Please compare any key aspect of either text that we’ve read to any pop cultural representation. You could think of whether there are any characters that resemble Hester Prynne alive in culture today. If so, how is she treated in contemporary representations? Are there similarities or dissimilarities to Hawthorne’s treatment of her, or of Dimmesdale, Pearl, or the Puritan town’s people.
What about key characteristics of O’Connor’s novel, Wise Blood? Are there characters similar to Hazel Motes or Enoch in today’s culture, albeit in different forms than O’Connor may have envisioned. Are there movies, television shows, or is there music that indicates a similar character or thematic aspect of O’Connor’s text?
This multimodal assignment will have the same function in this Writing 5 class as one of your formal papers. Its purpose will be to help you to continue to develop your skills in composition, critical thinking, and argumentation. You’ll be making a claim in your iMovie adaptation that will reflect back on one of our novels.
The length of the films will be 5-7 minutes. We’ll undergo two formal training sessions, and will be assisted by RWIT tutors, and the staff of the Jones Media Center. We’ll have two sessions during class time in which we’ll present our films to the class.
Course: AAAS 7: Women, Gender and Sexuality in the Caribbean
Instructor: Reena Goldthree
For this project, you will work in small groups of three to create a short documentary film. You and your group members will select the specific topic of the documentary; however, your film must critically examine some aspect of women’s lives in the Caribbean before 1960. For your film, you can choose to analyze the life of a specific Caribbean woman, investigate a social movement led by women (i.e., the campaign for women’s suffrage), or examine major topics such as slavery and indentureship with a focus on women’s lived experiences.
By creating an original documentary, you will have the opportunity to explore the issues that we have discussed in class through the visual medium of film. You will also be able to research a topic that interests you and communicate your findings to your peers and the broader public. Rather than simply telling a story about the past, your documentary should make a compelling argument—using voice-over narration, audio, and relevant historical images and film—about the topic you choose to explore. Your argument should be informed by relevant primary and secondary sources beyond the assigned course readings. Each documentary should be 5-6 minutes and must include a bibliography. The final cut of your documentary will be due on March 1, 2011. We will screen and discuss the documentaries in class on March 2, 2011.
To help you create your documentary, you will attend two special workshops. The first workshop, led by librarian Amy Witzel, will explore how to find relevant primary and secondary sources for your film. The second workshop, led by Susan Simon at Jones Media Center, will review multimedia composition techniques and provide basic training in iMovie and Photoshop. In addition, you will complete several mini-assignments in the process of creating the documentary, including an oral “pitch” of your topic, a written film treatment, and a draft script and storyboard.
Learning Outcomes
After completing this project, students will be able to:
Discuss how race, class, sexuality, and nationality have shaped the opportunities available for various groups of Caribbean women
Identify some of the major social, political, and cultural institutions that have sought to define women’s roles in Caribbean society
Produce polished multimedia compositions that have an original perspective, clear argument, supporting evidence, and proper citations
Assessment
Since this is a collaborative project, your group will receive a grade for the written treatment, storyboard, script, and bibliography. Your group will also receive a grade for the final documentary film. As a class, we will work together to develop a rubric to assess the documentaries.
You will receive an individual grade for your written reflection on the filmmaking process. Resources
Reena Goldthree, Instructor for AAAS 7
Contact: Reena.N.Goldthree@Dartmouth.edu
Susan Simon, Media Learning Technologist, Jones Media Center
Contact: Susan.Simon@Dartmouth.edu
Amy Witzel, Reference Librarian for African and African American Studies (AAAS) & Women and Gender Studies
Contact: Amy.L.Witzel@Dartmouth.edu
Kay Yi, Writing Assistant for AAAS 7
Contact: Kye.H.Yi@Dartmouth.edu
AAAS 7 Library Resources Guide (prepared by Amy Witzel)
http://researchguides.dartmouth.edu/aaas7
AAAS 7 Blackboard Page (see “Video Project Resources” link)
Student Center for Researching, Writing, and Information Technology (RWIT)
Website: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~rwit/students/index.html
As part of the course Unveiling the Harem Dancer, the students were divided into working groups and asked to produce a video (2-5 minutes long) that creatively challenges stereotypes commonly associated with Arabs and Muslims. The course material for “Unveiling the Harem Dancer” focused on the role that visual media has historically played in creating a repertoire of images that sustain stereotypical descriptions of Arabs and Muslims. In response, I encouraged the students to use the same tool, i.e. the visual text, and capitalize on its ability to unsettle some of the stereotypes associated with Arabs and Muslims today. In my opinion, the projects were a great success. A focus on the visual medium seems to have enhanced the students’ understanding of the extent to which societies rely on visual difference to perpetuate ethnic, religious, and cultural stereotypes. The videos allowed students to actively engage in a dialogue with the prevailing discourse about Arabs and Muslims, which in turn enabled them to participate in a cross-cultural dialogue promoting values of tolerance and coexistence.
