The use of film literacy in the development of critical self-awareness and transpersonal growth amongst a group of post-school youth

Abstract

In a developing country like South Africa, young adults in particular, in their attempts to establish a sustainable livelihood, are challenged by issues such as having to figure out their positionality within a phygital world, and becoming critically aware that spaces for learning and work can be created anywhere, anytime. Various authors have explored the importance of multi-literacy (New London Group, 1996; Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; Lankshear & Knobel, 2011; Kapur, 2019) and multimodal literacy in school and post-school curricula (Jewitt, 2009; O’Halloran & Smith, 2011; Mills & Unsworth, 2018). Each of these literacies has been shown to encompass the essential communication skills people require in terms of career readiness and function in society. In the 21st century, film as a multimodal form of expression is a widely recognised communication medium linked to the ability to make powerful statements about the world (Ruby, 1976; Barrett, 2015; Eco, 2016; Glotov, 2018). However, in educational practices, considerable confusion exists regarding the potential and scope of film as a multimodal form of literacy, particularly as a boundary-crossing competence (Dirkinck-Holmfeld, 2006; Walker & Nocon, 2007; Fox, 2011), a competence which can be used to facilitate communication and collaboration across disciplines and culturally defined boundaries. The strengths of spaciousness and in-between boundary positions provided by the spider’s thread metaphor (Holyoak, 2019) served as a useful methodological tool. Located in the question of how film literacy actuates critical self-awareness and transpersonal growth amongst a group of post-school youth, this inquiry explored a post-qualitative approach. Transformative theories and concepts, rather than pre-determined methodology, guided this inquiry and made possible an assemblage of relevant methods with transformative potential. Moving beyond the limitations of traditional discourse and content analysis, multimodal discourse analysis in combination with a modified, six-category measuring instrument was used to explore (analyse) the evidence (data), created as products of active participant engagement in a shortfilm-making project, over a 10-month period in 2020. Findings revealed that, for the participants, it was by moving from physical self-centred understandings of reality to experiential creations of authentic reality (shortfilm-productions) and involving an expanded awareness of those alternative possibilities which nurtured their potential transpersonal growth. In this process, film literacy-competencies became part of the altered or expanded selves of both the participants and their audiences. Significant knowledge contributions were made. Firstly, to knowledge about film literacy as a boundary-crossing competence to facilitate communication and collaboration across disciplines, and culturally defined boundaries; secondly, to the application of a research strategy rarely used in educational research, namely developmental phenomenography. Finally, the implementation of an arts-based educational research-approach was considered to have responded to the dearth of practical research on the arts-based doctorate as an emerging genre within academic research.