Considering The Use of Video To Engender Social Transformation

 

“The self/body, particularly in media work, becomes a rich representational tool used to facilitate reflection and praxical thinking. It is in media production where youth video provides the opportunity to develop these kinds of cultural artifacts to help students investigate and transform their vision of the world.”        

(Cruz, 2013, pg. 442)

There are various affordances to using video in educational research, including providing a recorded reality of a particular experience. For instance, a video recording of a teachers’ lessons can provide space for an aspiring teacher to engage in deep self-reflection, receive feedback from teachers, and ultimately iterate one’s future actions that will inform their future moments in the classroom (Brouwer, 2022). Importantly, video is also a methodological tool, as Cruz (2013) asserts, that can be employed pragmatically in order to create space to catalyze a social change research partners are committed to. The following contains information on research that integrates the use of video or methods that researchers can consider involving video in, positioning research partners’ material realities and commitments at the heart of the research agenda. 

Methods and Methodology that Positions Research Partners As Guiding The Work:

Youth Participatory Action Research is a growing research approach amongst education researchers working in partnership with youth, and are aiming towards a social transformation youth are interested in addressing. Commonly referred to as a more humanistic approach to research with youth, this approach positions youth as having full autonomy to spearhead their own self-study of social problems that impact their lives and create their own solutions to addressing a social issue impacting their lives and communities. As such, a young person explores their own capacity to cultivate personal and social change. In this work, the researcher works in concert with youth and engages in constant reflection and conversations on a collective process for working together in the research endeavor. Cammarota & Fine (2010) encourage researchers committed to this research endeavor to consider the following questions: 

• How do youth learn the skills of critical inquiry and resistance within youth development research collectives and educational settings? 
• How is it possible for their critical inquiries to evolve into formalized challenges to the practices of systemic oppressions?
• Under what conditions can critical research be a tool of youth development and justice work?

In thinking of the aforementioned questions Cammarota and Fine (2010) offer when engaging in youth participatory action research, how can researchers can consider how video can be used as a tool. The following are a few projects that employ the use of video and position youths’ understandings of their lived experiences as a cornerstone to reaching social transformation.

Narration of the Body Through Video & Storying the Self 

Cruz (2013) delineates the practice of storying the self in a video poem workshop for queer students —-navigating their material realities of survial sex, drug and alcohol use, homophobia and street culture—enrolled in a continuation school. Through students’ engagement with video, Cruz suggests that video becomes a tool for students towards a “reflexive and critical thinking politic.” As such, this work pushes us to consider interlocutors’ concerns about their material realities and how they envision themselves changing their own conditions. Cruz encourages researchers, particularly educators to consider examining conditions in community with students and what the material concerns are for youth. For instance, in this research project, Cruz considers what the material concerns of youth who are houseless.

Positions Youth as Researchers and Informing Policy Outcomes 

Sperling (2019) draws upon classroom videos, interviews and a student-led documentary part of a YPAR project to explore how students enrolled in alternative education speak against deficit discourses on students enrolled in alternative education. Youth engaged in this work engaged in a 3 month program —originally a partnership between university affiliates, school teachers and high school students—  wherein students create original research projects exploring issues of race, power, identity and language in their communities. Youth collectively decided to focus on creating a documentary examining why there are deficit-ridden perspectives on students like themselves and how these perspectives impact their schooling experiences and navigation of the world. As a researcher committed towards humanizing research, Sperling worked in concert with the youth to formulate interview questions and online surveys to support their research goals. Importantly, the deliverable part of the YPAR project is now a public documentary and became a platform where “Students centered their own subjectivities, positionality and self-worth by drawing on their own individualized experiences and powerful narratives” (pg. 478). Ultimately, this documentary has been viewed by parents, administration in local districts, and was selected for a citywide digital storytelling project. 

Social Design Experiments is a methodology coined by Gutiérrez and Vossoughi (2010) that resists the dominant understandings of experiments found in education research and considers how researchers can rethink the role of themselves in education research to reposition their relation with research partners and their social transformation aims. In social design experiments, researchers deviate away from top down approaches to designing research, traditional understandings of relationship with research partnerships, and ultimately create a Third Space— a space where praxis is facilitated to create social change. Importantly, the researcher plays a role in helping envision the organization of a space that will propel research partners into a mediate praxis to facilitate a social change they are interested in. Gutiérrez and Vossoughi (2010) offer key principles that can assist researchers in advancing social design experiments in their own work, which often demands that researchers center the ways of knowing from nondominant communities one is working with:

• Design as re-mediating activity: Positioning the process interrogating histories, structural, institutional and social cultural contradictions as fruitful for learning when considering the design of generative learning environments. This process is integral for designing transformative environments for our research partners, including youth, teachers, or community members. 
• Contradictions: Positioning the inevitable contradictions in designing transformative learning environments as an asset to learning and resisting top down notions of research by demanding that researchers consider the constraints of a particular space through a historical lens. 
• Historicity: Employing a historicized understanding of participants’ involvement in spaces to provide a lens for researchers to understand and value research partners’ involvement in their communities, including educational institutions. An integral part of this historicising perspective demands that researchers address underlying conceptualizations that potentially essentialize groups.  
• Equity: Consider how equity is conceptualized from the inception and throughout the various stages of the project. However, remaining attentive to how transformation is understood by participants can inform the social design experiment. 

In thinking of the principles Gutiérrez and Vossoughi (2010) encourage us to consider when designing social design experiments, how can the use of video be used to consider the points?

References

Cammarota, J., & Fine, M. (2010). Youth participatory action research: A pedagogy for transformational resistance. In Revolutionizing education (pp. 9-20). Routledge.

Cruz, C. (2013). LGBTQ youth of color video making as radical curriculum: A brother mourning his brother and a theory in the flesh. Curriculum Inquiry, 43(4), 441-460.

Gutiérrez, K. D., & Vossoughi, S. (2010). Lifting off the ground to return anew: Mediated praxis, transformative learning, and social design experiments. Journal of Teacher Education, 61(1-2), 100-117.

Sperling, J. (2019). “I Just Want to Finish High School like Everybody Else”: Continuation High School Students Resist Deficit Discourse and Stigmatization. Equity & Excellence in Education, 52(4), 465-484.