This article summarizes my experience teaching film through the lens of contemporary environmental issues within a university context at the Mississippi Gulf coast. While I address a wide range of pedagogical efforts, I highlight two in particular––a service-learning course and an extracurricular project. The production of environmental documentaries is the central concern of the extra-curricular project, which comprises a video series and a film documenting coastal wetlands research. The work that students produced in the service-learning course did not focus on environmental documentary per se, even though each piece engages with ecological issues and carries a documentary dimension.

The more hybrid and interdisciplinary approach in my courses is informed by my own filmmaking practice. My work straddles the border between fiction and documentary, or, more accurately, I don’t see the two in opposition. In my last film, an experimental narrative short that is driven by contemporary ecological concerns, the documentary lives in a fictional world. Neither a documentary nor a narrative about environmental issues, Edgewood (2019) documents environments that are threatened by the effects of anthropogenic climate change and neoliberal environmental policies. Similarly, the environmental focus of my teaching doesn’t distinguish between narrative, experimental, and documentary film. For instance, the production component of my hybrid theory/practice seminar Film, Media and the Environment asks students to investigate ecological issues affecting their community and shoot on location as they produce creative works in the film mode of their choice. However, whether their films take the form of a campy horror flick shot in the woods adjacent to campus, an experimental short that contemplates the dependence on cars in the area, or a National Geographic-style documentary about deforestation in Laurel, MS, they are all documents of compromised ecological systems whether or not they qualify as environmental documentaries. Rather than approaching environmental documentary solely as mode of filmmaking solidified in the final product or as a clearly delineated object of study, then, I suggest we see it as a practice and pedagogical tool. As a site-specific approach, environmental documentary practice transcends distinctions between narrative, documentary and experimental film. As a form of place-based inquiry, it can help tap into students’ knowledge of place that simmers under the surface.

My experience of teaching at the University of Southern Mississippi has been formative to this place-based, site-specific approach. USM’s Gulf Park Campus serves Mississippi’s coastal community, and a large part of the students grew up in the region. With approximately 30% of African American students, the student population roughly mirrors the statewide demographics of 36%. The campus also draws many non-traditional students with 30% being over 25; former military, retirees, and transfer students from the local community college help create a diverse environment. Having grown up at the Gulf coast, students are familiar with environmental challenges. The proximity of past and present is tangible, as is the danger arising from sea-level rise and anthropogenic ecological catastrophes that put the future of the region in peril. Even younger students born in the early 2000s are well aware of hurricane Katrina’s impact on the livelihood of their families and broader community. Their recollection of the clean-up as well as the stagnation after the hurricane often come up in class discussions and some have brought up more specific, haunting memories in their writing and creative work, such as the eerie sound coming from a damaged bridge they had to cross every day or the shape of an uprooted tree tangled with corrugated sheet metal in their backyard. The many empty lots along the coastal highway and in the surrounding residential neighborhoods serve as reminders of what has been lost, while the live oaks that have weathered the storms are natural monuments that––as the 500-year old oak tree on campus––in many cases precede European settlement. In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill caused havoc on the coastal ecosystem and restoration efforts have been compromised by the increasingly frequent opening of the Bonnet Carré Spillway to divert freshwater from the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico. Toxic algae blooms are a huge problem leading to the death of dolphins, oysters, and other animals. The artificial beaches that have replaced wetlands are regularly closed, and any local student will tell you that they have not put a foot in the water in years. However, despite students’ intuitive knowledge of the coastal ecology’s fragility and the fact that most plan to stay in the region after college, few are involved in environmental activism or organizations. Within this context, heightening students’ understanding of regional environmental issues in an era of global climate change has emerged as a key learning objective across disciplines; encouraging students to help foster coastal wellbeing is integral to the mission of USM’s Gulf Park campus and research initiatives. The Film Program where I taught from 2019 to 2023 is housed in the newly founded interdisciplinary School of Coastal Resilience, and my colleague Vincenzo Mistretta and I developed two environmental and social justice-themed courses that contribute to a Sustainability Studies bachelor of arts and the Southern Miss Gulf Scholars Program that were launched in 2022 and 2023 respectively. Civic engagement and community outreach are central to the film curriculum and to produce work that is attentive to issues of environmental and social justice is one of the program’s learning outcomes. Though there is no course solely dedicated to environmental documentary, environmental documentary practice as a form of place-based experiential learning has been part of this pedagogical effort.

