2013 Summit Programme - The Centre for Excellence in Media ...

PARALLEL SESSION 6: Friday 20th 14.00- 14.45
STUDENT VOICE:
Disrupting Familiar Roles: the informal learning
experiences of undergraduate documentary
filmmakers
Cantor
9132
abstracts
Ross Adamson
This paper presents findings from my research into the documentary filmmaking
experiences of undergraduate students. Situated within scholarly activity on ‘learning
in everyday life’, the role of creative/practice based work in Higher Education,
and documentary theory, the research is tracing the experiences of students placed
into the position of filmmaker in the course of their undergraduate studies. Such
filmmaking offers opportunities to fulfill stated curricular requirements in terms of
technical competence, creativity and ethical documentary.
However it also provides a potential site for ‘informal learning’ (e.g. Drotner et al.
2008) outside formal assessment criteria. This paper presents a case study of a
student who made a film about her father in the ‘domestic ethnographic’ mode of
filmmaking (Renov 2004). Data from two interviews with the student illustrates
how introducing the camera into a familiar environment provoked disjuncture
(Jarvis 2010) in social interaction with her family. Filmmaking offered her a subject
position in which to explore not only relationships within her family but her own
subjectivity within and outside of familial arrangements.
Documentary production in this context can be seen as acting to bridge multiple
sites of learning and positionality for student filmmakers.
Keywords: documentary, filmmaking, subjectivity, informal learning,
Higher Education.
Ross Adamson is senior lecturer in media studies at the University of Brighton.
His research interests are in personal documentary and the learning potential of
documentary filmmaking for undergraduate students.
Media Education Summit 2013 41