Introducing The Ubuntu Collaboration Model: An intersectional filmmaking framework for Higher Education teamwork-pedagogy.

Abstract

The Ubuntu Collaboration Model (TUCM) seeks to address collaboration tensions of scarce resources and hierarchical roles, in student film-production. It proposes that this is achievable via the ethical maximisation of limited production resources and the consciousness of humanness. TUCM has been designed from practice in, and the study of Nigeria’s mainstream cinema, Nollywood. This industry, at its inaugural in 1992, (un)consciously mobilised Ubuntu communal traits including shared ownership, commonwealth, reciprocity, collective survival, and goodwill, to apprehend the prohibitive costs of filmmaking. As part of decolonising-the-curricula initiatives in UK Higher Education, (elements of) TUCM has also been deployed to teach filmmaking on a few undergraduate and postgraduate degree courses. Ubuntu philosophy has been mobilised into discourses of feminism, leadership, literature, and conflict resolution. It has been applied as business model, as well as in dance and childhood pedagogies. This however marks the first time the African philosophy will be utilised to design a collaborative filmmaking model for student film production in Higher Education.