People’s Temple Digital Essay

Lynn Neal, Professor of Religious Studies

Question

What was your “recipe” for the Digital Essay assignment?

Answer

The following steps detail how to begin designing a digital video narrative storytelling assignment.

1. Identify your student learning outcomes (SLOs).
2. Conceptualize digital storytelling assignment possibilities that align with your SLOs.
3. Consult others—librarians, ITGs, Brianna, etc.—to refine your thinking and gather resources and strategies.
4. Decide on your aligned digital storytelling assignment.
5. Scaffold your digital storytelling assignment into your course syllabus. Process, not just product, matters and should count!
6. Test your process and do your own digital story.
7. Refine and Implement.

Project Description

Create a critically empathetic and humanizing three-minute digital essay about one small part of Peoples Temple’s history. Your digital essay can focus on a Peoples Temple member (except Jim Jones), a facet of Peoples Temple’s theology and social work (apostolic socialism, caring for the elderly, fighting racism), or a dimension of their collective life (sports, singing, farming, childcare). Your final product must incorporate primary sources, such as photographs, letters, videos, audio recordings, and interviews, and be informed by secondary research on your specific person or topic.

• Your Voice: Your voice is that of a beginning religious studies scholar seeking to challenge stereotypical and dehumanizing narratives of Peoples Temple.
• Your Intended Audience and Purpose: For the fortieth anniversary of the events at Jonestown, our class has been asked to present a series of digital essays about Peoples Temple to the public as a way of enhancing the general public’s understanding of this complex religious movement.
• Format: Critically empathetic and humanizing three-minute digital essay.
• Topic: Given the parameters of this assignment (3 minutes), your topic must be suitably narrow and focused. Numerous research questions and topics are possible, including: Why are there so many pictures of volleyball at Jonestown? Who was Edith Roller or Annie Moore? What did the Pavilion at Jonestown look like and what happened in it? We will work together in class on selecting topics and narrowing them down. Keep in mind that your topic must also fit the “critically empathetic and humanizing” criterion of the assignment, which means focusing on Jim Jones or media representations of Jonestown are not viable topics. Types of essays/stories include, but are not limited to: (1) Stories about someone important in Peoples Temple, (2) Stories about an event in someone’s life in Peoples Temple, (3) Stories about an important place or site in Peoples Temple, (4) Stories about the work done by a person or group in Peoples Temple.
• Accompanying Digital Story Analysis: Along with your final digital essay submission, you must also include an accompanying 1-2-page single-spaced analysis of it that explains why and how you made your scholarly decisions regarding central elements of your digital essay using the narrative tools discussed in class.

Purpose

• To strengthen your skills in analyzing and interpreting primary sources.
• To create your own piece of religious studies scholarship about Peoples Temple.
• To analyze and evaluate the decision-making process that informs religious studies scholarship.
• To discover and utilize a different form of scholarship—the digital essay.

Learning Goals

Learning Outcome 1: create critically empathetic visual and textual narratives that challenge stereotypical accounts of Peoples Temple by analyzing primary and secondary sources.

Learning Outcome 2: analyze and evaluate the decision-making processes that shape the construction of scholarly narratives.

Role of Academic Technology

For students to learn different skills (video editing, sound recording, script writing, etc.), as well as create a different form of scholarship—the digital essay.

Technology

• Adobe Premiere/Rush
• One Button Studio
• Audacity
• Photoshop
• Google Drive

Target Skills

• Video editing
• Sound recording
• Visual literacy
• Primary source curation and research
• Creative nonfiction writing
• Peer evaluation

Outcomes & Perspectives

Showcase

Walk a Mile in my Shoes:

Religion 390 Final Project Process

Religion 390 Syllabus Beyond Drinking the Kool Aid

Student’s Perspective

“Constructing a digital essay pushed me to move outside of my academic comfort zone to think critically and with empathy. Although I hold that the liberal arts generally teach you these two crucial qualities, challenging the methodologies through which students learn is crucial to continuing to grow. Constructing a digital essay was difficult: from writing a script in a storytelling format to constructing the video itself, the digital essay process was completely new to me. However, I left the Jonestown course excited because I had learned a new skill and thought about academic study through a different lens than the traditional paper or exam would not reach.” (Katherine Cassidy ’19)

“As a last semester religion major, I naively believed that I knew all about theories, synthesis, and application of religion concepts. By taking this course focusing on the intersectionality between popular culture, religion, tragedy, and the construct of narrative, I really had to wrestle with how I previously defined religion and storytelling. This course, and my digital story, will continue to stand out in my Wake Forest experience because I had to apply methods of synthesis and religious studies methods in a creative and unique way that I had never experienced before with any other course in the major. There was definitely a learning curve in this type of course experience because I was so used to learning about the methods and specific religious experiences in different classrooms, but this course required the complete application of both types simultaneously, which was challenging and frustrating at times, but ultimately an extremely rewarding experience.” (Anna Hathcock ’19)

Instructor’s Perspective

“Designing and utilizing a digital essay assignment fostered student engagement with primary sources and their interpretation. By curating and interpreting photographs, videos, audio interviews, diaries, and more, students grappled with different types of sources and created rich, textured narratives about the lives of Peoples Temple members. Constructing these narratives challenged students to cultivate their scholarly voices even as they gained a stronger and more empathetic understanding of the complex people who made up this vital religious movement.”

Assessment

• Assess elements of the digital storytelling process.
• Assess the final digital story. Keep in mind that students will not achieve “mastery” of this skill in one course, so be realistic about what they can achieve.
• Create rubrics!