A+Project+-+Documentaries+in+the+English+classroom

The A Project: Inquiry Focus – How do we include documentaries in our English class? by Marlene Menzel “Can we watch a movie, please?” This is something teachers get to hear often. And of course, many times, teachers show the film version of a written text that the students have read in class. Usually those movies are about a fictional text, they have read. But today students are asked to read a lot of non-fictional material. Non-fiction is gaining a stronger presence in the English classroom at nearly every level of education. Students are required to read the newspaper, biographies, speeches, textbooks, etc. and they have to determine what is “real” and they have to judge if it is true or not.

At the beginning of our semester, we talked a lot about fiction vs. non-fiction. We read a chapter in Milner and uploaded non-fiction books to our wiki-page. But we haven’t really discussed other possibilities to teach non-fiction. Non-fiction texts are read in a different way than fiction and teachers need to prepare their students and teach them different skills for working with those texts. One way to teach non-fiction is through documentaries. So the question is: How do we include documentaries in our English class?

Documentaries are “texts” to be “read”. Teaching them how to “read” documentaries helps them to develop the skills they need for working with a non-fiction text. They serve as a bridge to critical thinking, reading and writing. John Golden says in his book //Reading in the Reel World: Teaching Documentaries and Other Nonfiction,// “… [as] we are teaching our students how to ‘read’ documentary film, we are also giving them the tools and the ability to read nonfiction print texts.” Many students are visual learners. Students can more easily remember what they saw and heard than what they have read. Using documentaries in the English classroom is a very good tool for the reluctant readers or for the ones who find text boring. Documentaries offer a different perspective to talk about a topic. They help to provide key concepts such as understanding the theme and tone of a text and it helps the students to practice their writing and judging abilities and help them form opinions. Watching a documentary helps them also to develop an understanding of how texts are organized because they are remembering what happened in the film, in what order and how it got presented. This understanding of those overall concepts might be very difficult for them at the beginning but they can certainly learn from watching them. In one of the articles which I have read, it was said that documentary film is used to give the students a foundation of rhetoric, so that they can read film as an argument. And yes, a documentary represents the filmmaker’s opinion on a subject and the audience has to accept this viewpoint or has to understand the rightness or wrongness or take action. So in a way, the documentary has to be appealing for the audience and has to fit into the rhetorical situation.

There are a bunch of documentaries available online and on DVD’s. It is not every time necessary to show the whole documentary film. Sometimes it is enough to just pick extracts or short films that add visualization to your lesson. Documentaries are built on the visual world of our students. And of course they cover most of the time controversial issues that affect students’ lives. We want our students to become critical viewers! A few suggestions of documentaries that work well are //Hoop Dreams, Spellbound,// and //Super Size Me,// as well as lesser known films such as //Girlhood, The Gleaners and I,// and //The True Meaning of Picture, John Golden explains in his book.// // Questions that we could ask during the films are: What tone or feeling does the filmmaker create? What point might the filmmaker be trying to make? What ideas, images, or sounds do you find persuasive or convincing? What questions or points of disagreement do you have? //

The Humanities Film Series showed a couple of documentaries during the semester in McComsey. I went to a couple of them. It is definitely different from a movie screening, but I have to say I liked them and enjoyed them a lot. I can see myself using documentaries in my English classes. I think they can add a lot to the understanding of non-fiction texts and bring students closer to literature and texts in general.

Works Cited

“AP English Language and Composition – Using Documentary Film as an Introduction to Rhetoric.” The College <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Board, 2010: 1-62. Web 11 Dec. 2011. []

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Barry, Bernice. "The Real Stuff: Using Documentaries to teach non-fiction writing." //Screen Education// 53 (2009): 76-82. //Communication & Mass Media Complete//. Web. 11 Dec. 2011.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Golden, John. “Reading in the Reel World: Teaching Documentaries and Other Nonfiction.” <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">National Council of Teachers, 2006. Print.