Composition Video Draft

WHAT AND HOW: With the spirit of Women’s Ways of Knowing as our structure, we will examine the evolution of the academic feminine voice through inter-generational interviews with female graduate students and female faculty members at differing career levels and examine “how they define powerful learning experiences and go about gathering knowledge and making meaning” (10). These interviews will focus on personal narratives of the search for the feminine voice, its place in the academy, the tools to unearth it in our students, and the means to preserve it.

To focus our discussion, the following questions will be posed:

1. Why did you decide to go to graduate school and did that decision empower you as a woman or did you feel devalued in any way because of it?
2. How would you define feminine voice and do you believe that it is different from academic voice? Why or why not?
3. Have you ever experienced or know of an experience of intellectual sexism in academe? If so, what was it?
4. “As one moves up the professional ladder, one observes and increasing defeminization – increasing cognitive and professional authority appears to correlated with decreasing femininity.” –Women’s Ways of Knowing. Do you feel you have or might lose all or part of your feminine identity to conform to the masculine world? Why or why not?We will also include data concerning the graduate program at Texas Tech as it relates to female graduates at the various levels. In addition, we hope to explore the gender make-up of the English department as well.

WHY: To document the evolution of the feminine voice in academia from different perspectives. Yes, some researchers have done so on paper, yet no one has considered the visual.

Research Project: Woman’s Ways of Knowing: Going beyond the B.A.
Group responsibilities:
1. Coming up with a decent title.
2. Creating time and work deadlines.
3. Setting up time to work together on the combination of individual work.
4. Writing the two-three page essay.

Individual responsibilities:
1. Each member will interview four women, graduate students or professors, using only the agreed upon questions. She should make sure the participants have signed a permission slip for use of the video in a class project. She will be responsible to set up the interview times, get all equipment ready, check for room readiness (Room 455 on the white wall), and prep the interviewee by giving that person the questions in advance. (This will take at least 5-6 hours.)
2. Each member will be download each interview, using the Macs in the MOO or Dr. Rice’s classroom, and the I-movie program, in order to have consistency and avoid incompatibility problems between programs and computers. Remember each download takes as long as each interview. A 30-minute interview takes 30 minutes to download. (This will take approximately 3 hours.)
3. Each member will be responsible for editing the interviews to fit time constraints. If we are making an hour video and have ten questions, total response for each question can be no more than six minutes (This six minutes would have more than one answer from an interviewee but cannot have all the answers from all the respondents.). Therefore, each member should only pick the very best answers to put into the videotape. (This may take 6-10 hours.) All interview editing must be completed before Thanksgiving if we want the entire video completed by the 29th.
4. Each member will be required to work with the other members to complete the project in the final editing stages. This may require an entire afternoon (or more) early in the week of Nov. 26, late in the week of Nov. 19, or over that weekend between the two, which is Thanksgiving.

Individual member responsibilities:
Vicki—Create intro, transition, and credit pieces. Find and underscore with music where necessary.
Janna—Provide research information about female grad students.
Beatriz—Demographics from various departments used.