Level Up: CineWorlding Website

Positions available: 3 CineWorlding is a newly developing digital cinema production method for educational film. While traditional educational approaches to film have relied strictly on documentary media, cineworlding inverts this method and asks educators and students to be producers of their own films. Through the production process students and educators learn how to make their own educational resources centering the lives of students and the future of their community as the curriculum. A series of free tutorials have been produced at MacEwan University and the next step is to create a website to house and expand these tutorials. This project, therefore, will design a website that will: 1. Establish a virtual home for CineWorlding tutorial videos; 2. Provide extra how-to content that goes into more detail for some of the technical aspects of digital cinema production; 3. Provide a bibliography for teachers and program designers so that they can communicate the importance of CineWorlding to school administrators and funding bodies; 4. Provide a collection of essays and links to books about CineWorlding; 5. Provide examples of CineWorlding films; 6. Provide access to the CineWorlding film festival. Teachers and students increasingly recognize the opportunities that digital media affords. Students engage in digital media, through social media, as a regular part of their lives. Teachers are often frustrated with the amount of time students are engrossed in social media and too often see technology as an enemy of learning. This is due, in part, to the way technology and technological production has been framed in western philosophy, and the narratives of technological utopianism and technological determinism that have resulted. Technological utopianism is the belief that technological innovation only brings along positive outcomes and that society, and the planet, will be saved by technology. Technological determinism, takes an opposite view, seeing technology, and especially entertainment media, as generally negative. Recently, Bernard Stiegler has argued that technology needs to be viewed differently, as central to what it means to be human. CineWorlding is developed on this new view and is building a media pedagogy that will provide students with an opportunity to see that digital media technology has both positive and negative components and that schooling that seeks to understand media technology will help students prepare for their futures with a balanced view of what media technology introduces in society. To get there requires a digital media pedagogy, and therefore CineWorlding. The project will develop in three individual stages with a shared fourth stage: website design content writing social media development editing (all team members contribute) Communications students will be hired to design and populate an interactive website that will lead students and teachers through the processes of digital cinema production. By the end of the 18 30 minute instructional videos, students and teachers will be well-positioned to make and share their own educational films, will have, through this experience, come face to face with the opportunities and challenges of digital cinema production and will be able to critically evaluate the media that they experience. It is my belief that critical capacity comes as the result of producing media, not from abstract analysis of media.

Level Up: Music Learning and GBA+ Analysis (Phase Three of Three)

Project Description (positions available two students) Music is a site of the production of identity, and as a significant source of community, it can serve as a way for musicians to understand self in relation to sociality. Unpacking the formation of musical identity through the study of varying musical educations, such as formal education in a post-secondary jazz program, and informal education in west coast folk music communities, can give us a holistic understanding of the ways that culture, education, and music interact. The coming paragraphs will explain, in greater detail, the goals and methods of each half of this project. Phase Three: The third phase of this project will be to produce a report drawn from the data collected and analyzed in the first two project phases. Part A A site of education, art creation, and improvisation, a post-secondary music program is a complex social network. Each person within this network is at an intersection of various social, institutional, and existential pressures. Using the GBA+ analysis framework and “Background Practices” theory, I will attempt to disclose the nature of some of these pressures and the ways they intersect. Through interviews and participant-observation research in the Bachelor of Jazz and Contemporary Music program at MacEwan University, Edmonton, I will attempt to discover how individual students construct musical-personal identities in this context. Part B Informal music education is formative of musical identity and of how we, as musicians, think about and understand our practice of music-making. Using the restricted geographical context of Vancouver Island and the surrounding Gulf Islands, this project aims to conduct interview-based research on how informal musical training informs the singer-songwriter identity. We intend to use GBA+ analysis framework to uncover the relationship between intersectional identity and musical learning, and we plan on centering the idea of “background practices” in our analyses. The southwestern coast of Canada is an ideal place to study the impact of informal music education on the singer-songwriter identity; especially on the Gulf Islands, there is a distinct “anti-establishment” culture that informs many people’s decisions surrounding formal music education. Folk music is typically an “anti-establishment”, grassroots, community driven music that directly reflects culture by way of story-telling. Simultaneously, folk musicians often depend on and compete for grants and government funding. These tensions between art and institution create a fascinating ecosystem in which to unpack the relationships between musical community, informal education, and identity.

