Mobilizing Knowledge About Gender Transfomation: New teachers taking action in Sierra Leone through cellphilming

• In Event: Girls and Young Women Driving Gender Transformation in Rural Spaces in Global South Contexts

Proposal

This paper highlights the role of media making in mobilizing knowledge about gender transformation, exploring the role that new teachers can play as agents of gender-transformative social change through their Cellphilms (cellphone+video) and Whatsapp platforms. Drawing on the production and screenings of a documentary film Teachers taking action in Sierra Leone: Cellphilming for social change created as part of CODE’s Transforming Girls Education Project (TGEP), the paper focuses on the story of documenting how teachers from six teacher training institutes across Sierra Leone are using cellphilming as a tool for addressing gender issues in their colleges and communities. The film introduces cellphilming as a participatory approach to engagement in gender transformation and features pre-service teachers and teacher educators along with NGO community educators who are working with cellphilming for the first time. Teachers taking action showcases youth-produced cellphilms such as “She’s too young” tackling Child, Early and Forced Marriage and Unions and the voices of young women and men about making change in their community. A special feature of the film is group discussion among new teachers and teacher educators about the profound personal shifts they experienced through cellphilming activities, from questioning gender roles that they have always taken for granted to ideas about how they might take up cellphilming in their teaching practice. As facilitators of the cellphilm workshops that took place in Magburaka, Sierra Leone, and as facilitators of the documentary in collaboration with a local film maker, we highlight the challenges and significance of the documentation process, and the ways in which this process documentary or composite video (Mitchell, 2011) is being used as a digital dialogue tool (Mitchell et al, 2017) to support youth-led work on gender transformation. Overall the findings also contribute to deepening an understanding of the role of ‘going public’ through community-led research.

Authors

• Claudia Mitchell, McGill University

• LISA J STARR, University of Lethbridge

• Jennifer A Thompson, McGill University

• Grace Skahan