Introducing the Ubuntu Collaboration Model: An Intersectional Filmmaking Framework for Higher Education Teamwork-Pedagogy.

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.

In recognising that this philosophy is relatively novel to UK learning spaces, TUCM is fashioned to first guide learners through the ontological foundations and epistemological effects of Ubuntu. In this phase, theories of Intersectionality and stereotype are invited for contextual purposes. It then proceeds to apply the philosophy as a mediator to student-filmmaking challenges particularising those of communication, hierarchisation of cast and crew roles, as well as constraints of budget and time. TUCM seeks to ensure that collaborative filmmaking is learnt in a relatively non-judgemental, safe space where learning curves are proactively supported by academic scaffolding. In proposing such scaffolding, this paper concurs with existing teamwork-pedagogy scholarship (Riebe et al 2017), that there is the erroneous tendency to assume that HE media-production academics are adequately trained in teamwork collaboration. In conclusion, it proposes an agenda for the possible propelling of TUCM towards HE pedagogical spaces like Leadership, and Organisational management where collaboration is equally indispensable.

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.

Keywords: Ubuntu philosophy, Intersectionality, teamwork pedagogy, collaboration, stereotype, international students, knowledge equity, Nollywood, The Ubuntu Collaborative Model (TUCM), Indigenous knowledge systems of Africa, pedagogical model, media production, filmmaking, student filmmaking, decolonising media production curricula, student filmmaking, Critical Race Theory, shared ownership, creative leadership.