This video assignment also required each group to maintain a “Group Diary Blog,” which were made available to students on Blackboard. The purpose of the “Group Diary Blog” was to create a space for the students to flesh out their ideas, identify their research question, and define the vision of their video project in writing. It served as a productive forum for the students to brainstorm ideas, respond to one another, manage group meeting times, share information/graphics/links, organize and cite research material, and discuss the progress of their video project. It also provided me insight into the nature, process, and development of each of the groups’ video project, and allowed me to be more effective in directing and guiding the students whenever they had questions or faced challenges. Each group followed the “Video Project Proposal – The Pitch” and “Treatment Plan for Student Video Projects” guidelines provided by the JMC for their midterm. As part of their pitching presentation, however, I also encouraged them to create a preview video to practice using imovie software and to have a better feel on how to divide production tasks among group members for the video project. The groups screened their final videos at the end of week nine as part of an open public event that was followed by Q&A. The grading criteria for the final video project included three components:
Video Quality Production (from Concept to Creation) – 80 points
Video Supporting Group Paper – 10 points
‘Behind the Scenes’ Group Presentation – 10 points
Course: Studio Art 66/68: Architecture II Instructor: Prof. Jack Wilson Assignment: Architectual Space in Digital Media
The experience of architecture is spatial and it is also temporal. The purpose of this assignment is to encourage students to explore and analyze existing buildings and places on the Dartmouth campus from the perspective of their own experience in a spatial, aesthetic and temporal sense and to investigate the history and character of a particular building or place. The work to complete the assignment will consist of research as well as video production.
Students will work in teams of two determined by the instructor.
Each team will select three buildings or places from the following list in order of priority of your preference:
Dartmouth Row
Hopkins Center
Hood Museum
Collis Center
Robinson Hall
Baker/Berry
Rauner Library at Webster Hall
Alumni Gymnasium/Memorial Field
Fairchild Science Center
Leverone Field House
College Park/Bartlett Tower/the Bema
The instructor will assign each team to a building or place from their list of selections.
The class will attend an orientation session with Jay Satterfield, Dartmouth’s Special Collections Librarian, to learn about research access to the Rauner Special Collections Library. This archive will serve as a primary resource in researching the building or place assigned.
The class will also attend digital video tutorial sessions in the Starr Instructional Center at Berry Library. Teams will complete an edited digital video recording of approximately 8-10 minutes in length. Each team is to research and explore the experience of that building or place using historical analysis as well as contemporary visual experience through the medium of digital video. Students will use iMovie as an editing program for this exercise. Camcorders, editing stations and portable hard drives are available for use through coordination with the Jones Media Center. The Instructor will arrange to make DV tapes available from Jones for the taping and storage of projects. Final projects will be burned onto DVD’s.
Course: Introduction to Sociology
Instructor: Joshua Kim and Susan Simon
Assignment: Sociological Mashup (Team Project) (25 Percent of Final Grade)
Throughout the term your team will be working on a sociological mashup. Your mashup will be a short (5 to 7 minute) video project that utilizes one or more pieces of the rich media (video) from our course curriculum. Your mashup is designed to teach one of the main concepts we cover in our course (from the modules). The goal of the mashup is to make the topic of the module interesting and exciting to a high school or college audience. You will be posting your Mashups on YouTube, and then linking them to the Sociological Mashup Wiki in Blackboard.
