As Eliza White ’26, Megan Maguire ’26, and Aaliyah Chen ’28 explored material from the Wellesley and MIT archives for their film project in POL1 329: Political Psychology, they were struck by how 50-plus years ago Wellesley students were debating the same issues they are today. “I’d be like, oh my gosh, this quote was from the ’70s, but it feels like this student could go here now,” says White. Maguire added that many of the Wellesley News articles from the 1960s and ’70s “read like they could have been posted this week.”
White, Maguire, and Chen and four other groups of students in the course, taught by Jennifer Chudy, associate professor of political science, have been conducting archival research and interviews on an aspect of Wellesley’s history and how it connects to the political psychology theories they have been studying. They have synthesized their findings into five- to seven- minute documentary films that they’ll present in a film festival at 12:40 p.m. on Thursday, April 23, in Tishman Commons in the Lulu Chow Wang Campus Center.
White, whose group studied the history of the MIT-Wellesley exchange, says several of the films focus on divisive issues in Wellesley’s present and past. “Students in our class have [done] a lot of research into the history that can really clarify and provide insight into why certain debates on this campus have been so persistent over the last few decades,” she says. “I think a lot of these questions will feel very present and salient to students today.”
Topics include the 1971 Commission on the Future of the College, when the board of trustees debated whether Wellesley should go co-ed, and parietals, which were campus rules governing the visiting privileges of off-campus men in Wellesley’s dorms.
“This assignment is not meant to be about which side is right or wrong,” says Chen. “It’s very much meant to be an exploration of the psychology of people that think about these topics … It provides a really interesting framing device for how to understand [them].”
This is the first time Chudy has incorporated a film project into POL1 329, and the first time it will culminate in a film festival. Chudy says she has two main goals when teaching the course: to emphasize sensitivity to the psychology behind people’s political opinions and behaviors, and to “get students talking, because it’s a public speaking class.”
The project helped me feel a stronger connection to Wellesley this semester, just getting to see a lot of the history of the College, especially the more recent history.
Eliza White ’26
Through conducting interviews and creating the short films, Chudy’s students practiced speaking confidently and explaining complex political psychology theories to an audience that may be unfamiliar with them. Chudy says she especially loves to see students who are quiet in class become animated and start gesticulating when in front of the camera. She says making the films is in itself a lesson in political psychology—learning how to hold the audience’s attention and to use music and color to get a specific message across.
“This project has definitely made me see sort of a different form of public speaking,” says Chen. She was already familiar with mock trial and debate, but a film, she says, is “also about the visuals and the sounds, and you have to pay so much more attention to all of the disparate elements of communication that are not just strictly verbal. It’s been really interesting thinking about, how do you go about effective communication when your medium is so much more expansive and so much more flexible?”
Chudy will grade the five groups on the quality of their final films, how they present their work at the film festival, and their effort to encourage classmates and friends to attend Thursday’s event. “I built the syllabus in such a way that there’s actually part of their grade tied with speaking in front of a big audience, because that’s a very specific type of public speaking,” says Chudy. “So the more people they can get to come on Thursday, there’s one or two percentage points that are reserved that will increase the class grade.”
Ahead of Thursday’s event, Chudy’s students seemed confident and ready. Although White, Maguire, and Chen had never made a film before, and any big group project can be “intimidating,” as Chen says, the three agree that Chudy scaffolded the assignment in such a helpful way that they never felt overwhelmed.
Chudy has experience in high school and college theater (she is having her students do a dress rehearsal for the film festival to practice their blocking), but she had never made a film, so she reached out to colleagues across campus for help: Sara Ludovissy in the Wellesley College Archives curated a list of topics for Chudy’s students that were supported by available historic materials. Rebecca Darling and Daria Hafner in Library and Technology Services helped Chudy figure out how to best structure the film project and set the parameters for video production. Paul MacDonald, professor of political science, spoke with Chudy’s students about effective archival research methods. Stacey Schmeidel, Wellesley’s director of media relations, gave the students feedback on their films, and a Pforzheimer Learning and Teaching Center tutor coached them in public speaking.
Chudy says it “feels great” to know that “if I want to do something like this, all these types of resources are available, and it just makes the class better to bring in that expertise.”
Maguire is looking forward to Thursday’s film festival: “We worked very hard on this all semester, and having a celebration rather than just putting a file into a Google Drive folder or submitting it via email feels like an exciting culmination.”
For Maguire and White, both seniors, digging into Wellesley’s history also felt like an appropriate way to end both the College’s 150th anniversary year and their own four years at Wellesley. “The project helped me feel a stronger connection to Wellesley this semester, just getting to see a lot of the history of the College, especially the more recent history,” says White. “I really appreciated that.”
Maguire agrees: “Looking at the past of Wellesley and really taking the time to think about that has been a nice wrap on my experience here.”
—
The POL1 329: Political Psychology film festival is free and open to members of the Wellesley community.
If you can’t attend the festival on April 23 but would like to watch the films, they will eventually be shared online. More information will be posted on this page once available.