The Awakening
The Awakening: Re-Examining the American Dream was a semester-long project examining the ideals and diverse experiences associated with the “American Dream.” As a collaboration between two Humanities classes, we took on exploring the content, mastering relevant technologies and establishing the community participation necessary to work towards a student-produced documentary film festival. At this exhibition, students presented publications (as DVD inserts) and documentary movies depicting research, creativity and critical commentary based on what they each personally discovered about the realities of rights and opportunities embedded in this “American Dream.”
During the course of the project we worked as a team towards a deeper understanding of how this dream has been experienced by diverse groups of Americans throughout our nation’s history. We explored how these ideals were established and communicated, the events and impacts of various social movements that pursued these ideals, and also headed out into our community to assess how people feel about these ideals today. Beyond considering this important content, The Awakening provided a powerful opportunity to work with production professionals, develop unique technical skills, and gain experience working in a group towards a common goal.
After much hard work crafting research papers, conducting interviews, sifting through primary source footage, carefully editing video and taking on a DIY publication job, we were able to share our final movies and polished writings with our community at our student organized film festival at our school. While it was a powerful opportunity to share all the learning that took place during the course of this project, it was equally rewarding to demand focused thinking about what it means to live in the United States from every individual that viewed our films and read our words.