“My Parents Never Read My Papers, But They Watched My Film”: Documentary Filmmaking as Feminist Pedagogy

• In Event: 3433 - Teaching (In)Justice

Abstract

This paper examines the use of student-made documentary films as a feminist pedagogical practice to enhance student understanding of issues of social justice and inequality. As feminist sociologists teaching at a women’s college, we have the unique opportunity to practice feminist pedagogy on a campus that is unabashedly committed to women’s empowerment. This provides a kind of pedagogical liberation because pushing conventional gender boundaries (inside and outside the classroom) is not only supported, it is encouraged. It is within this larger women-centered context that we see our efforts to incorporate documentary filmmaking into the classroom as a powerful form of feminist pedagogy. Although we teach primarily women-identified students—and in ways that are critical of the gender binary altogether—teachers in co-ed classrooms can also incorporate documentary filmmaking as a form of feminist teaching. Throughout this paper, we describe our process of integrating documentary filmmaking into our sociology classes as a major course assignment. The filmmaking project is situated within a substantive course (in one case a course on gender and violence and in the other a course on the sociology of families) and students working in small groups produce a documentary short on a topic relating to the course content. Drawing on 24 student reflections (from a total of 33 student filmmakers) from two different substantive courses in which the documentary film project was incorporated we identify three feminist pedagogy outcomes. These outcomes include: 1) students engage in knowledge production, telling stories of injustice and resistance; 2) students work collaboratively and non-hierarchically; and 3) students develop and expand their technological proficiency and skills.

Authors

• Amie P. Hess, Meredith College

• Kris Macomber, Meredith College