I created this video for WRA 860: Visual Rhetoric for Professional Writing. Like project #1, this project was a chance for me to explore the affordances of a medium, video, for communicating. Like photography, video has the capacity to evoke emotion in its viewers and offers a chance for immersive storytelling. I used this video to help my viewer understand the specific thoughts, emotions, and behaviors of a graduate student’s experience.
Specifically,this video attempted to convey the ways in which emotions immerse us in a particular standpoint, one that can distance us from ourselves and from others.I portrayed this in the hallways scene (in which I’m floating towards colleagues and professors asking me questions) by silencing my own voice and the voices of others, and adding an emotional buzz (the hum heard inside an airplane). One of the things that this portion of my coursework taught me,then, was how to convey the complexity of emotional dimensions using a variety of media (including integrating royalty-free sounds, video, and images from external sources).
JacquelineRhodes suggests students should experience the affordances of using different mediums to compose, and I certainly did.This video was very personal. I explored my own identity as a teacher, which involved coming face-to-face with my insecurities about my competence. An affordance of video, I discovered, is that it allows us to experience and re-experience something from multiple standpoints throughout different phases of the composing process. When actually filming the scene in which my students are looking at as though skeptical about my competence, I got to play out both my insecurities and actual (oftentimes sexist) student perceptions of my identity.
I realized belatedly that what I was experiencing and reflecting on was what Amy E. Winans (2012) calls disidentification, the discomfort that comes with recognizing how our identities are constructed by others in ways we cannot control. Just as Winans (2012) argues, learning to stay with this discomfort (though it may feel counterintuitive) helps us accept the diverse ways that meaning is always being constructed.
In the actual filming of this scene, however, I increased my self-awareness of my own construction of my identity. Consciously dramatizing and even directing a scene and context from which I often unconsciously operate reminded me that I am always operating from a particular standpoint, one characterized by a great deal of prejudice about the way others are perceiving me. I later learned about the concept of mental representations in WRA 841, which helped me see that this video was a chance to become aware of the gap between who my students are and my mental representations of them (Schriver, 2012). For instance, I initially generalized all of my students’ experience of filming the opening scene as“students seemed to think this is fun.” While editing the video, however, I was able to listen more deeply to each student’s experience of the filming itself. By reading non-verbal signals, I observed that each student was taking in what was happening in more nuanced ways. The contrast between my first-person memory of this experience and the richness and diversity observable in the editing process is a constant reminder that our mental representations of others are always limited. I carry this lesson with me in my ongoing work on listening.
