Nurturing youth film literacy: Post-qualitative arts-based inquiry into critical self-awareness

Post-digital, as a timeframe set, raises specific concerns for young adults engaged in artistic and cultural activities, seeking to establish a sustainable livelihood within a semi-rural South African context. They grapple with issues such as determining their positionality within a world marked by fading boundaries between the physical and digital. To better understand the post-digital impact on experiential learning opportunities for young adults, the authors explored the specific ways and extent to which active engagement in shortfilm-making contributes to developing critical self-awareness among the participating post-school youth. An assemblage of transformative theories and concepts, rather than pre-determined methodologies, guided this inquiry that extended beyond the development of career and workplace competencies. The strengths of spaciousness and in-between boundary positions provided by the spider’s thread metaphor served as a useful methodological tool. Moving beyond the limitations of traditional discourse and content analysis, multimodal discourse analysis in combination with a modified, six-category measuring instrument was used to explore (analyse) the evidence (data) created as products of active participant engagement in a shortfilm-making project, over a 10-month period in 2020. Findings revealed that, for the participants, it was by moving from physical self-centred understandings of reality to experiential creations of authentic reality (shortfilm-productions) and involving an expanded awareness of those alternative possibilities that nurtured their potential transpersonal growth.Transdisciplinary Contribution: A synthesis of arts-based, post-qualitative and developmental phenomenographic approaches was employed to create, explore and communicate evidence in ways that present a holistic picture of alternative pathways to knowledge production.