This issue of the JCMS Teaching Media Dossier offers the reader a selection of wide-ranging and thought-provoking articles on documentary pedagogy. For many scholars, educators, artists, and citizens, the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, the ongoing environmental crisis, and historic inequities around the world have provoked a reevaluation of how they should approach timely issues in the classroom, as they wonder how recent events will impact their teaching practice. Reflecting on the future of documentary pedagogy in a profoundly polarized media landscape and chaotic world, how should we introduce undergraduate students to documentary history and practices, and what pedagogical strategies should we privilege to supervise graduate students working within the field of documentary studies or those making documentaries within MFA and practice-based PhD programs?
The constant state of crisis characterizing North American universities is perhaps nowhere better reflected in the field of cinema and media studies than in the curricula, scholarship, and creative work taking place within film studies and documentary programs. Yet the specific exigencies of documentary pedagogy in a fine arts and media studies context have been given little systematic attention by practitioners, theorists, and historians, at a time when the ethical, material, and environmental underpinnings of the moving image—especially in its rapport to sociopolitical realities—have never been more pressing.
The contributors to this Teaching Media Dossier ask fundamental questions at a time when many feel we have reached a pedagogical crossroads where traditional ways of approaching documentary history and media making deserve to be questioned. How can course content and assignments be tailored to better integrate diversity into the curriculum, embracing collaborative learning, and challenging the hegemony of the neoliberal university model? Which best pedagogical practices can practitioners, scholars, and students learn from each other? How is the documentary canon being reshaped by environmental, avant-doc, activist, and interactive-doc practices? How might co-teaching, collaborative, or alternative learning modalities be adapted for the documentary classroom? How can emerging documentary production and media consumption patterns fruitfully inform our teaching?
This issue of the Teaching Media Dossier asks such timely questions, all of which point to an active gathering of thought and a thoughtful call to action. The contributors to this dossier are scholars and artist-makers who imagine what forms documentary teaching may take in the twenty-first century. They approach the topic of innovative documentary pedagogy from various levels of experience and transdisciplinary perspectives that draw on a wide range of approaches related to film and media studies, including anthropology, sociology, journalism, history, education, and gender studies, among others.
Documentary Pedagogy: A Burgeoning Field
From the first courses in documentary appreciation and production—at the New School for Social Research (1938) and the City College of New York’s “Institute of Film Techniques” (1942)—to the plethora of undergraduate, graduate, and continuing education curricula focusing in whole or in part on non-fiction media today, documentary pedagogy has had a remarkable impact on the training of practitioners and the shaping of public tastes. Despite this history, the development of documentary media within and beyond the field of film studies at the post-secondary level remains undertheorized, especially the making of documentary as a pedagogical practice. Recent attention has focused on institutions such as the Flaherty Film Seminar, which remains the exception and is massively outweighed by the number of studies dedicated to the use of documentary in teaching subjects as diverse as sociology, history, and science. If documentary is not just a means to an end within colleges and universities, why hasn’t there been more sustained inquiry into the way it is communicated to students and how documentary education has evolved over time?
Visual instruction (in the US) and screen education (in the UK and the Commonwealth) provided the earliest proof that there was “intrinsic value in our efforts toward conceptualizing documentary pedagogy.”[1] As Michael Renov has argued, beyond the more obvious benefits in providing students with the necessary historical context or engaging them in discussions about aesthetics that are grounded in practice, an intentional pedagogy can also lead to a more robust political engagement, a reflection on the ethical stakes of mediamaking, so that teaching future documentarians simultaneously involves shaping informed citizens and critical viewers. If instead of using the blu-ray (or stream) of a historical film as a substitute teacher, we involved students in the production of non-fiction content, leveraging their skills as digital-native “bricoleurs, sophisticated multimedia rag-pickers,”[2] we would be deploying documentary as an active learning tool, one that obviates the hard separation between theory and praxis.