Topics that your teams can choose to teach with your mashup include: The Sociological View and Culture and Socialization, Social Interaction, Groups and Social Structure, Deviance and Social Control, Stratification in the United States and Global Inequality, Inequality by Race and Ethnicity and Inequality and by Gender, Family and Religion, Social Institutions – Education, Government and the Economy, Population, Community, Health and the Environment, or Social Movements, Social Change, and Technology
Source materials for your mashups include the videos that we watch in the course, PowerPoints from the curriculum (available for download in Blackboard) as well as other video and image material you fine. Keep in mind that you job is to use the curriculum to teach the core concepts of the module you choose. The idea is that we learn something best if we need to teach it, and your teams will be teaching these concepts using the mashup structure.
Each week we will devote our X-Hour time to your team working on their Mashups. Training on video editing software, as well as the original media to mashup, will be provided. We will also provided training on designing a mashup. The videos you will be using as the main sources for your team Mashups are the ones we will be watching each week for our modules. They include:
The Persuaders
Devil’s Playground
Sick Around the World
Declining by Degrees
The Lost Children of Rockdale County
Nova World in the Balance
Teams will be able to pull scenes from these videos, as well as supplement with other materials (such as images or videos you get from the Web) as well as provide a voice-over.
Course: Africa: Ecology and Development
Instructor: Caroline Faria
From week 4 on, groups of 3-4 students will present short video ‘mash-ups’ to the class covering a key concept and case study of ecology and development in Africa. You may choose to cover a topic you have learned about through the class or a related topic of interest. These mash-ups can include visual and audio material produced originally by students and/or collected from a range of sources and edited together into 5-minute short films. The concepts and ideas presented in the videos should tie to key themes discussed and presented during the week in which the material is shown (with the exception of students presenting in week 4 and 5 who may choose to focus on topics covered in weeks 1-3 also). Students should begin their video with a brief (1-2 minute) discussion of how they chose their theme and what they would like students to think about as they view the film. The presentation will close with a Q and A session and a discussion of the key themes raised. We will review these as a class on Thursdays as a way to stimulate discussion, to learn about new case studies researched and to review key concepts of the class so far. You can find a grade guide used to assess these essays at the course blackboard site.
Course: Hearing Voices Through Invisible Walls: The Art(s) of Facilitation
Instructors: Ivy Schweitzer and Pati Hernandez
Video Project, 5-7 minute maximum, to be done in groups, shown to the Dartmouth Community, and assessed according to rubrics determined by the class (see below). This project is one of two culminating group projects for the course, whose overall theme is “Hearing Voices through Invisible Walls.” During the term, we study the way various arts and artists facilitate voices of people who usually go unheard in our society. Five artists, each working in different media, specifically photography/videography, theater, dance (two), and journalism, visited our class and presented their own theories and methods of facilitating voices. They talked to students specifically about their video projects and the issues these projects raised for them. Each visitor helped the students address crucial issues about how and why one facilitates someone’s voice; we encouraged students to think specifically about what they found helpful in these artists’ presentations by requiring them to write short “Critical Reflections” on each artist’s visit, which we commented on and graded.
Our first visitor, Greg Sharrow, an ethnographer at the Vermont Folk Life Center in Middlebury, VT, helped the students navigate a central issue. Our first reading assignment, Paolo Freire’s indispensable philosophy of liberated education, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, stressed the importance of dialogue. Sharrow stressed the importance of the involvement of the facilitator and the necessity of “deep hanging out” to equalize power inequalities between the interviewer (who has the camera and the desire to facilitate) and the interviewee (who faces the camera and may not want to have his/her voice facilitated). Thus, early on students got the idea that only one person could/should facilitate/interview. Greg uncovered a conflict in the class between those who wanted to do the projects in a group and those who wanted to be the solo interviewer. At the end of the class, the members elected to embrace both, and some students did, indeed, choose to work by themselves (though we assigned helpers to these students because edited solo is so time-consuming).
The goal of this project is for each group to produce a short video that facilitates the voice of someone in the Dartmouth community whom the members of the group feel is behind an “invisible wall.” The point is to use video technology and the art of video in the service of voice. Thus, the emphasis is on facilitation and not on the technical production of the videos. The subject of this video project will be determined by students’ specific interests and in consultation with the professors. In approaching their subject, we encouraged students to apply the ideas and methods described by our visiting artists, in the texts we have read and discussed in class, and in the resources on the Blackboard site provided by Susan Simon. This assignment is 20% of the final grade.
