Grant program: Teaching and Learning Development Grant (TLDG)

Grant recipient: Kate Hennessy, School of Interactive Arts and Technology

Project team: Doenja Oogjes, research assistant

Timeframe: September 2021 to April 2022

Funding: $5,000

Course addressed: IAT344 – Moving Images

Description: Our project proposes to bring together the rich set of films created by SFU students during the Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 semester on a to-be-designed website. These films portray their pandemic experience over three distinct moments in time: the start of the pandemic, the “new normal” and returning to in-person learning. Our goals for this research are: 1) to investigate learning challenges and opportunities of the global Covid-19 pandemic that can be carried forward to in-person learning 2) to create an online archive of the films (will be approximately 90 films in total) representing both a unique moment in time for SFU students and educators and documenting their changing experiences over these three semesters of the course, student film topics, and our ongoing partnership with the Museum of Vancouver.

Questions addressed:

• How can the online course be adapted as a “flipped classroom” model for in-person learning, building on pedagogical innovations that were necessitated by the pandemic shift to online learning? 
• How can we draw from our teaching adaptations of the Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 and apply it to the Fall transition semester and possibly the Spring 2022 semester?
• What will the website with tagged/categorized films reveal about online teaching and the COVID experience more broadly? 
• How has remote teaching and new remote filmmaking tools supported the documentation of the pandemic experience?

Knowledge sharing: The website will be used to share the course as a teaching portfolio. Additionally, we aim to write a paper on the outcomes of our surveys and hybrid teaching methods, particularly in the context of pandemic image making and the way it enabled students to be creative within limitations. The project will also be presented at a SIAT School Meeting.