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The Retold Histories of Clemson
The Process: Making Documentary Videos in the FYC Classroom
The Retold Histories of Clemson: Three Documentary Films
Behind the Scenes: Access, Accessibility, & Audiences
Appendix A: Assignment Prompt for The Retold Histories of Clemson Project
Abstract
This article offers strategies and a process for documentary filmmaking initiatives in first-year composition (FYC) pedagogies. Suggesting modes for integrating civic and advocacy elements into multimodal composition pedagogies, this article suggests ways that composers can engage the public through the production of videos posted to a public website. Using a project in the author’s own classroom as a case study, this article closes by examining some of the challenges that accompany multimodal civic action in FYC classrooms, including technological access, accessibility, ideological disagreement, and practical issues related to filmmaking with limited resources.
Introduction
“Picture” this: a trio of your students huddled around a camera, aiming it toward a street of commuting cars. Another small group of students whispers behind a laptop about a script they are composing collaboratively, and a third group of students tests the lighting next to a greenscreen assembly they’ve put together in the hallway. You, perusing the aisles of this classroom, have left your students to their own business for the class session. They have a goal to work toward, yes, but the path they take to reach that goal is up to them. They’re hardly on their own, of course: you, their instructor, have put the tools in their hands, even showed them how these tools work and how they can be used to create something entirely new, but at a certain point you decided it was time to turn them loose, to step back and sink into that feared “unstructured time” you’ve spent your teaching career anxiously avoiding. But, you sit down, you listen, you hear the conversations happening: how do we solve this problem? How do we film that? Is this music the right choice? What do we need to do to accomplish our goals? What are we trying to say with this film we are making?
This article explores what might be gained from documentary filmmaking initiatives within first-year composition (FYC) classrooms. Multimodal composition initiatives in FYC classrooms can nurture practices of literacy, experimentation, digital exploration, and rhetorical invention, among other skills and capacities (Selfe, 2007; Takayoshi & Selfe, 2007; Shipka, 2011; Palmeri, 2012). Some have even argued multimodal composition initiatives nurture civic actions that potentially are capable of enacting social activism (Sundvall & Fredlund, 2017; Edwards, 2016). This article will suggest strategies through which filmmaking and study of the documentary genre might be used as a generative form of multimedia composition within rhetoric and composition courses. It will introduce multimodal composition strategies as tools and heuristics with which students might cultivate a public humanities project that enacts what Laurie Gries (2019) calls “writing to assemble publics” for civic-rhetorical purposes (331). Ultimately, by recounting and describing a project my students and I completed in the 2018-2019 academic year called The Retold Histories of Clemson, I propose documentary filmmaking to function as civic action that empowers students to compose for social justice causes. In doing so, students can cultivate some of the skills needed to communicate productively to a variety of publics, including for causes of equity, advocacy, and justice. By drawing on research in multimodal composition and rhetorics of public engagement, this article offers one method composition instructors might use to design situations for students to re-envision important local histories, and in doing so engage publics through the creation of short documentary films. Multimodal composition has a long history of expanding what the FYC classroom can do. This article aims to contribute to that conversation by offering strategies for documentary filmmaking in FYC with goals of advocacy, activism, and community justice grounded in students’ own local communities.
The Retold Histories of Clemson, a documentary collection assembled by four FYC courses, serves as an initiative that demonstrates the literacies, competencies, and skills of multimodal rhetorical invention that documentary filmmaking is capable of nurturing among students. We compose in an age, as William Hart-Davidson reminds us, in which the available means of persuasion, as Aristotle defined rhetoric, are suddenly becoming a whole lot more available (x). To respond in empowered ways to twenty-first century exigencies, composition instructors would do well to harness available tools of digital media such as the cameraphone as inventive tools if students are to learn to engage dynamic publics and respond productively to the social issues that characterize many contemporary rhetorical exigencies.