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The Five Contexts in Documentary Filmmaking

Mon, April 16, 10:35am to 12:05pm, Millennium Broadway New York Times Square, Floor: Fourth Floor, Room 4.11

Abstract

Purpose:
This presentation shares the evolution of a video series over twelve years in the making. A fellow colleague and I amassed over 60 hours of interview footage of 20 key international scholars in the social sciences and humanities, aiming to document their autobiographies, academic philosophies and research methodologies. The personal and autobiographical nature of these interviews invites researchers to enter the lived, experiential, and reflective world of each scholar. Professor Maxine Greene was a key interview participant, and in 2017, our team completed the documentary On Being Maxine Greene, using the footage from her extensive interview. Very recently, these 20 recorded scholar interviews have been made available to teacher-researchers in a graduate level education course at a Canadian university for use in the creation of student video narratives. On Being Maxine Greene was the exemplar used in the course. This presentation reports on the experiences of students engaged in the creative process of building narrative through the art of filmmaking, as well as the use of video narrative as a tool for mobilizing social justice issues.


Perspective(s) or theoretical framework AND methods, techniques:
The five contexts is a theoretical framework that comprises of the autobiographical, political, post-modern, historical and philosophical contexts as a means for “conducting, understanding, and interpreting qualitative research in education and in other disciplines (Cooper and White, 2011, p.23). For us, it has served the dual purpose as the lens through which we formulated our questions for the 20 scholar interviews, and more recently, has served as a framework for our students as they contemplated the creation of their video documentaries. It has assisted our students to understand how “the whole receives its definition from the parts and, reciprocally, the parts can only be understood in reference to the whole” (ibid,p.23).


Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials:
At the end of the course, students participated in a questionnaire with open and closed questions designed to examine their learning process during the creation of their video. Content analysis around key words and themes of student-generated data provided further scope to analyze learning. The student videos also provide an artifact through which the authors are currently probing further through video analysis.


Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view:
At this time, data analysis is still unfolding. The initial scan of data suggests that students found telling their narrative through film to be a valuable experience, and an opportunity to reflect deeply on their own stories, a new understanding of the power of the auto-biographical, a common theme of inclusion- exclusion to mainstream culture, which incidentally, parallels Greene’s own story, and the value of relating their personal stories to a larger story.


Scholarly significance of the work:
A major objective of this study has been to examine, theorize, and conceptualize the creative practice of citizen documentary, resulting in a methodology that may be used by researchers in the documentation and mobilization of social justice scholarship through creative works such as documentary filmmaking.

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