Competence and Mastery in Practice: On Participation, Responsibility and Believing in Your Own Abilities

Abstract

How can school-weary youth regain faith in their abilities and their own future? The film discussed in this article is a critique of compulsory school’s inability to mediate knowledge and self-confidence through practical experiences. We meet two young boys who describe their schooldays as a time of little self-accomplishment and little joy in learning. Being given the opportunity to participate in the practical relation between themselves, the materials, the tools, and the customers at the car workshop Midtun Dekk, they now have experienced performance accomplishment and developed self-efficacy. They both emphasize how this workplace has changed their lives and their attitude towards themselves, and they both express a sincere gratitude to the company manager who gave them trust and responsibility. This article will highlight some of the conditions that may have contributed to their positive development. The determinative experiences of the boys combined with the power of visual communication makes it also necessary to discuss some of the considerations to be made in the process of presenting research through a research film. The author wants to ask: How much is it acceptable to edit in a research film? Can too much intervening change the result from argumentative reasoning to propaganda?