Teaching with Media and Primary Sources: Grounding Theory in Genealogy and Method

By José Eduardo Valdivia Heredia, Ethnic Studies 

Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2026

A recurring challenge in interdisciplinary classrooms is the gap between abstract theoretical frameworks and students’ capacity to engage them concretely. In my sections for Introduction to Gender & Women’s Studies, I observed that students could often restate a theory or concept in their own words—naming intersectionality, identifying a social construction argument—without being able to trace where those ideas came from, what historical conditions produced them, or how a specific text or object enacts them. Theory, encountered without a genealogy of concrete instantiation, risks becoming inert: something to be reported and memorized rather than strategically applied and engaged. 

To address this, I developed a multimedia primary source integration strategy oriented around three pedagogical goals: grounding abstract concepts in their historical origins, training students in discipline-specific analytical methods, and making visible the connection between academic frameworks and the forms of cultural production students encounter in everyday life. Rather than supplementing theory with media, I repositioned multimedia primary sources as the starting point—the sites from which theoretical questions could be excavated. 

In practice, this meant tracing the genealogy of concepts like “intersectionality” (coined by Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989) by introducing the Combahee River Collective’s “Black Feminist Statement” (1977) not as an illustration of intersectionality but as the political and intellectual scene from which such frameworks emerged, asking students to analyze its rhetorical structure, collective authorship, and historical situation. It meant screening Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning (1990) to practice visual analysis—attending to the documentary gaze, the politics of representation, and what the film preserved and what it cannot. It meant working with digitized archival materials from the Documents of Latin American and Latino Art (ICAA, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) to practice archival analysis while raising questions about how archives are constructed, what they authorize, and what they render absent. Each session included scaffolding: directed analytical questions distributed before viewing or reading, so students arrived oriented toward method rather than passive consumption. I was also explicit with students about the pedagogical intention—naming why we were using these sources and what analytical capacities we were building—treating transparency itself as a teaching tool. 

Assessment of the intervention’s effectiveness was multi-layered and drew from several sources. Visual cues like sustained attention and lively group discussion indicated a qualitatively different level of engagement than discussion sections organized around secondary readings alone. Students approached me after section to share how the lesson had felt, noting that the materials made theoretical concepts feel less abstract and more traceable. More significantly, the course professor reported that students were actively referring to section discussions during lecture and office hours, suggesting that the learning had transferred beyond the discussion context. End-of-semester student evaluations offered written confirmation of this pattern, with students identifying the multimedia sessions as among the most intellectually generative of the course. Taken together, these overlapping forms of evidence suggest that grounding theory in primary sources and explicit methods instruction meaningfully deepened students’ analytical engagement and their sense of ownership over the course’s theoretical frameworks.