Humanizing Education Research Through Documentary Filmmaking

• In Event: The Stories Project. A Documentary Short: A Community-Engaged, Arts-Based Research Project

Abstract

Theoretical Perspectives
Currently, over 82.4 million people have been forcibly displaced worldwide (UNHCR, 2021). Of the 82.4 million forcibly displaced people, 26.4 million have been granted official refugee status, around half of whom are under the age of 18 (UNHCR, 2021). In U.S. schools, rather than providing culturally and linguistically responsive educational experiences that promote additive acculturation (Gibson 2001; 2005), refugee-background learners are constantly confronted with pressures to assimilate to U.S. schools culture (Bigelow, 2010), which is steeped in monolingual (English) ideologies and an overemphasis on high-stakes testing.

Purpose
The Stories Project: A Documentary Short film is both a scholarly product and an educational resource intended to generate critical conversations that dismantle negative stereotypes about (im)migrants and refugees and why they migrate to and (re)settle in the U.S. The film shows how a super-diverse (Vertovec, 2007; 2019) group of volunteer teaching assistants came to appreciate each other’s unique challenges and triumphs as well as recognize each other’s inherent dignity in the context of a summer camp for refugee-background youth.

Methods & Data Sources
To create the documentary, we (the co-authors/directors/producers) developed a draft of a storyline prior to collecting data during the summer camp. This storyline informed what footage to capture and how to capture it. We primarily used “cinema verité” to capture events as they occurred naturally. In addition to pre- and post-interviews, five Friday afternoon dialogue sessions were filmed; over 25 hours of footage were captured with a focus on the teaching assistants during camp. The video footage served as rich data that supported the construction of “field texts” (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 118) and the documentary itself.

Results: The Post-Production Process
Using the interview transcriptions and footage as anchors for the arc of the documentary’s storyline, we spent 12 months editing the film. This process involved iteratively revisiting our purpose (to provide a window into the transnational context of the summer camp and the teaching assistants’ stories), intended message (our shared humanity), and target audience (middle and high school youth). We revised our drafts of the storyline throughout the editing process, based upon how the interviews and various pieces of footage from the camp were lending themselves to the weaving together of a cohesive story that centered the participants’ lived experiences, perspectives, and voices. Once we reached picture lock, we worked closely (albeit virtually) with our post-production team to design and add essential artistic elements (an original music score, animation and graphics, sound engineering) that brought the film to life.

Significance
To dismantle xenophobia and negative stereotypes of (im)migrants and refugees, arts-based educational research—and documentary film in particular—can bring (im)migrant and refugee-background youth’s first-person narratives, voices, and lived experiences to the fore in a way that is accessible for researchers, teachers, and students. To engage learners’ hearts and bodies as well as their minds, arts-based research (Leavy, 2015) can be used to create educational resources with the “aesthetic force” (Lewis, 2015) necessary to address the most pressing social justice issues of the 21st century.

Authors

• Carrie Symons, Michigan State University

• Leo Samuels Vosburgh, Michigan State University