Recalling the significance of documentary in film schools for the launch of such groundbreaking movements as the LA Rebellion (out of UCLA) and the broadcast documentaries of the BBC (some of the earliest by alumni of the Newport College Film department in Wales), it might seem that such work has been happening for a while, albeit under the scholarly radar.[3] The role that publishing played in enabling film studies to proliferate in academia during the 1960s and 1970s also helped to mainstream documentaries in the mind of many students. From Hillier and Lover’s Studies in Documentary (1972)—the series of pamphlet, manuals, and guides coming out of the BFI’s educational department—to the first surveys of documentary history by Erik Barnouw and Richard Barsam, it was often in print rather than on screen that exposure to the “creative treatment of actuality” took place.[4]
A call for more research into teaching, such as the one by the contributors to this dossier issue, is inseparable from the teaching of research in all its forms. What began as sociological examinations of propaganda in the 1940s (e.g., in Siegfried Kracauer’s study of “totalitarian communication” at the New School), organizational research in the 1960s (e.g., the work of Drew Associates), and the spread of visual ethnography in universities in the 1980s, has today morphed into a plethora of practice-based PhD programs that encourage engagement with documentary in all its forms: interactive, sensory, and web-based, to name a few. In her doctoral dissertation on documentary filmmaking and critical pedagogy, Taiwanese curator and scholar Yng-ruey Jiing articulates the value of research beyond the “ivory tower” as a way to “expand the knowledge of independent filmmaking, popular education, media literacy and social transformation.”[5] Others, like Ana Vinuela, see in documentary the ideal vehicle for an applied understanding of media industries and communications, escaping the “rigid bailiwick” of film studies where students have often been forced to contemplate it.[6]
So, what is to be done, fellow instructors, professors, and mentors? An area of learning as complex as the intersection of reality and creativity can surely never be exhausted in case studies, discussions of best practices, theorizations of pedagogical principles, and ideas for curriculum innovation. The following contributions offer a sustained, collective reflection on the topic of documentary pedagogy that do not claim to exhaust the topic, but that certainly wish to lay a solid foundation for future work in the area.
In her article, Marsha Gordon explores the ethical dilemmas that she faced when designing and teaching a 21st century documentary filmmaking course, in which she initially envisaged showing Darnella Frazier’s cellphone video of George Floyd’s murder to her students, and then her reconsideration not to do so. Gordon provides a sustained ethical reflection on what motivates an instructor to include (or not) controversial material as she closely examines the function of transparency and student agency in the pedagogical process.
Revisiting the canon of women’s documentary cinema, Sarah Sinwell asks her students to consider whose stories are (not) being told and how audiences gain access to these stories. Probing the instability of gender, questions of intersectionality, and biography in a transnational context is as necessary in today’s surveys of documentary history as it is vital in inspiring future productions and further exploring documentary media’s potential for social change.
Reflecting on the use of archives in one of her undergraduate courses, Nicole McCuaig discusses how personal and public archive collections can be fruitfully used in group and individual assignments to allow students to discover the narrative and creative potential of archives in documentary making. She also proposes to integrate the concepts of “archiveology” and “domestic ethnography” into documentary pedagogy to make this kind of potential more apparent to students seeking to combine theory and practice.
In his reflection on the use of interviews in documentary, Ted Fisher considers the role that the human voice, in its physical and metaphorical registers, has played in non-fiction filmmaking within and beyond the talking-head format. A short film produced in one of Fisher’s classes provides a case study in decolonizing documentary practice while crafting emotionally impactful and engaging works.
Richard Langley’s video essay uses a set of three documentary films that has been used as a pedagogical tool to teach graduate students about some of the more practical choices in making a film, including formal and rhetorical decisions. Langley notes how this particular pedagogical model has generated a greater number of personal and essay films submitted by MA students.
Eylem Atakav and Richard J. Hand reexamine Grierson’s classical definition of documentary as “the creative treatment of actuality” from the perspective of their undergraduate and graduate students, whom they ask to consider both the impact of visual outputs and the function of filmmaking as a form of research practice. They explore the negotiation of the troubled waters of activist ethos, ethnography, personal identity, and cultural context through thought-provoking reflections from the classroom frontline.
In the Canadian context, research-creation has emerged as an original methodological approach to the combination of theory and practice within academia. Gerda Cammaer draws on her experiences as an instructor and supervisor at the MFA level to address some of the challenges associated with teaching graduate students whose academic backgrounds and research interests greatly differ, as well as some of the possibilities that present themselves in such a pedagogical context.
