Interview with CAMRA, Part 2 of a 3 Part series

This is part 2 of the interview with four Penn Doctoral students who contribute to the Media Pedagogy Lab, CAMRA.  They are preparing for the First Annual Screening Scholarship Series Festival this Sunday, an event that CAMRA is co-sponsoring.  

For part 1 of the interview, click here.


MTW: One of the results of creating new ways to present research is that you can establish new ways to set the tone of the learning environment.  As visual and digital research representation becomes more prevalent, what aspects of the learning environment - and the students and scholars in those environments - must researchers be aware of?

Matthew Tarditi (Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education): Pedagogy is at the heart of CAMRA and most of us in the organization who are educators and/or educational scholars are keenly aware of the relation between research, knowledge production and issues of representation on one hand and teaching and learning on the other.  

Audio-visual and digital technologies pervade all facets of our lives, not only as learners and teachers, but also as social beings acting and interacting with one another through these media.  Therefore, researchers must continue to be aware of the ways technology mediates and influences the complex array of individuals, knowledges, relationships, contexts and learning environments, among other variables, in order to explore, account for and ultimately incorporate these media (existing and new) into pedagogical approaches.  

Lastly, for researchers, the issues of ethics and participation are important themes warranting thoughtful consideration and awareness as we continue to experiment with multimedia technologies in educational environments.  


Sofia Chaparro (Educational Linguistics): First, we must address the media literacies we come with as audiences for digital/visual/auditory representations of research. How do we interpret what we see and hear? What literacies are already in place that frame what we see in particular ways?

Secondly, we must address the issue of legitimization of this type of genre in the academy. How do evaluate such work? Is there a way to “peer review” and “publish” digital/visual/aural works? What criteria do we use? Part of the project of CAMRA is engaging the academic community in this discussion so that we may begin to articulate frameworks that will allow this work to “count” just as much as written papers and publications do.

Finally, as Matt mentioned above, issues of ethics and representation come to the forefront whenever you use visual media as a methodology in social scientific research, particularly ethnography. To me, it means that fostering critical literacies in students is paramount as a goal of education at all levels. 

Arjun Shankar (Anthropology and Education): This is a great question and one I have been thinking about a lot.  The first is that technologies (film, multimedia) are not some magic bullet.  We have all been in classrooms already in which professors put on films expecting that the film will somehow do all the teaching for them.  In reality, these forms of media have to be thought of with a pedagogical lens in mind.  What types of power differentials and inequalities might the film be propagating?  What are the major questions which a professor needs to be ready to address and critique when students integrate these new forms into their learning environments?  These are really important ethical questions which cannot be swept away.  

The second part of this is that we cannot expect students to be able to utilize these tools in self-conscious ways just because they are immersed in digitality in their everyday life.  To use these tools effectively, professors have to begin allowing students to experiment with production, and help students see how their own biases come out in what and how they produce these digital products.