Level Up: Music Learning and GBA+ Analysis (Phase Two of Three)

Project Description (positions available two students) Music is a site of the production of identity, and as a significant source of community, it can serve as a way for musicians to understand self in relation to sociality. Unpacking the formation of musical identity through the study of varying musical educations, such as formal education in a post-secondary jazz program, and informal education in west coast folk music communities, can give us a holistic understanding of the ways that culture, education, and music interact. The coming paragraphs will explain, in greater detail, the goals and methods of each half of this project. Phase Two: The second phase of this project will be to analyze the interviews from phase one. Part A A site of education, art creation, and improvisation, a post-secondary music program is a complex social network. Each person within this network is at an intersection of various social, institutional, and existential pressures. Using the GBA+ analysis framework and “Background Practices” theory, I will attempt to disclose the nature of some of these pressures and the ways they intersect. Through interviews and participant-observation research in the Bachelor of Jazz and Contemporary Music program at MacEwan University, Edmonton, I will attempt to discover how individual students construct musical-personal identities in this context. Part B Informal music education is formative of musical identity and of how we, as musicians, think about and understand our practice of music-making. Using the restricted geographical context of Vancouver Island and the surrounding Gulf Islands, this project aims to conduct interview-based research on how informal musical training informs the singer-songwriter identity. We intend to use GBA+ analysis framework to uncover the relationship between intersectional identity and musical learning, and we plan on centering the idea of “background practices” in our analyses. The southwestern coast of Canada is an ideal place to study the impact of informal music education on the singer-songwriter identity; especially on the Gulf Islands, there is a distinct “anti-establishment” culture that informs many people’s decisions surrounding formal music education. Folk music is typically an “anti-establishment”, grassroots, community driven music that directly reflects culture by way of story-telling. Simultaneously, folk musicians often depend on and compete for grants and government funding. These tensions between art and institution create a fascinating ecosystem in which to unpack the relationships between musical community, informal education, and identity.

Level Up: Music Learning and GBA+ Analysis (Phase One of Three)

Project Description (positions available two students) Music is a site of the production of identity, and as a significant source of community, it can serve as a way for musicians to understand self in relation to sociality. Unpacking the formation of musical identity through the study of varying musical educations, such as formal education in a post-secondary jazz program, and informal education in west coast folk music communities, can give us a holistic understanding of the ways that culture, education, and music interact. The coming paragraphs will explain, in greater detail, the goals and methods of each half of this project. Phase One: The first phase of this project will be to conduct interviews with musicians in the locations discussed below. Part A A site of education, art creation, and improvisation, a post-secondary music program is a complex social network. Each person within this network is at an intersection of various social, institutional, and existential pressures. Using the GBA+ analysis framework and “Background Practices” theory, I will attempt to disclose the nature of some of these pressures and the ways they intersect. Through interviews and participant-observation research in the Bachelor of Jazz and Contemporary Music program at MacEwan University, Edmonton, I will attempt to discover how individual students construct musical-personal identities in this context. Part B Informal music education is formative of musical identity and of how we, as musicians, think about and understand our practice of music-making. Using the restricted geographical context of Vancouver Island and the surrounding Gulf Islands, this project aims to conduct interview-based research on how informal musical training informs the singer-songwriter identity. We intend to use GBA+ analysis framework to uncover the relationship between intersectional identity and musical learning, and we plan on centering the idea of “background practices” in our analyses. The southwestern coast of Canada is an ideal place to study the impact of informal music education on the singer-songwriter identity; especially on the Gulf Islands, there is a distinct “anti-establishment” culture that informs many people’s decisions surrounding formal music education. Folk music is typically an “anti-establishment”, grassroots, community driven music that directly reflects culture by way of story-telling. Simultaneously, folk musicians often depend on and compete for grants and government funding. These tensions between art and institution create a fascinating ecosystem in which to unpack the relationships between musical community, informal education, and identity.