Interview with a Film Director

Essay 2: Things that will help you better understand the requirements of the assignment
1. Identify someone to interview. What is important to remember here is that you want to focus on the intersections between career and literacy in your interview; therefore, you should consider talking to someone who has some kind of professional qualification.
Through the interview, you will get an idea of the types of literacies needed for the particular career. (If you interview a band director, you will learn about musical literacy, for instance). You can interview people from the field you are interested in (not mandatory, just a suggestion). Maybe a professor, or someone working in a field you are interested in but don't know, or you can also talk to a boss, a parent, an older friend, a family friend, etc.
Basic question: What does the interviewee do (careerwise)? What led them to their jobs? How did the literacy in their field help them in their career? Does it relate to your future goals as well? If so, how? If not, how?
This is the basic background of the questions. You can explore the professional journey of the person. Have questions that intrigue the interviewee.

Take away from the assignment: This essay asks students to learn how to use primary materials to craft an original argument. The interview questions that students use should be developed by them and should centre around their career field or professional goals (preferably). The purpose is to allow them to learn about the career path they envision from themselves from (preferably) someone already in the field and to then make an argument using what they learned. An example of this might be that a student in IT interviews someone in the field and learns that workers in this field need to have passion and be trustworthy, so they craft an argument with this idea as the thesis and then use quotes from the interview as their evidence to support their claim.
2. Create an interview plan that includes a formal set of relevant, useful questions. Plan to record to the conversation if possible AND to take detailed notes as you interview. Then, conduct the interview. We might have preconceived notions about the interviewee if we know their profession. So, some of our questions might already be tailored for that particular career. What inspired them? What motivated them? What inspires them even now to continue doing what they do? (Questions that you might want to ask, not mandatory. Feel free to come up with your own questions and prompts) Since this assignment focuses on literacy and career, that should be the focus of your conversation and interview. Most times, you will be led by the interviewee to different findings that you might not even have thought about earlier.Being creative with your questions can help you analyze your interviewee’s answers better. Why did they say a certain thing? Were they influenced by any external motives?
3. Review the interview and analyse your notes/data looking for patterns OR trends in responses, especially where the information from your interview coheres with (or deviates from) your own experiences. Generate a claim about your major findings.
4. Write a short report that presents this claim as a thesis statement. You do not have to submit the transcribed interview, word to word. Use the information from your interview to support your claim. The essay uses details from the interview to present your findings and give readers a reason to accept your claims about this profession and its roots in a certain type of literacy. Does anything particular in the interview intrigue you to ask questions? Now that we have explored our own experiences with career literacy (Essay 1), how can we proactively seek an understanding of others’ narratives? This essay tasks you with conducting an interview with someone who has become an authority or entered a profession as a result of their skills in literacy who can speak to the challenges and affordances of their role—what their role asks them to do, what is challenging, and what they are able to do, especially as it relates to one of the literacies discussed in Chapter 1. You have done exercises on literacy when you wrote about your personal experiences with literacy- your fondest memory, your difficulties, multiple literacies, literacies within a particular group etc. You have also read Amy Tan’s essay “Mother Tongue”- where she writes about the different ways in which she interacts with the people around her. Why? Because we have different literacies (vocabularies?) for different situations and people. When we discuss literacy, these questions inevitably come up. You can use these questions as prompts to form your own questions. Does your interviewee challenge you to look at literacy in a different light? Literacy is a part of our society, how to you think that affects us as individuals? You will use your data to generate a claim about this profession and its grounding in literacies. The interview data will be used to support a series of claims about this profession and its intersections with literacies.
 800-1200 words
 A clear thesis statement that presents your major findings from the interview
 Detailed evidence to support your claim that comes from your interview (e.g. direct quotes from interviewees, summaries of their stories/explanations)
 A coherent organizational structure that supports your claim (includes introduction and conclusion)
 MLA citation for all sources in attached Works Cited page
 A set of research questions as an appendix (2 or more)
Dream career: Film (anything in the field mainly :director or editor)