#708: Learning to Look Through the Lens: How Youth Practice Perspective-Shifting Through Filmmaking

Perspective-taking is essential to critical thinking and empathy development. Perspective-taking involves looking at a situation from a viewpoint that differs from one’s usual viewpoint, and understanding another person’s thoughts, feelings, and how they experience the world. Filmmaking is a medium that affords many opportunities for perspective-taking; yet little is known about how youth practice perspective-taking in filmmaking programs. In this paper, we use qualitative data analysis to examine interviews with three young artists in a summer youth filmmaking program. Our analysis reveals specific instances of perspective-shifting, such as considering the audience’s point of view, which we use to create a codebook highlighting occurrences of perspective-shifting in the filmmaking process. We then examine these sections of dialogue and identify linguistic markers of perspective-shifting in the youth filmmakers’ language. The aim of this research is to inform learning design that supports a young person’s capacity to shift perspectives through creative media production.