First, we required students to hand in a “pitch” to be discussed by the class. A few weeks later, we required students to submit a Video Project Treatment, a form that includes a short description of what they will do, what materials they will include, and what point they are trying to make, what roles everyone in the group will fill. We also asked them to include a short annotated bibliography (minimum of three sources, which can be drawn from the class readings and viewings), 1-2 pages. 5% of final grade.
Rubrics for student assessment of Video Projects: These rubrics were determined by members of the class through a discussion in class that took about 45 minutes. This discussion, although initially frustrating, was extremely helpful because it clarified the aspects of the project everyone thought was the most important––and that was “facilitation,” rather than technical aspects. Although students were, on the whole, leery about assessing each other’s work, even in groups, we felt the determining of rubrics helped them to clarify what was most important to them and to the class.
THEA 10/WGST 59 “Hearing Voices Through Invisible Walls: The Art(s) of Facilitation”
VIDEO PROJECT ASSESSMENTS
Please fill out as a group, one for each video not your own. This will be shown to the group that made the video, and we will use it to assign a grade for the groups on the video projects.
Name of Video:
Name of Students:
I. Facilitation- (40%) 100pts. ________________ x4 _____________
- mutual engagement
- comfort/space
- theory integration (praxis)
Course: Native Cultural Production: (Re)Mapping Race, Gender, and Nation
Instructor: Prof. Mishuana Goeman
Assignment: Multi-media Map Presentation
Student groups will present 5-minute multi-media mapping project based on the readings and their interests. The presentation will consist of conceptualizing a map or creation of space that might exist between two communities discussed in our readings or with an individual community of your choosing with approval of the instructor. The size of the class will depend on the group size, but it will be between 3-4 people.
The idea is to promote a thoughtful exploration of how we narrate space, account for a “layered geography,” and examine the culturally specific tools that are part of cartographic consciousness. We will complete our project on a step-by-step frame and if the steps are followed on time, the project will not consume your finals period. This course will require the use of the x-hour period that will be devoted to the project and learning the skill of camera handling, filming, film editing, and putting together a video project. Also you will be responsible for signing out the cameras. This does mean you are agreeing to pay for damage and loss. The librarian assures me, however, that students have taken this responsibility well and that no incidences as of yet have occurred! I will have classroom cameras reserved for the week seven. Slots fill up fast for the cameras so if you need them, sign up in advance. If you do need to miss an x-hr, it will be your responsibility to set up a training time with the librarians in order to use the equipment. These training sessions are important, but they do have times on Tuesday night that require signing up. Your group does have the option of not doing a film project, but you do need to talk to me with a plan of what you would like to do in its place.
Portfolio:
Portfolios will be important for the class as they will let me know how you are thinking about the readings and how this ties into your conceptualization of the project. The journal entry is to reflect on how the readings and theoretical approaches become part of the process of the creative production. Each entry will include a thought-provoking question to pose for class discussion. It may even be a question that helps your group with a particular issue relating to your project. You should purchase a binder and use this to organize your written entries and film material, available on blackboard. The items are to help you not get behind on the project and have to rush at the end. Remember it takes four times as long to edit as it does to film. Therefore the items below are used to help you carefully plan your shots, filming, and content before you begin. In the end you will have a ten-week reflection on this process. The materials in the portfolio are items often used in the film industry.
Portfolio Items:
Weekly Journal reflection on the reading and Your question
Course: Government 83 – Political Communications
Instructor: Prof. Deb Brooks
Assignment: Communicating Politics: A Dartmouth Classroom Simulation
The start of the simulation involved a detailed campaign communications strategy memo which was jointly developed and written by the team.
Each media team was responsible for producing 4 campaign advertisements, along with appropriate press releases for their candidate. The first 3 ads were each 30 or 60-second radio ad and/or direct mail, and had to include a specific strategy for targeting a particular group over voters given hypothetical budget constraints.
Each individual within a team was assigned to take ownership for one of the first three ads, with the final ad produced collectively by the team. Each student wrote a paper on their “owned” ad, describing their strategy for the creation of the ad in light to related readings from the course.
View the Final Projects
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Course: Writing 5: Expository Writing
Course: Studio Art 66/68: Architecture II
Course: Hearing Voices Through Invisible Walls: The Art(s) of Facilitation
Course: Native Cultural Production: (Re)Mapping Race, Gender, and Nation
Course: Government 83 – Political Communications
Themocracy