By Allain Daigle and Krista Grensavitch
For the last two years, C21 Graduate Fellow Allain Daigle and C21 Tennessen Scholar Krista Grensavitch have been collaborating on short videos that explore feminist teaching practices. Krista is a PhD candidate in History; Allain is a PhD candidate in English. Together, we’ve worked together to create short videos that document and express our shared interests in teaching, history, and material culture.
While we worked within a floor of each other in Curtin Hall, our collaboration began outside of the university. We were both volunteers at the Riverwest Co-Op, helping to unload the weekly delivery truck and shelve the chickpeas, bulk grains, local cheeses, and other goods that arrived in the early hours of Thursday mornings. Somewhere between the bustle of moving boxes and the quiet warmth of coffee we often took seated on the curb (the view of the sunrise was best from this vantage), our conversations turned to our respective work. As part of her dissertation, which focuses on feminist teaching and learning practices, Krista suggested that she and Allain work together to create a short video about one of her upcoming classes.
In fall of 2016, after Krista secured support for these videos from The Chipstone Foundation, we began to work on our first teaching and learning video, Creating The Supper Club. The video focused on the final project assigned for Krista’s course, The History of Women in American Society. Students researched women in Wisconsin’s history who have often been omitted from or minimized in the historical record, then collaborated as a class to create a local reinterpretation of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, an installation widely understood as a foundational work of feminist art. In the video, we combined classroom footage, interviews with Krista and students, and documentation of the gallery show. In doing so, we sought to encapsulate not only Krista’s innovative classroom exercises, but also the ways in which students came to learn about and participate in the work of history-making.
Most recently, we’ve finished our second teaching and learning video titled Memory Keepers. Focusing on a single class meeting (Spring 2018, Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies) in which students completed one of five assignments in a semester-long series of assignments titled “Object Lessons,” the video explores how students investigated the idea of consent using archival objects from UWM’s Special Collections. In this video, we focused on contextualizing the objects students examined, which included vibrantly colored dolls used to teach Milwaukee students about sexual consent in the 1980s. As part of this process, we talked with archivists to illustrate how the classroom could present a rich opportunity for students to engage hands-on with history—and how a hands-on approach to history can help us to see the stories and lives that often live outside the written record.
We’ve both found that our collaboration resulted in significant rethinking and reflection on our own fields of practice.
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Allain:
Digital technologies are sometimes held up as magical tools that democratize learning, invigorate teaching, and create new spaces for dialogue. I do see really interesting things happening in digital humanities labs and online learning spaces, even if universities occasionally lean on online teaching for questionable reasons. I see this project as part of a wider effort to find new ways to use technology to support learning, but I don’t see the videos replacing in-class instruction. Krista’s pedagogy is clear evidence of the benefits that in-class learning provides. I do see these videos extending and circulating the life of those classroom exercises in really useful and hopefully moving ways. My hope is that my videos can share Krista’s innovative teaching practices both widely and affectively.
I also found that the best technology for the project was the soft technology of collaboration. Throughout our collaborations, I regularly talked with Krista about the learning goals for the course and ethical historiography, and I learned a great deal about her broader investments in feminist history and material culture. These conversations helped me to better understand what I was seeing when filming in the classroom; they also helped guide my hand as I worked in the editing room to shape the story. Knowing the broader feeling of both Krista’s work and the classroom was as much a part of my process as framing shots and editing sequences of footage, if not more. Working on a small scale helps me to work in spaces and with people that are sometimes held outside of representation. Representation—helping people feel joy and validation at seeing themselves represented well on a screen—is a key part of my work. For me, that process begins in conversation. It’s important to think of that conversation as part of, rather than separate from, any media technology.
Krista:
Creating these teaching and learning video resources with Allain has unwittingly provided me opportunities for self-reflection. As a graduate teaching assistant and later university lecturer, I was always hyper-aware of my relative lack of power within the university as an institution. Additionally, my devotion to developing my teaching practice was consistently challenged by the anxiety I experienced in the face-to-face classroom. However, when Allain and I reviewed the first drafts of the videos, I began to see myself in significantly different ways. In this footage, it was clear that I was a person who possessed authority and appeared confident and assertive as I facilitated a dynamic and thoughtful classroom. Viewing those mediated representations was transformational and I am still grappling with the implications.
This current semester (Spring 2019) I am set to complete and defend my dissertation. Without the time I spent behind the camera responding to Allain’s prompts (which were often challenging and always productive of critical insight), I would not have such a clearly-defined conception of both WHAT I am writing and creating and WHY I am doing it. In his interview prompts, Allain asked me to articulate my motivations for creating an assignment in a particular way, or explain why considering objects is important in the first place. While Allain and I have had many conversations about our respective projects, the opportunity I had to respond on film pushed me to speak clearly and succinctly.
I echo Allain’s sentiments regarding representation, collaboration, and the necessity of centralizing both in these projects. Without his careful consideration and intellectual prodding, as well as his willingness to share his filming and production skills, these videos and the messages they so artfully share would not be possible.
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There are, of course, barriers to creating these videos. While the videos might offer us both professional benefits, they are largely labors of love. Then comes the process of using digital cameras to faithfully document teaching and learning in the classroom. It is one thing to promote the possibilities of digital cameras and audio equipment; it is another thing to find the time and resources to use them. Allain’s video work is the product of a longer history of independent practice and learning. Similarly, Krista’s teaching is also the product of many years of experience and a vested interest in contemporary student experience. It usually takes some outside investment in these extra-academic skills to make using them in academia possible.
This is not to say that video projects like this shouldn’t be done, but it’s important to be aware of the time and labor investments that creating teaching and learning resources, like these videos, entail. The Chipstone Foundation has been a wonderful supporter of the project, and we hope to see teaching and learning videos like these supported at an institutional level more broadly. In addition to creating a rich resource for other teachers, video projects like these would serve as powerful documentation of graduate teaching and could provide a rich complement to traditional teaching statements.