The service-learning course Moving Environments: Creative Outreach in the Mississippi Coastal Plain took a site-specific approach to filmmaking as community service. Candice Salyers, an Assistant Professor of Dance at USM, pitched this collaboration to me based on the shared environmental focus of our research and teaching, and she brought with her extensive experience in partnering with institutions such as the Water Dance Association in a service-learning context. Our community partner was the Land Trust for the Mississippi Coastal Plain (LTMCP), a non-profit organization dedicated to conserving and managing land threatened by erosion, invasive species, misuse and neglect. As part of the course’s service-learning component, students produced experimental dance videos, narrative or documentary shorts, and social media clips to support the land trust’s educational outreach goals. A key text that guided our fieldwork on one of LTMCP’s restoration sites was “Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene,” the introduction to the anthology Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet.[1] Anthropologist Anna Tsing’s concept of the art of noticing––slowing down to watch, listen to, and encounter things familiar and unfamiliar––became the starting point for experiential learning at the site and formed the basis for our attempt to tune into the geological history of the landscape.[2]

Over the course of the term, we worked at Turkey Creek, one of LTMCP’s restoration sites, which––much to our students’ surprise––is located less than 15 minutes from campus. Built on wetlands that had been considered uninhabitable, Turkey Creek is a historic black community settled by freedmen and women in 1866. Turkey Creek has long been subject to social neglect; more recently, rampant urban development encroaches on the neighborhood that is hidden behind big box stores on Highway 49. The racial and environmental injustices threatening the community have previously been explored in Leah Mahan’s 2013 documentary Come Hell or High Water: The Battle for Turkey Creek, a chronicle of community resilience and resistance that became an important reference point for our course discussions and investigations; it also served as a starting point for one of the final projects, a short documentary that revisits sites from the film to explore relationships between human and non-human nature within a racially segregated environment. However, it was the interdisciplinary design of the course––bringing together students from film and dance and building on their respective skills––that turned out to be the most successful aspect of this collaboration. Embracing experience over information, the videos the LTMCP eventually chose to screen at community meetings were short experimental sketches that documented movement exercises engaging with the temporality of landscape on the restoration site.

My second example, the Coastal Wetlands Research Documentary Project, is an ongoing interdisciplinary project that seeks to communicate ecological research on Mississippi’s coastal wetlands to broader audiences beyond the academy, from regional stakeholders to environmental organizers and artists. A collaboration between faculty, staff, and students from the School of Coastal Resilience, the School of Ocean Science and Engineering, and the Gulf Coast Geospatial Center (GCGC), this project focuses on long-term ecosystem changes resulting from processes like land use change, storm effects, and climate change to natural habitats like marshes, seagrasses, and barrier islands on the Gulf Coast. Film students are enlisted to document the research being conducted by faculty and students from the GCGC and the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory (GCRL). The projects explore how marsh vegetation along the Northern Gulf Coast responds to sea level rise, a long-term process that includes image analysis, measuring plant growth and vegetation patterns at particular sites, and extensive data evaluation in the lab. Since the beginning of the project in January 2022, film program faculty and students have accompanied graduate students from the GCRL and the GCGC on their fieldwork and visited them in the lab for further interviews about their work. With sites across a 50-mile radius and field visits contingent on weather conditions the project is still in its early stages, and integrating this work into the film program’s curriculum has not been without challenges. So far, students have participated on a volunteer or work-study basis, however, independent studies or workshop courses could offer ways to contextualize this work more deeply within the history of environmental documentary filmmaking.

From the perspective of the film program, it was important to us that the project would support our curriculum, which offers students avenues for professionalization but is also dedicated to teaching film as an art form. In the process of conceptualizing the project with our collaborators in the sciences, two documentary formats emerged, short educational “spotlight” videos and documentary portraits to address either academic or popular audiences and a longer documentary to be screened at environmental film festivals and events. The spotlight videos will function as an archive and display of ecological research conducted at the university. As a tool for community outreach, they are meant to help community members and stakeholders in making informed decisions to minimize risks and help improve resilience in endangered wetlands. Finally, shorter, more playful videos could be used for early childhood education in the programming of USM’s Marine Science Education Center. Taking a more experimental approach, the longer documentary combines observational footage and informal interviews with a more abstract soundscape to immerse viewers in the coastal environment. Designed as a long-term project, one of the goals for the documentary is to capture environmental research as a process. Similarly, the process of filmmaking becomes more important than the finished product, as students gather hands-on experience in documentary filmmaking in the field.

Not unlike the use of writing-to-learn teaching strategies in the classroom, both the Wetlands Research Documentary Project and Moving Environments: Creative Outreach in the Mississippi Coastal Plain can be seen as a form of place-based writing. The site-specific aspect of my approach––enticing students to see their immediate environment through new eyes––is crucial to this pedagogical endeavor. Environmental documentary practice here presents an embodied cinematic experience that allows students to engage with the marsh ecologies on which the future of the coastal environment and, by extension, their communities depend.

Katrin Pesch received her PhD in Art History, Theory, and Criticism with a Concentration in Art Practice from the University of California San Diego. An alumna of the Whitney Independent Study Program, she has exhibited internationally in film festivals, art spaces and museums. Her writing has been published in Studies in French Cinema, Anthropology and Humanism, NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies and several edited collections. She is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida.

1. “Introduction: Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene.” In: Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt, editors. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), G1-G14. ↑

2. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 17-25. ↑