The Instructional document for teachers is the main tool for adapting and upscaling the methodology “Creative Audiovisual Writing and Reading”, developed in Italy over the past 30 years. It is for CrAL partners who will soon pilot the methodology, but also for any other organization interested in it.
The authors of the methodology are Annio Gioacchino Stasi and Mery Tortolini. Annio Gioacchino Stasi is a screenwriter, essayist, and writer. He has been working for 30 years on teaching creative processes in writing and filmmaking. Mery Tortolini is a painter, essayist, and teacher. Her artistic research is developed through the abstract sign with mixed media carving.
What can you find inside the Instructional document?
- Teaching strategies and approaches
Do you know which are the 5 components of successful cooperative learning? How to apply this and other instructional strategies to teaching media literacy to your students? Do you know how to use participatory teaching and learning? Gamify your lessons? Use visual thinking strategies as a teaching method? Integrate role models in educational practice?
The document presents these and other strategies to innovate the relationship between teachers and students, to make it more vibrant, reciprocal, and participatory.
- Basic principles and theory
What is the language of moving images, and can we teach it in school? How can we express our thoughts through images and what is the relationship between thought, image, and sound? Can the audio-visual language be a tool for observation and deep investigation, for individual and group expression, for looking beyond content creation?
The document tries to answer these questions through its account of previous research and theoretical, methodological, didactic, and artistic hypotheses.
- History of the methodology
A re-cap of 30+ years of research, working with students, experimenting, improving that evolved into the Laboratory of Image and Creative Writing at La Sapienza University in the late 90’s and later formed the basis for the Creative workshop “Sounds and Images in motion” at the audio-visual department of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Activities.
- Course structure
The document presents the blended course for teachers. The course consists of a series of online platform-based interactions and face-to-face workshops. It is divided into ten modules grouped in four sections. Learning outcomes are defined for each module. The document details the structure of the modules, including content and assignments.
This document is aimed to accompany trainers and teachers in the process of acquiring the methodology and implementing it in the classroom with their students. It’s available for free download in English, Croatian, Greek, Italian, Lithuanian, and Spanish in the Results section of this website.
In the words of the authors, “The skills and competences that derive from the CrAL training, allow us to develop our identity and help us understand that being together implies accepting the new and unexpected while rejecting the general proposition of stillness and systemic repetition of the uncritical society that we are generally asked to produce and participate in. We are no longer good consumers and observant citizens who conform to the laws of a predefined way of thinking. We become creators of a more just world.”
Could you be the next Creative Audiovisual Lab teacher? Get in touch!