Chapter 24: Documenting Democracy: The Digital Short Project

The Digital Short Film Project positions teacher candidates to (re)consider their conceptions of democracy and democratic living by creating a digital short focused on answering the question, “what is democracy?”

The Digital Short Film project is designed to give teacher candidates, as democratic citizens and future social studies teachers, the opportunity to reflect on the meaning of democracy. The project challenges them to connect their definitions of democracy, their developing purposes for teaching social studies, and their thinking about what counts as subject matter in social studies. Given that the majority of our candidates enter this course with limited experience connecting social studies content with democratic living, the goal is to push them to make their new thinking visible in their digital shorts.