Young Guerilla Filmmakers: Shaping Learning Through Community-Centric Practices

• In Event: 51.035 - Sympathetic and/or Agentic? Constructions of Youth in Educational Scholarship

Abstract

Understanding that education is shaped by sociopolitical context (Lamont Hill, 2016) this paper shifts our understanding of learning from the individual to the collective, centering community as a framework for equitable education. This paper explores the notion of community and how it shapes learning in a filmmaking program, Young Guerilla Filmmakers (YGF). Through the perspective of Community Centric Pedagogy and ethnographic methods, we observe how the facilitator and high school students collaboratively produced a documentary on teenage pregnancy, considering its intersections of power, race, gender, and class. We suggest that in YGF, centering community shaped a learning environment where knowledge was drawn from the group itself and their surrounding community, which engaged them in mastering academic content.

Authors

• Hui-Ling S. Malone, NYU Steinhardt

• Jasmine Y. Ma, New York University

• Jessie Levandov

• Syzan Vucetaj, New York University