In the Fall of 2015, Professor Ron Smith came up with the great idea of having his students partner with participants of the Gaza Strip in Palestine as part of his International Relations course, Middle East Conflict & Revolution. He was looking for a way for students to understand the content of the course, the political struggles, and the people involved in a more direct way. He had students form groups and create short 5-9 minute documentaries discussing the themes of water, electricity, food, healthcare, and music. He wanted his students to engage with the content by comparing and contrasting these themes within their own environments (the Bucknell community) as well as the Gaza Strip.
These students had the rare opportunity to not only study and learn about Gaza through the content of the course, but also to meet participants from Gaza who could explain these themes in more detail through Skype conversations. The result was life changing for many students. How often do students have the opportunity to engage first-hand with actual people from different cultures on such important issues as these?
The documentary short is a form of multimodal storytelling which combines the use of narration, images, audio, and other elements to magnify the process of storytelling. It is an empowering form of communication, which teaches critical thinking and digital literacy skills, enhances audio-visual rhetoric, develops writing and oral communication, and aids in articulation and self-reflection.
Professor Ron Smith developed a successful use of multimodal storytelling within his discipline. I interviewed him regarding his experiences with multimodal storytelling and here is what he had to say about the process, technology, and the student experience.
Please briefly describe the nature of the technology-based assignment you created for your course.
RS: For this course, my students were asked to make short video documentaries in small groups. We were aiming for around five minutes per video, and these projects were centered around large themes that we defined the first week of class. The documentaries would require that students make contact by Skype with people in the Gaza Strip in Palestine. This assignment was designed to make real the political struggles we study in International Relations and Middle East Studies, and to humanize the people suffering the consequences of these policies.
What were your learning objectives for this assignment?
RS: My hope was that the video documentaries would make the abstract ideas that we study real to them, and to transport my students to a far-away place that they had only heard about on the news. I thought that talking to people on the ground in Gaza would increase student engagement by having key participants that could talk about their own experiences, and would develop a sense of responsibility to the people they were in touch with. I also hoped the project would create long-lasting connections between students and others in the two sites.
What were some challenges of the documentary short process?
RS: Making a documentary, short or otherwise, is a great deal of work! The main challenges were setting expectations for what they could hope to produce, managing time in a class with students for whom this was their first encounter with the region, while simultaneously introducing video production concepts and making enough time to critically analyze the videos they produced.
Below is an example of the documentary short produced in Ron Smith’s International Relations course. The film is entitled “Rhythms Within” and focuses on the theme of music.
If you are interested in multimodal storytelling in the curriculum please contact Brianna Derr: brianna.derr@bucknell.edu.