Using Creative Media Projects to Engage Students in Social Justice and Improve Their Critical Thinking Skills

• In Event: 3423 - Teaching and Learning Symposium Roundtable
  In Informal Discussion Roundtable: Table 9: Teaching Sociology with Nontraditional Texts

Abstract

Students have developed an increasingly impactful and impressive capacity to function as creators of media for social justice (Paek 2011). Our roundtable presentation will highlight the culminating project for a Social Problems course in which students designed a creative media project using Adobe Spark, a free suite of storytelling applications. The purpose of the creative media projects was to clearly and coherently communicate a solution to a real-world social problem. We will share our experiences with asking students to move beyond being consumers of knowledge to being producers of knowledge (Ryan 2013). The creative media project served not only as a pedagogical strategy but also as a public sociology tool for reaching wider audiences (Buraway 2005). Perhaps even more relevant for teaching and learning, the students made significant gains on the Critical thinking Assessment Test (CAT).

We will discuss successes, pitfalls, and opportunities of the creative media project as a vehicle for facilitating social change at a time when neoliberal threats are ever-present. Our roundtable presentation will be most useful to faculty who teach Social Problems, but it will also demonstrate the potential of creative media projects for engaging students in social justice across the discipline while simultaneously improving their critical thinking skills. We hope to not only share what we learned through this culminating project but also to receive feedback on how to make it more impactful for students as producers of knowledge engaged in social justice.

References

Burawoy, Michael. 2005. “For Public Sociology.” American Sociological Review 70:4-28.

Paek, Hye-Jin, Thomas Hove, Hyun Ju Jeong, and Mikyoung Kim. 2011. “Peer or Expert? The Persuasive Impact of YouTube Public Service Announcement Producers.” International Journal of Advertising 30:161-188.

Ryan, Berry. 2013. “A Walk Down the Red Carpet: Students as Producers of Digital Video-Based Knowledge.” International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning 5:24-41.

Authors

• Ada Haynes, Tennessee Tech University

• Jacob Kelley, University of Tennessee, Knoxville