In his contribution, Derek Long argues for the potential of the “Op-Doc” to supplement documentary pedagogical models within a film production context. Drawing on his experiences in the undergraduate classroom, Long discusses the “Op-Doc” as a hybrid form combining cinematic elements and journalistic content in which resides great potential for interdisciplinary documentary inquiry and image-making.
The role of new technologies in reshaping nonfiction documentary culture provides the impetus for Patrick Brian Smith and Kenzie Burchell to explore collaborative curriculum design and open-source investigative techniques. Drawing from sociology and forensic media studies, the authors ask how instructors can help students engage more deeply and pragmatically with emerging tools like geolocation, 3D modeling, and pattern analysis.
As the thematic and methodological diversity of these articles makes clear, the value of pausing to reflect on our teaching practice, its intent, tools, successes, and challenges goes well beyond the potential for pedagogical improvements into the continued relevance of documentary as a constellation of media theories and practices. After all, teaching (docere in Latin) is at the very root of “documentary”; to better grasp its potential as aid to learning, as proof, or as propaganda, it is vital to revisit the terms under which non-fiction has figured in and, in turn, shaped the documentary media classroom.
Dimitrios Latsis is a historian and digital humanist working at the intersection of archiving and visual culture. He is Assistant Professor in Digital and Audiovisual Preservation at the University of Alabama's School of Library and Information Studies. His work on American visual culture, early cinema, archival studies, and the Digital Humanities has been supported by the Smithsonian Institution, Domitor, Mellon and Knight Foundations and Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, among others. He has published and lectured widely in these fields, including co-editing a special issue of The Moving Image, the journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists on the topic of Digital Humanities and/in Film Archives and an anthology on documentaries about the visual arts in the 1950s and 60s for Bloomsbury Academic. He is currently finishing a monograph on the historiography of American cinema during the early and silent years. dlatsis.people.ua.edu
Bruno Lessard is an Associate Professor in the School of Image Arts at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University). An award-winning researcher, he is the author of The Art of Subtraction: Digital Adaptation and the Object Image (University of Toronto Press, 2017), and co-editor of the collection Critical Distance in Documentary Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). His forthcoming monograph focuses on Chinese documentary filmmaker Wang Bing. As a photo-based artist, Lessard has focused on changing urban landscapes in Canada and China, and he has sought to revive night photography and non-figurative photographic practices within a documentary context. www.brunolessard.com
Michael Renov, “Teaching Documentary: Toward a Goal-centered Pedagogy of the Documentary Film,” SignificaçaÞo 35 (2011): 12. Accessible at https://www.redalyc.org/pdf/6097/609766003002.pdf ↑
Richard Jones-Nerzic, “Documentary Filmmaking in the History Classroom,” in Using New Technologies to Enhance Teaching and Learning in History, ed. Terry Haydn (New York: Routledge, 2013), 86. See also Boris Trbic, “In the Archive of Cinematic Memories: Teaching Documentary Film History,” Screen Education 47 (2007): 72–78. ↑
Duncan J. Petrie and Rod Stoneman, Educating Film-makers Past, Present and Future (London: Intellect, 2014). ↑
John Corner, “Documentary Studies: Dimensions of Transition and Continuity,” in Rethinking Documentary: New Perspectives and Practices, ed. Thomas Austin and Wilma de Jong (Maidenhead, Berk.: Open University Press, 2008), 13–28. For another example of a BFI teaching guide aimed at the secondary school level, see Sarah Casey Benyahia, Teaching Film and TV Documentary (London: British Film Institute, 2008). ↑
Yng-ruey Jiing, Documentary Filmmaking as Critical Pedagogy (Ph.D. Thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 2002), 28. For a take on critical pedagogy as research practice in a K-12 environment, see Rosalind Cooper, Critical Documentary Making: An Action Research to Develop Pedagogy for the 21st Century (MA Thesis, University of Oulu, 2009), accessible at https://dml2011.dmlhub.net/sites/dmlcentral/files/resource_files/thesis.pdf ↑
Ana Vinuela, “Teaching Documentary: Between Academia and the Media Industry,” Mise au point 7 (2015), accessible at https://journals.openedition.org/map/1944 ↑
