Audiovisual Media Literacy Education

In 2021, upon my graduation from The L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation, I received a Fellowship at the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC) to work alongside Audiovisual Archivist Brent Phillips. I began the Fellowship in June 2022, immediately becoming included with the Collections Management team and meeting the Assistant Directors of the RAC. The remote workflow quickly revealed an opportunity to pursue a project directly in line with my interests: media literacy education and legacy audiovisual material.

I was fortunate to work with Brent and Education Program Manager Marissa Vassari on creating a Media Literacy Education Resource. The RAC has already developed similar resources that can be found on the Teach with Archives hub. From the outset we knew we wanted to provide an additional resource to focus specifically on legacy audiovisual material.

I began this project with a literature review, researching the approaches of how to integrate legacy audiovisual material into media literacy education. This topic can be found in the discourse, but discussion of how audiovisual archivists can be involved in MLE is sparse. While libraries, media non-profits, healthcare professionals, and more are presented as stakeholders, the voices of audiovisual archivists are often absent. Tasked with preserving, digitizing, and making accessible these materials, audiovisual archivists also represent important stakeholders and should be present in the discourse.

For our MLE resource, we identified two VHS tapes from the Ford Foundation records. The first title, Sex, Drugs & AIDS (1986), was created by O.D.N. Productions and was financed by the New York City Board of Education. According to reporting by The New York Times in November of 1986, this was the first video about HIV/AIDS to be distributed to students in the United States. While it was originally intended to be shown to eleventh grade students in May of 1986, the video was shelved due to concerns by some board members that it did not emphasize abstinence as the best option to avoid AIDS. While a revised version with the new title, The Subject is: AIDS (1987), was created to appease concerned Board members, the original version was shown to students across the country.

These videos were apt choices for our resource, as they are nearly identical despite the few revisions made for the 1987 version. Both feature actor Rae Dawn Chong as she explains HIV transmission and AIDS to young people. The videos differ mainly in two dramatizations featuring (1) young women discussing their birth control methods and (2) individuals regretting their homophobia after gay people they knew and loved died of AIDS. The similarities and differences between these two videos allowed us to create critical questions for students, which aimed to have students analyze how these videos communicate visually and narratively. We also wanted students to think critically about these videos as archival sources that they are still able to watch nearly 40 years after their creation.

We did this first by identifying aspects about the social and historical context during the 1980s. Identifying the original intended audience can give students a reminder that they are watching these videos from a distance. Produced during the height of the AIDS crisis, the general population still faced uncertainty about how the virus was transferred from person to person. Furthermore, the gay community faced high levels of backlash and violence, which lends credence to the sections in which tolerance of gay people is encouraged. Additionally, we identified the original format for these videos as VHS tapes, notably because young people may not know the extent to which VHS tapes proliferated the home video market. The popularity of VHS tapes during the 1980s gave rise to educational content students could watch in the classroom. Noting the original format of media is of the utmost importance, as it can provide context surrounding the distribution of media, who watched it and how they received information.

We also provided additional resources for students and educators: an HIV/AIDS timeline, textual and audio sources from the 1980s, and a glossary of audiovisual and archival terminology. Not only do these additional resources give students an opportunity to explore the cultural landscape of how HIV/AIDS was handled during the 1980s, but providing a glossary gives students language to accurately describe audiovisual material.

Upon watching the videos multiple times and utilizing the information and resources provided to them, students will be able to answer the following critical questions:

  1. What do you think is the overall message of this video?
  2. Who created this message?
  3. How might diverse groups of viewers interpret this message differently?
  4. Why is this message being conveyed to the audience?
  5. What values, lifestyles, and points of view are represented in, or omitted from, this message?
  6. What creative techniques are used to grab the audience’s attention?
  7. What narrative techniques are used to grab the audience’s attention?
  8. Why are viewers still able to watch this video?

These questions are vital in order to understand audiovisual media. We are living increasingly in an audiovisual saturated world, and legacy materials often present challenges in educational settings as they can include language and images now deemed offensive. As audiovisual archivists we recognize media as unique cultural artifacts that ought to be saved and learned from in order to make a better and informed citizenry. Giving students and educators guidance as to how to understand our collection material within cultural, historical, and formal contexts furthers these goals and makes for well-rounded media consumers.

Culturally Competent Description: Video in Progress

While archivists recognize that legacy material at times can be difficult to watch or read, they also must reckon with problematic description that has been applied and used within their own collections. Thus, in my second project of the summer, I continued with the work Christian Balistreri, the 2020 RAC-Selznick Fellow, had previously completed and explored the topic with Brent Phillips, as well as Processing Archivists Amy Berish, Katie Martin, and Darren Young. Our goal was to create a storyboard for an upcoming video tutorial about the RAC’s Culturally Competent Description (CCD) Campaign.

This upcoming video will give a brief overview to define CCD and, importantly, focus on the steps the Campaign team took to implement CCD at the RAC. Through using visual examples of problematic description and how they have been changed, the video will explain to student archivists and professionals alike how this work can be implemented and achieved.

Conclusion

The two projects undertaken during my Fellowship help paint a broader picture about how to approach sensitive topics through archival material. All archival materials and media were created within a specific historical context and for a specific audience in mind. However, understanding these contexts does not mean archivists need to agree with the values these archival materials espouse. Indeed, it is vital archivists identify these values when present, as not doing so can create more harm moving forward.

As the stewards of our collection items, archivists stand to make major change not only in affecting how current-day individuals should understand our materials, but how individuals far in the future will as well.