“Documentary filmmaking in the curriculum is one of my favorite genres to teach,” says ITEC’s Instructional Technologist Brianna Derr. “I love the hands-on, in the field, approach to research. We take students out of the classroom and place them at ground zero of their story. This experience is invaluable. The students aren’t just reading about personalities in a book, they’re shaking hands with them.”
Environmental Residential College has been teaching the documentary film as a form of pedagogy for the past three years. Each year the professors assess and re-shape their approach, and every year the results get better. Currently Professor Alf Siewers and Professor Kat Wakabayashi are teaching the course, which contains 25 students forming a total of 8 teams, all of whom learn how to create a treatment, script, storyboard, film, conduct interviews, edit, peer review and assess each others projects. Professors Siewers and Wakabayashi have combined each of their courses, Christianity and Sustainability and Reduse, Reuse, and Recycle, with an overarching topic of sustainability. Students then break this topic into subtopics, selecting from subjects such as re-purposing old buildings, recycling, community sustainability, community gardens and CSA’s, hunting, water quality, and waste disposal.
“For me, these documentaries really demonstrate the well-rounded, forward-thinking approach to the learning experience that Bucknell University has to offer. These students are learning some really critical 21st-century communication skills. They are becoming producers of their own media messages, and they’re not just existing behind Bucknell walls. One group of students produced a documentary film on the Tire Burner facility that almost planted roots within the nearby community of White Deer. The local anti-tire-burner committee placed the documentary on their website to help raise awareness about the dangers of the facility.”
I asked Professor Siewers and Wakabayashi the following questions regarding their experience with documentary film making in the arena of the Environmental Residential College and this is what they had to say.
1. Why did you choose the documentary film as the main focus for your course?
2. What were some of the challenges you faced with the documentary film process in the beginning? How has it changed over time?
Initial challenge challenges included allowing enough time for and focus on preparation work by students, and building in a detailed process of assessment of student group work on that preparation. Also, students needed to realize the public nature of the audience for professional video work. This is similar to how they must grow to learn professionally to address a public audience in their written work. In other words, they are familiar with video work recreationally, but they need to see it as a professional vehicle for communication. In all this we were greatly helped by support from ITEC and the tireless professional work and guidance of Brianna Derr. We could not have done this without her.
3. What do you think the documentary film can offer your students that something like a research paper can not?
That sense of a larger audience is also needed for a research paper, but the documentary form complements their understanding of what professional work involves, in a medium that engages them personally in an intense way. I think it’s easier to teach those lessons regarding an individual research paper when it’s possible to draw on parallels to the group video work. So the video work becomes complementary to written research work.
4. Would you recommend this video format to other universities? Why or why not?
Documentary films from Environmental Residential College 2013.
Food Waste at Bucknell
Sustainability at Bucknell: Then and Now
Burning the Future: The White Deer Project