Kara Hisatake

Over the past three years, I have seen Kara grow into a confident young scholar who uses technology to create innovative learning opportunities for her students. I was privileged to work with Kara to develop a new, digital storytelling assignment for her course – Pacific Rim Discourse: Pacific Island Literatures. She was eager to bring new modes of learning to facilitate visual literacies. As such, she developed an assignment that invited her students to annotate media objects so they could build argumentation around images and film alongside close reading. She was willing to experiment with new technologies and implemented a Scalar assignment that integrated annotation, analytical writing, and critical theory. The assignment succeeded: Kara’s students created narratives that critiqued and interrogated the way the Pacific Islands and Pacific Islanders have been imagined and defined by film and literature. The multi-modal assignment fit the learning objectives of the class well, allowing students to interact with multiple forms of literary representation.

More, Kara scaffolded the assignment so that students built skills and content throughout the class. By breaking the assignment into three separate activities, she highlighted the analytical benefits of annotation and curation. This structure also allowed students to build confidence with Scalar while developing new skills in how to read visual materials. The assignment structure allowed students to go beyond an initial hesitation with technology and create meaningful arguments with the tool.

— Rachel Deblinger, UCLA Library Program Director