Voice and the Politics of Scale in Youths’ Video Documentaries on Immigration

• In Event: Digital Literacies and Mobility in Migrant Communities: Studying Youth Practices and Learning Across Spaces

Abstract

Studies of cultural diversity in literacy education have shown that the experiences of minority and immigrant students are marked by a disjuncture between the cultural and linguistic resources in their community and those resources that are valued for learning in schools (Pacheco, 2012). In this study, we explore how a multimedia journalism curriculum implemented in a high school with students from immigrant backgrounds was designed to leverage and facilitate the movement of representational resources across home, school and civic spaces. This analysis draws on Bakhtinian theory of voicing and dialogism (Bakhtin, 1981; Wortham, 2001) and the concept of scale from human geography and sociolinguistics (e.g., Collins, Slembrouck, & Baynham, 2009; Moore, 2008) to examine the dialogicality of voices across social, geographical and institutional spaces in the video documentaries on immigration produced by a group of students. We define voices as socio-ideological points of view of different groups in society (comprising of belief, values and social experiences) and the linguistic and semiotic expression of the point of view. The concept of scale is developed to analyze how geographical spaces, and the voices and people inhabiting these spaces, are socially differentiated as well as contested and reconfigured through human activity and political practices. Specifically, we examine how producing a short-form video documentary on immigration allows the students to bring the voices from their community in dialogue with voices from civic institutions and public discourses on immigration, thereby producing new representations of the scalar relationships between these spaces.

Our larger data set includes field notes and video recording of the multimedia journalism class; documentation of the videos and other artifacts produced by the students; and interviews with the students to reflect on the story they were telling and the representational choices that they made. In addition, we interviewed several professional documentary producers to understand the representational tools that they use in producing social issue documentaries. This paper uses data from both interviews with professional producers and the work of student producers to develop the concepts of voice and scale in understanding how media production may allow students to move across spaces (community, civic and institutional spaces) in learning. Our interviews with the professional producers show the ways in which they construct scale (by portraying particular characters as representative of social actors from particular communities) and how they reconstruct or re-order scalar relations (by juxtaposing characters from different communities or institutions, thereby creating a connection between them and using their voices to comment on and refract each other). In analyzing the student work, we focus on one student group that produced a video profiling the experience of the deportation of a student’s family member. We examine how the students use language, image, sound, and cinematography to construct multimodal representations of the voices of their profilees and representatives of civic and political organizations, and articulate the relationships between these voices. This study provides implications for how new forms of media production can offer opportunities for learning that reconstruct relationships across institutional boundaries.

Authors

• Wan Shun Eva Lam, Northwestern University

• Natalia Smirnov, Northwestern University

• Enid Marie Rosario-Ramos, University of Michigan