Lesson 41: Digital Witness Exhibit, Storyboard Multimedia Components

Display the essential question: How can readers evaluate words and images for accuracy, perspective, and ethical use? Remind students that, for the past few lessons, they have been engaged in identifying, analyzing, and comparing sources for the Performance Task presentation.

Turn and Talk

Say these Directions: Take a moment to think about the prompt, then use a Turn and Talk routine to discuss your ideas with a partner:

• Ask: What is one image and text pairing that you plan to use in your presentation? What is one insight you would like to share with your audience?

  • I want to combine Toyo Miyatake’s picture of the mochi-making tradition from Seen and Unseen with survivor testimony about the camp food being bland at first. The insight I want to share is that over time, prisoners at Manzanar started participating to make sure they had foods that were important to them.

Connection to Today’s Learning

• Say: Today, we will be storyboarding, which is a more structured, visual version of what you just did in your conversations. We will be charting out how the images and text in our presentations fit together and what points we want to make in our captions and narration.

Explain that in sharing text and images from other sources, it is important to follow certain ethical guidelines. Use a Think-Aloud routine to model how to pair text and images. Discuss as a class examples of ethical and unethical pairings.

Combining Text and Images Ethically

Say these Directions: It is important that your audience can find more information about your presentation topic if they want, check facts about what they heard, and come away from the presentation with an accurate understanding of the images they saw. In order to ensure this, use the following guidelines when creating your captions:

1. Identify and credit all of the sources used to compile evidence

2. Ensure that captions, quotes, and narrative accurately reflects included images

Depending on the format you wish the presentations to follow, you may wish to specify exactly how students will credit their sources:

• If the exhibits are going to be submitted as a narrated PowerPoint presentation, a slide at the end could provide a reference list with names, titles, and page numbers.

• If the exhibits are submitted in video form, it may be preferable to have students submit a typed reference list to accompany the video.

• At a minimum, students’ image captions and their quotations from written texts should refer to the source:

  • Ex. “Photograph of Louise Tami Nakamura by Ansel Adams, Seen and Unseen p. 97.”

  • Ex. “It was a melancholy, complex feeling.” (Sadae Takizawa, Seen and Unseen p. 35)

To show how to pair text and images for accuracy, provide students with a sample photograph and suggest two or more different ways to support it with quotation or paraphrase. For example, display the photo of Louise Tami Nakamura and offer the following accompanying texts:

• “Joyce Nakamura complained of the sun in her eyes when Ansel Adams visited to take her picture.”

  • Say: The photo is of a real person, and the text is a true statement about something that happened at camp. But if we place the photo and text next to each other without explanation, audiences could be confused into thinking Joyce is the girl in the photo.

• “Louise Tami Nakamura posed for this photo by Ansel Adams, whose goal was to depict the camp prisoners as young, cheerful, and neighborly.”

  • Say: This is a more accurate option because it names the person who actually appears in the photo and explains the photo’s wider purpose.

• “‘Everything in a picture is not necessarily true,’ observed Taira Fukushima, who arrived at Manzanar when he was a teenager.”

  • Say: This is another acceptable pairing because it is clear from context that Taira Fukushima, then a teenage boy, is a different person from the little girl in the photo. Audiences can think about the relationship between Fukushima’s statement and the photo of Nakamura without potentially misidentifying the subject.

Lead discussion of how these three examples converge on a basic principle: when we pair text with an image, we have an opportunity to explain different aspects of the image, but an obligation not to mislead our audience.

Then, present another photo juxtaposed with a potentially misleading quote or statement from Seen and Unseen. Invite students to identify and correct the issue.

• For example, display the photo on p. 69 with the caption “Archie Miyatake initially wanted to answer ‘no’ on the loyalty questionnaire, but his parents convinced him to answer ‘yes’ and declare his allegiance to the United States.”

• Ask: What is misleading about this image–text pairing?

