Collaborative Writing on Our Autoethnography of a Youngest Child: Reflecting and Looking Forward

Our video represents Natalie’s narrative: the experience of a youngest child reflecting on the way her life has been shaped by birth order with a new perspective she’s developed as a college student. Throughout the video making process, our group strived to take scholarly pieces that explained why she felt certain ways, and how her experiences with birth order were similar to others, and turn it into an easily accessible story that still had an emotional appeal. Our process was multi-step, beginning with transforming the writing to spoken narration, and then focusing on our photographic content, music choices, and video components. We felt a strong desire to focus on details and symbolism throughout the film, and despite challenges in production and scheduling, we felt that our video came out as a complete and thorough piece that exceeded all of our goals. Our project worked well because of our ability to actively communicate and exchange thoughts and ideas that resulted in strong collaborative rhetorical choices and a cohesive piece.

Our video making process was a methodical and efficient step by step system. We began by using Natalie’s compiled research and outline to create a rough draft of our script. After meeting with Professor Giovanelli, we decided to create a tone with more prose, reflecting our audience. Over Thanksgiving break, Natalie returned with a plethora of family photos that displayed her experiences as a youngest child. These photos gave us an early opportunity to organize our thoughts. The photographs provided ranged from her early childhood, her high school career, and even to her family over the recent break. Once we had compiled the script and family pictures, we created a storyboard that would dictate where the video would go, and how we wanted all the visual components to tie together. We began the filming stages as a group in various locations around campus, and then recorded the audio based on what we had written in our script. Our final stages involved finding additional photos of the scholars that we used, and some more general images that we added to the end of the film. Lastly, we compiled all of our elements, and found music to tie everything together.

One of the first rhetorical choices we made was over which sources to include in the script and video. Among the sources Natalie used in her essay we found a couple that were most relevant to the script of the video. One scholarly source we included was “Meet the Farfels: An activity for discovering and discussing birth position” by Milliren and Dubrovich. We included this source because they found that the youngest child in the family is the most spoiled and has the least amount of responsibilities causing them to be more sensitive and self-conscious, but still likely to become successful, which reflects Natalie’s experiences. The second source we included was “The Associations of Birth Order with Personality and Intelligence in a Representative Sample of U.S. High School Students” by Damian and Roberts. This source provided evidence that not all research has found birth order affects personality, addressing the idea we talk about at the end of the essay that not all experiences as the youngest child are the same and being the youngest child does not have set in stone effects. In addition, while reading Amy’s essay we discovered that one of her sources connected as well. Russ and Dunkel found that the relationship between children and their parents is affected by their place in the family and that each child has their own family, which supports Natalie’s belief that her relationship with her parents was different that her siblings’ relationship with her parents. When including these sources we decided to include the names of the researchers and where their findings were published when we stated only their findings, rather than combining multiple of our sources. By including the names of two of the researchers we used we showed ethos, but still did not detract from the personal story we were portraying by talking too much about our sources and the researchers.

We also chose to focus our video on family photos. The very premise of the original essay was Natalie’s experience with the dynamic of her family that she felt as a youngest child, so we felt that original family footage would most strongly correlate to the content of the essay. The pictures that we selected covered many aspects of her life, both her moments among her family members, individual moments, and even moments of her siblings alone that acted as comparisons to her personal experience, such as their various sports tournaments, or jobs post-graduation. Throughout the video, we attempted to keep the photographs directly relevant to where the script was going at that point. For example, when Natalie speaks about being isolated from her older siblings and cousins, we included a picture of her with her mother alone, with her older sister Jacqueline playing in the background. Similarly, when she talks about focusing on her relationship with her parents more than her social life outside of the house, the accompanying picture is her hugging her mother and father. These photographs not only related back to the storyline of the narration, but added an emotional element as well. Because they are so personal to Natalie’s life and experience, the viewer feels more of a connection to the thread of her account.

In filming the video portion, we wanted to include the symbolism of Natalie’s family tree. The inclusion of her family tree shows how her thoughts are still with her family as she becomes a full time college student. Additionally, it creates a visual distinction between Natalie and her siblings, and her own unique relationship with her parents. We also show her entering South, and the classroom where our writing course takes place. This element shows our attempt to create a greater metaphor of Natalie’s experience entering college, and the analysis that she did over her past as a youngest sibling, not just in class writing. The video footage showing Natalie exiting South at the end of the video shows the culmination of her reflection on her past as a youngest child, and her moving into the future. This enables the viewer to reflect after the video on how her experience will change now that she is in college, and not at home with her parents as most of the video focuses on.

Our next rhetorical choice was choosing background music that we felt would provide good background to the narration without becoming overpowering. We believe that the sounds that we chose have a somewhat sentimental quality, while not being depressing or disheartening. While it has a somewhat quieter feel, it still transmits a somewhat uplifting emotion, which pairs well with the content of the narration. As Natalie looks back on her positive relationship with her parents paralleled with her complicated relationship both looking up to and feeling competitive with her siblings, the music’s multifaceted mood adds a matching dimension. The ambience it provides to the video provides both a complimentary mood to the content, and a good background filler.

At the end of the video, we decided to stop showing Natalie’s family photos and include pictures of other families. The reason we did this was to show that not all families are like Natalie’s and not all youngest children have the same experiences Natalie did. We talk about how the research on birth order is fairly inconclusive, so we wanted to provide a broad array of siblings to demonstrate the diversity of personalities and characteristics that different siblings have. No family shares the same dynamic or traits, and the stock photos, while not as personal, demonstrate this concept.

While we think our final product is polished and well-put together, the construction process was not entirely smooth. One of the things we struggled most with was transitioning the essay from structured, scholarly writing, to a more fluid, personal, and artistic piece. It took a lot of collaborative brainpower to come up with mutually agreeable solutions that would retain the scholarly content from Natalie’s original work but add a new element of intimacy and emotion to the film. We also had difficulty finding time to collaborate in person, due to the break and our conflicting schedules. However, with our various time management skills, flexibility, and willingness to divide and conquer, we were able to find effective solutions to these problems.

Throughout this process, we have learned how to look at writing from other people’s perspectives and integrate different writing styles into one cohesive piece of writing. We have also learned how to plan our process based around our priorities, as well as how to communicate with others more efficiently. In retrospect, we wish we could’ve brainstormed storyboards separately so we could’ve had some different ideas instead of coming up with everything together, because that may have limited us to a certain extent. We also could’ve produced a more updated second draft in order to receive more detailed and relevant feedback in our second round of in-class peer reviews. However, we found that our experience of collaborating to write the script, make our video, and write our reflection essay was beneficial because in many professions and in the scholarly world which we are sure to encounter in the future, teamwork and cooperation is necessary in order to present research, develop new ideas, and bring clarity to old topics. Especially in this day and age where digital media makes teamwork possible even from opposite ends of the earth, this is a skill that will be valuable regardless of profession, location, or project.

Sam Pastor, Natalie Bath, Dorina Langer, and Amy Pfeffer