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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
Composing to Assemble Publics
Multimodal composition initiatives in the writing classroom have long been invested in activism and social change (Palmeri, 2012; Shipka, 2011; Sundvall & Fredlund, 2017). But what would a pedagogy look like that challenges students to not only create multimedia compositions, but also to orient them toward a collaborative campaign to engage heterogeneous publics through an assembly of diverse artifacts?
Gries (2019) proposes a push toward what she terms “writing to assemble publics” that teaches students the techne of social activism. Gries argues for an approach to civic activism that “puts students in the hot seat, where in building their own collectives and implementing their own activist agendas, they become the organizers and drivers of rhetorical assemblage in every stage of the public writing process” (331). Gries follows student-led activist initiatives over the past five years, including the students who organized following the shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, as well as the General Body civil-disobedience sit-in at Syracuse University in 2014, using them as models from which to build a pedagogy that assembles student text-creation and the possibility of social change. Gries advocates a new materialist approach to social composing, proposing that “we might actually think about rhetoric as the assembling of various entities that assemble bodies into collective action. Rhetoric is both constituted by and constitutive of constant assembling” (333). When students are challenged to create in a digital media environment, they assemble an array of audiences, publics, tools, ideologies, and interfaces, and when they compose with an eye toward the possibility of social change, they multiply these assemblages exponentially, bringing bodies, histories, and material realities into the fold.
Within the pedagogy this article will outline, FYC students view a few iterations of the documentary film genre and then discuss its filmmaking techniques (cut, scene, casting, facial expression, dialogue, narration, perspective) as well as its displayed rhetorical choices (narrative, argument, story/plot, circulation, cover image, music, inclusion, omission). Students then mobilize their knowledge of film conventions and the rhetorical choices made by filmmakers into producing a film of their own that extends an argument, such as one aligned with social, political, or personal causes.