  • From reading the text, a person watching the presentation could easily get the idea that the young man in the picture is Archie Miyatake. They might even think that Archie Miyatake agreed to serve in the U.S. Army when he said “yes” on the questionnaire. But while Archie Miyatake answered “yes” to the loyalty question, he did not agree to fight in World War II.

• Ask: How could you fix it?

  • We could make the text a little longer to clarify: “While young men like the soldier pictured here volunteered for military service, others, like Archie Miyatake, refused to fight in the war for the country that had imprisoned them.”

Provide students with a confidence continuum (i.e., 1–5). As needed, model how to demonstrate a level of confidence using the continuum.

Connection to Today’s Learning

• Say: Remember that in making your presentation, you have multiple ways to clarify the relationship between the image and the text. You can caption images for clarity, add a little contextual information to quotes that you display, or include details in your narration that guide audiences to an accurate interpretation. The main thing to avoid is simply dropping images and text together and assuming audiences will know what you mean to convey.

Before students begin, direct them to the Digital Witness Exhibit Performance Task handout. Ask them to keep it visible as they storyboard and check that their planned images, testimony pairings, and narration notes address each criterion — particularly Multimodal Design and Narration Script & Captions.

Provide students with the Storyboard graphic organizer and, if needed, briefly discuss its features. Then, allow them some time to storyboard their presentation using the images, anchor text excerpts, and external sources. Reassure students that they are not being asked to create a full script from scratch in half an hour: the storyboard is the “skeleton” or framework, and the exact words of the narration can be written in a subsequent lesson.

Storyboard Exhibit/Podcast (W.7.5, SL.7.5) (30 minutes)

Say these Directions: Use the Storyboard graphic organizer to plan your presentation. For each image you plan to show:

• Write the source of the image with enough detail to find it again.

• Describe or sketch the image clearly enough that you can identify it later.

• Note the quotation you plan to include.

• Write brief notes for your narration script.

• Say: Remember that you can use your T-Chart and Three-Column Chart, as well as any other notes you accumulated during your research.

Students can use the Storyboard graphic organizer in various ways depending on how much detail they are prepared to add. The simplest way is just to treat every “Scene” as an image–text pairing.

Another approach, for students who are ready to record their narration ideas in more detail, is to use one column of the organizer for each image–text pair, using the upper large box at top to record the image and text and the lower large box to write down narration notes.

Encourage students to represent the images in whatever way is convenient for them: a rough sketch with page number, a brief text description, or even a screen clipping if working digitally.

SAMPLE RESPONSE

Once students have created their storyboards, have them form pairs and discuss their work with a peer to obtain feedback.

Say these Directions: As you discuss your storyboards, consider these questions:

• Is it clear why this image and this text excerpt are being paired?

• Is there potential for the audience to misunderstand the image based on the text? How will the presentation author address this?

• Do the narration notes show how the captions and script will add to the image and text rather than just describing the contents?

• Is the overall presentation, as sketched out in the storyboard, in line with the author’s research question?

Lead students in a brief whole-group discussion that details the next steps of drafting their presentations.

Say these Directions: Take a minute to read and think about the questions below. Prepare to share your ideas with the class.

• Ask: What is one opportunity you can see as you continue to draft, revise, and record your presentation?

  • I think I have an opportunity to share how holidays at Manzanar were special times for the prisoners despite their bleak circumstances. I want to show how those incarcerated at Manzanar celebrated different holidays to keep their spirits up and strengthen family ties.

• Ask: What is one challenge you expect to encounter while drafting your presentation?

  • A challenge will be making sure I can find images or descriptions of both Western and Japanese holiday traditions since both were important to many Japanese Americans at Manzanar.

Provide students with additional copies of the Storyboard graphic organizer.

Read these Directions: Review your storyboard. Does it include all the visual components you want, in the order you want? Note changes you wish to make in any of these three ways:

• For small changes, write “to-do” notes in your Journal

• To reorder or add material, make annotations to your storyboards from today

• To make major changes, revise your storyboard on a fresh copy