Teaching Community Groups Documentary Skills To Tell Their Stories

Elmira, NY (12/17/2021) — Storytelling is a powerful tool for sharing information, and a collaborative effort between Elmira College, the Arts Council of the Southern Finger Lakes, The MakersSpace at Steele Memorial Library and Chemung County Historical Society, is helping the region's diverse communities gain new skills in the art through a documentary workshop developed by Doc Billingsley, assistant professor of anthropology at EC, and T.C. Owens, folk arts coordinator at the Arts Council.

In eight sessions held over two months, 13 area residents attended the free Community Documentation Workshop organized by the Arts Council and funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Attendees learned how to put together short, 5-7 minute documentary-style videos about local cultural traditions using interview, photography, videography, and video editing skills.

"My job was to cover ethnographic methods of talking to participants," said Billingsley. "I taught about how to do interviews, take notes, transcribe and then make sense of the notes taken in order to put together a narrative."

Owens focused on how to shape a narrative and the technical video editing skills needed to put it all together.

"The idea is to take a lot of the knowledge Doc and other folklorists and I have and put that into the hands of the communities so they can document their own stories," said Owens. "That way they can be the authors of their own experiences."

In the inaugural workshop, the documentary duo divided participants into four teams who each worked with one of four community groups: Congregation Kol Ami, Elmira Center for Cultural Advancement, Southern Tier India Cultural Association (STICA) and the Islamic Association of the Finger Lakes. Each organization had at least one person attending the workshop who served as a cultural scholar. Their role was to help their team better understand cultural nuances, learn the traditions of each community, and help network within the respective community.

Skills ranged across the team members. But that was part of the fun for Billingsley.

"It was great to see a tapping into the hive mind of everyone's different expertise and seeing what they came up with when they were mixed together," he said.

One attendee is in the music industry and composed a song for the video soundtrack.

"This really is a collaborative project that's focused on amplifying cultural equity and the voices of our region and I think there has been a lot of goodwill and trust with our partners and it's really exciting," said Owens. " People are meeting people and building connections across lines they wouldn't normally."

The workshop participants weren't the only ones learning.

Billingsley said he learned a lot about video storytelling and hopes to bring his new skills to his students at Elmira College. He also wants to dive back into his doctoral research and think about new ways to share the information using video.

Beyond the storytelling skills, the workshop helped introduce Billingsley to the area and its people. He joined the EC faculty about three years ago and about half of that time has been spent homebound due to the pandemic.

"This has been a great way to meet people and form relationships," he said.

In the final workshop, the teams premiered their films with the class. They are working now to edit the videos based on the class feedback. Billingsley and Owens are reaching out to venues and setting up times to screen the videos in the respective communities and beyond. The videos will also be placed on the Southern Finger Lakes Traditions website.

Billingsley and Owens hope to continue offering the workshop. They are both eager to learn from the experience they had with the first group, especially figuring out how to modify the experience to keep everyone, from the teams to the people they are documenting, healthy and safe in the pandemic.

"This would be a great opportunity for Elmira College students," said Billingsley. "Not just anthropology students but people from various fields of study. For example, it would help business administration students who are learning marketing and communications. They can use these skills to put together presentations."

"This is a great opportunity for experiential learning that we can't always provide in the classroom," he said.

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