After taking this ENG363W course, I feel as though I have completed and achieved many of the goals stated in the WPA outcome statements. First and foremost, our focus was Race, Gender, and Making Media as the title of the class states. I have also focused on different topics in each of my personal, individual projects: Disability and Media, ResLife and Media, and Invisible Children. I have been challenged not only to respond to various mediums, audiences, and topics, but also to use various new mediums in writing in order to respond such as blogging, making a documentary, as well as the always engaging hyper-essay. Writing in these different genres forced me to change the way in which my writing engages with the readers and my audiences. Through responding and "writing" in these different mediums, I have begun to develop my own voice as an upper level writer at Emory. In finding my own voice, I have been forced to continuously think critically. I wrote to learn, inquire, and communicate. I wrote to learn about how social and cultural groups and their knowledge and usage of media. I eventually learned all the different ways and reasons why these groups have been deprived of media and maybe are inept in the world of social media. Through my documentary, I inquired about a particular social group that I consider to be a huge part of my life and investigated how my fellow peers in these group saw the role of media as well as how they would respond (if any differently than I have been in class) about how education is currently using technology and media and how society is pushing these institutions to use media in an educational manner. In my final hyper-essay, I am communicating to my audience what I believe activism to be as well as what the activist group Invisible Children Inc. is does in order to ACTIVELY combat injustice. Through all our workshops in class, I have benefited tremendously from peer evaluation and group discussion. Even when my work is not shared, I benefited from seeing what my peers had been working on and learning through their work. I also ended up learned about various new topics and ideas in our global culture that I was not aware of before or was not aware of the significance in our growing, fast-paced, ever changing society. I believe this class to have been a huge benefactor to my liberal arts education here at Emory.
So as you can see, I never actually blogged about my progress in making my documentary, my first documentary ever. At the time, I had no progress to blog of. After completing the filming, editing, and screening of my final product, what I have to say is WOW. WOW, what hard work. I never truly realized how many little details go into to making sure the documentary is filmed best not just for you but to please your subjects and benefit your viewers. Now that I realize how important each aspect is I want to take a moment to reflect on these aspects in PSA form. MAKE SURE YOUR SUBJECT FEEL COMFORTABLE. I interviewed many of my close friends and colleagues. Some of us couldn't even look each other in the eye without laughing. I had to step back and allow another friend to conduct one of interviews while I merely watched to make sure everything was going smoothly in order to keep the documentary professional and not full of giggles. CHOOSE A QUIET SPACE. It can be quite challenging on a college campus to find a quiet space. But, Emory is big, you'll find one and your documentary will turn out so much better. Lastly, GO OVER THE QUESTIONS. Don't coach your subjects. Don't train them to answer how you want to steer your project rather this simply goes hand in hand with making them feel comfortable. As long as you do not go over each question in serious detail their answers will still be genuine.
Overall, I was extremely impressed by my peers documentaries exposing the use of media in various communities. I was most struck by the many different social, racial, and gender groups that were exposed in the making of these videos. For me, this was my first time learning about these groups and becoming aware of their goals and missions. One of my favorites was my classmate Ivy Kang's documentary on the Asian Pacific Islander Movement. Check out her documentary website. |