This study analyzes the idea of “media archiving as critical pedagogy” by using the Saving Home Movies Campaign (hereafter the Campaign) in Taiwan as a case study. Home movies are not only valuable family artifacts but also historical and cultural documents full of signs and symbols and an anthropological record of a transforming society. They reflect the standpoints of the people who produced them, providing messages and information different from official records and mainstream media. This study illustrates how a group of people made it their mission to save, collect, and preserve home movies made and owned by ordinary Taiwanese, and engaged them in home movie preservation practice. The goal of this study is to analyze the Campaign and its use of critical pedagogy, learn the perspective of the “ordinary people” who participated, and interpret what critical pedagogy both the Campaign and the ordinary people bring. This study adopts qualitative approaches to collect data and a combination of textual analysis and coding to examine and interpret the data collected. First, I conducted field research in several archival institutions to collect past and current studies related to Taiwanese home movies, as well as the data about the Campaign. Second, I participated in several media archiving workshops held by the Campaign and observed how the workshop activities engaged the participants. Third, I interviewed 15 workshop participants to understand their thoughts about and perspectives on their home movies, the Campaign, and the workshop activities.

This study reveals that critical pedagogy existed in the interactions among the Campaign, the participants and the current media cultures. The Campaign empowered participants by teaching them preservation skills and knowledge and fostered their literacy on home movies and engaged them in making diagnostic critiques of mainstream media culture. It created an engaged pedagogy by sharing and dialoguing. Also, the Campaign established a participatory archive which collects and preserves counternarratives of ordinary Taiwanese. Through this learning process, people raised their consciousness about themselves and their relationship with the world. Last, the study critiques how digital media technology lowers the technical threshold for preservation while increasing public concern about permanent preservation.