Notes from the Classroom: Visual Storytelling in a Composition Course

It all started with an unlikely idea: integrating participant-produced documentaries into the upper-division general education writing course we teach at USC. Given that students are already so steeped in visual culture, one could legitimately question why we would waste classroom time teaching film basics rather than the more critical skills of written argument and analysis. Furthermore, how would the difficult work of forming partnerships with community organizations facilitate the goals of the course, to “place marked emphasis on the public, professional, and academic aspects of writing within specific disciplines and career field….to hone the composition skills that [students] first acquired in the lower-division course”? In other words, do these types of documentaries and the work they entail have pedagogical uses in the composition classroom?

Our idea first took shape from our desire to integrate service-learning into our writing classes. Placing writing in a real-world context teaches students that writing matters, and allows them to see the value of writing rather than viewing their assignments as empty exercises designed to please the arbitrary or subjective demands of their professor. We imagined partnering our students with local community groups to develop research projects that would emphasize the connections between academic rhetoric and “real world” issues. In our vision, the writing that they would do for this class would help them see their larger place in social systems, as part of the conversation that makes up our democracy, emphasizing in particular the way that writing functions as a form of social action.

What we discovered was that using community-based documentaries as a course requirement enabled us to move beyond the versions of service learning most often used in the composition classroom, typically structured around either a “writing for” or “writing about” approach, either helping community organizations with students’ expertise as writers and thinkers or using the community as subjects for our students’ research. We wanted to do something different, something that would engage the community as partners rather than clients or subjects, each partner bringing something to learn and something to teach. We wanted to challenge rather than confirm the implicit hierarchy that values only the expertise, knowledge and discourse produced by the university. Partnering students with community groups-high schools, nonprofits, juvenile detention facilities-and asking them to collaborate on five-minute documentaries positioned our students as facilitators rather than as experts, engaged in the mutual project of using stories to experience the world through unfamiliar perspectives.

We were fortunate to find a supportive partner in the IPE at the very beginning of the course; not only did we draw encouragement and inspiration from the model of participant-produced documentaries originated within the IPE, but Pablo Toledo also provided crucial guidance for our students as they began these collaborations. If the IPE’s model provided us with a more equal platform for “town” and “gown,” these type of projects also challenged our students to think through their initial assumptions about power, privilege, and inequity. Another potential problem for service-learning courses is that they can confirm rather than dislodge a simplistic understanding of social relations. In Bruce Hertzberg’s influential essay “Community Service and Critical Teaching” he acknowledges the way that service learning can turn into “charity” if it does not actively foster “an understanding of the social forces that produce and sustain poverty, illiteracy, discrimination and injustice.”

To address this problem, we structured the class to first investigate the institutional and systemic factors that curtail individual choices and opportunities. Working with their community partners, students identified issues pertinent to the community-issues such as disparities in public education, safety at inner-city schools, racism, the achievement gap, and the juvenile justice system-and researched these issues using both community and academic voices as experts. This in-depth exploration of the social, political, ideological and economic forces gave them a backdrop for the visual stories they would tell in their documentaries, stories which would in turn make these more abstract forces real.

In the end, our course, “Writing in the Community,” was more difficult and more rewarding than we could ever have expected, for both teachers and students. Finding community partners was relatively easy, but matching partners with students’ busy schedules was a far greater hurdle. Managing these partners’ expectations-making sure they were on board with our model of collaboration rather than tutoring-was also a challenge. By far the greatest difficulty came in getting permission to film from parents and other authorities, a difficulty that proved insurmountable for two groups partnered with a juvenile justice facility. Although we had initially received assurances that we could easily get a judge’s permission to film the minors at that facility, the site administrators put up so many obstacles that we had to abandon the idea of bringing in cameras. Without the mutual project of filmmaking, our students lapsed into the more familiar, hierarchal models of service, but the restriction also brought into question a justice system that deprives its inmates of their ability to construct their own visual narratives. Absent “subjects” for their documentaries, our students made self-reflexive documentaries that explicitly exposed their own biases, the difficulties they experienced navigating these cross-cultural relationships.

Other partnerships similarly exposed some of the assumptions our students brought to these projects. At one site, our students were surprised by the high percentage of seniors planning to attend college, a jolt to their vision of inner-city students as low achieving dropouts. By digging more into the issue for their research projects, they discovered that inequities persisted even within higher education: these seniors were mostly headed for local community colleges, not the pricier colleges still reserved for the more privileged. And their teachers, too, worried about their ability to graduate from college once admitted, given the funding gaps that threaten to restore what Jonathon Kozol terms “apartheid schooling.” Their documentary highlighted these inequities by contrasting Beverly Hills High School with 32nd Street School, an inner-city magnet school right across from USC, using words and images from students at 32nd Street to poignantly articulate the costs of such injustice.

As our students adjusted to working with people whose life experiences were very different from their own, so our community partners tried to figure out exactly what we were doing, their enthusiasm about working with USC students tempered by wariness about our commitment to a mutually beneficial learning experience. Bringing cameras into the classrooms helped facilitate relationships in the “contact zone,” Mary-Louise Pratt’s term for “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power.” By giving our community partners access to digital cameras borrowed from the university, we redistributed resources (if only temporarily) and gave them control over their own stories. The shared project of recognizing the way the many decisions involved in the shooting process-choices about camera angles, lighting, focus, etc. etc-change the message of the story gave all of the participants an inside-out view of how visual texts work to convey meaning. And, most importantly, together the students recognized the power of such texts to bring to public attention neglected or marginalized perspectives.

Uploading these videos to YouTube ensured that they would reach a wide audience and, through the public comment section, opened up conversations about the issues they raised. Still, institutional inequities made it difficult to fully realize the collaborations we had originally imagined. Without access to the editing equipment and training our students had available-resources made possible for our students through the generous support of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy-our community partners were unable to participate in the final shaping of their stories. We hope to rectify this problem with the help of a grant we received from the Center for Excellence in Teaching to purchase a computer and editing program we’ll be able to take into the community, once again using the resources of the university to redress some of these structural inequities.

Our students described this course as a transformative experience, one of the most meaningful courses they’ve taken at USC. One student, Erica Andrews wrote: “I feel like this is the class college students talk about that changed their life in some way. This class gave me the privilege to work with and help kids from the local community and that felt so great. Making that documentary helped me feel like I was making a different, even if it was a small one.” And Simone Andrews wrote: “This has been one of the best classes that I have taken so far at USC. It has been a transforming experience and I hope to use all that I’ve learned in future endeavors.” The response from our community partners has been equally positive. In fact, one of the students from 32nd Street School was so inspired by the documentary that she wrote and directed another documentary, this one a further investigation into the intra and intergroup racism explored in the first project. We look forward to continuing and expanding these partnerships next year the next time we teach the course.

To see some of the videos from the course, search YouTube for “Disparity in Public Education,” “In the Rough,” “Skin Deep,” “Experimental Learning at West Adams,” “Safety First!,” and “Design and Education at West Adams.”

Stephanie Bower

John and Stephanie are happy that they survived the first semester teaching this course together on speaking terms. Stephanie has a Ph.D in English and has taught at UCLA and Claremont McKenna College. John has a Ph.D in Education and a Master’s in Professional Writing. Both are currently Senior Lecturers in the Writing Program at USC.