Turn³

The CLARIAH Media Suite offers students the challenge to investigate the visual cultural archive for themselves. Rather than applying a set of prescribed analytical tools to a prescribed corpus of visual materials that the lecturer has decided are relevant and representative of visual culture, students are given the task of curating, annotating, and studying an original corpus of visual media materials that they deem valuable.

About the project

Through formulating a set of realistic learning problems that explicitly lead the way into the CLARIAH Media Suite, but otherwise are open-ended, this project sets upon a path towards a critical pedagogy in/of the archive. It does so by inviting a diversity of responses tomaterial from Dutch media archives, and inviting a diversity of perspectives on these materials that originate with the students’ previous knowledge, life experiences, and sense of urgency. This project aims to explore and report on the pedagogical and political potential of collaboratively building annotated corpuses related to self-identified issues in visual culture as a starting point for building skills associated with visual literacy, archival literacy and critical cultural citizenship.

In order to stimulate students to assume the role of curators, producers and disseminators of knowledge in their own right, this project is aimed at developing a set of learning triggers or prompts along the pedagogical principles of problem-based learning, using the collections and tools made accessible through the CLARIAH Media Suite. Embedded in the critical pedagogical project of enabling students to envision themselves as agents of change, the problem-based learning (PBL) archival encounters will be designed to activate skills in critical visual analysis and development of archival literacy through self-directed learning projects.

This project aims to combine the radical and critical potential of PBL as “practice of freedom” with the enriching and challenging possibilities of digital collaborative research. By turning upside down the hierarchies of cultural and educational institutions, PBL can cut through the intimidation that students sometimes experience when entering archival spaces and activate their potential as critical cultural citizens and agents of change.