Abstract:

As teachers in a master course in pedagogy, we wanted our students to get a livelier understanding of their own teenage years. One of the aims in the course, is to reflect upon current cultural diversities among young people. Therefore, we wanted to give our 40 students a new kind of mandatory task beside the academic essay: creating a 3-5-minute-long video that shows us glimpses of dilemmas or ambivalences in a situation connected to a school or a leisure time setting from their own youth. “Their own youth” that they present, could be a youth between 13 and 20 years old, close to their own realities or told through a fictive “I”. Our research question is: how do students create short videos making use of their own or fictive experiences as resources for understanding dilemmas or ambivalences of teenage years?

In this study, we conduct a thematic coding to organize the videos relevant to our research question, in total, 200 minutes of videodata. This gave us an overview of:
1) what are the themes of students’ videos and
2) how are the youth dilemmas presented in the videos.

Among this sample, we pick out two presentations of special interest, one with an authentic story and one with a fictive story. We use interaction analysis of transcriptions of the two videos to analyse sequences of meaning making to explore how the students made use of their authentic or fictive “I” as resources for presenting dilemmas or ambivalences. In addition, these two students will be interviewed to meta-reflect upon the insights they got from creating this video work, and how it, possibly, affected their more theory-based understanding of young peoples’ identity work and lived experiences while conducting their master thesis.

Our intention is that this research may contribute to show how the combination of creative filmmaking and more traditional essay-writing may work together. Another intention is to critically discuss the special ethic challenges that this methodology may infer.

Keywords:

Video for learning, youth culture, higher education, ethics, video analysis.