Brigham Young University

About Hands on a Camera

Hands on a Camera (HOC) is an on-going service-learning project developed by faculty and students from the Brigham Young University (BYU) Theatre and Media Arts Department.

The media literacy education project seeks to instill the basic principles of media literacy in local primary and secondary students by providing them with critical engagement and hands on experiences with a variety of digital media.

The Hands on a Camera project was founded in 2005 by Amy Petersen Jensen, an assistant professor at BYU, and is supported through grants from the BYU Theatre and Media Arts Fulton Endowment. The program has also been supported by the Laycock Center for Creative Collaboration in the Arts and BYU Mentored Learning Grant (MEG) monies. This on-going media literacy experience, guided by BYU students, helps young people from local public school classrooms:

University Students—
Preparing for the Collaboration:

In phase one of the HOC project BYU students from across campus (Theatre, Media Arts, Humanities, Technology Teacher Education, and Education) participate in Media in the Contemporary Classroom (TMA 457) taught by Theatre and Media Arts media education and production faculty. Students study basic media pedagogy and instruction techniques. They also create documentary projects (video, audio, photo) that follow the same model they will eventually help K-12 students create in school settings. The university students also develop preliminary lesson plans based on media literacy principles and methods of digital storytelling.

These experiences provide the university students with opportunities to see differences in their own conceptions of media literacy education and documentary production. It also provided space for the university students to negotiate shared conceptions about appropriate learning models and classroom activities, and to develop clear teaching and learning expectations for themselves and their future students that aided their work in the implementation phase of the project.

Sharing their work with the larger community—

When the project is complete participating teachers, elementary and secondary students and their families are invited to BYU to participate in a Hands on a Camera Day, where the HOC community and their guests view the K-12 students’ documentary efforts.

'Students and teachers and other community members get to view and discuss the work of their peers from other schools. These screenings allow for reflection and celebration and hopefully extend the conversation of the group beyond the boundaries of the smaller partnerships we develop in the HOC collaborations.