you react to different situations. Gee's bottom-up basic skill principle also applies for I state in my narrative that I am still learning new things from my girls each day. Being hands on and in the job is really the only way to learn and fully understand it. My experiences each day shape me for the next experience to come.

I decided to define my learning into three simple components for a few reasons. First, the three components seemed practical and useful to my audience. My residents are able to understand what I am expressing and my affinity group can easily relate. Second, my focus for my movie is my job and my life. Using three components to sum up what I do and how I have learned it seemed to fit into the feel of my movie. My movie is focused on my residents and learning how to make their first year a positive one. If I had focused more on Gee specifically, my overall message and feel would have been lost.