Interactive Documentary Filmmaking and Student Engagement With Community

Introduction

It is a goal of communication educators to find effective techniques for getting student citizens to actively engage with issues and become informed participants in their communities. One such technique that shows promise is the creation of interactive documentaries by students. This article describes a curricular project by the authors in the emerging area of interactive documentary filmmaking to engage students with their community. The project also incorporated the instructional approach of place-based education (PBE) within the interactive documentary filmmaking process to promote civic engagement. The project provides valid and important results in an immediate sense, while also establishing the foundation for strengthening the media curriculum at educational institutions.

Civic Engagement

Civic engagement refers to those activities by which individuals become informed participants in their communities and can be defined as citizens working together to make a change or difference in the community (Kahne & Middaugh, 2009). Civic engagement takes various forms such as voting, participating in civil society and volunteering, and can prepare students to become better citizens by focusing on processes that build self-awareness and critical thinking, encouraging action related to community life and social issues. Research shows that civic engagement and volunteering experiences are potent avenues for propelling positive youth development (Bhangaokar & Mehta, 2012).

Civic Engagement and Education

American institutions of higher education have historically viewed preparing students for citizenship as a central purpose (Lopez & Kiesa, 2009). Research indicates that civic engagement is a robust educational tool (Finley, 2012) and as an educational approach, civic engagement works (Cress, 2012). Civic engagement activities yield greater learning and increased graduation rates in K–12 schools, community colleges, and 4-year institutions (Astin et al., 2006; Bridgeland et al., 2006; Cress, 2012; Prentice & Robinson, 2010). Researchers have also found a consistent and significant relationship between civic engagement and academic engagement (Cress, 2012; Hurtado & DeAngelo, 2012).

With a rising interest in civic engagement, opportunities to volunteer are increasing and many colleges and universities now offer lectures, films, and discussions on issues of social concern. Nevertheless, these efforts are often unsupported by or coordinated with academic curricula (Liazos & Liss, 2009). In spite of the growing consensus that civic education needs to be integrated more fully into higher education, many educators are unsure about exactly how this goal can be accomplished (Musil, 2009).

To encourage faculty to bring issues of civic and social responsibility into the classroom, this project advocated the use of interactive documentary filmmaking which can add value to the curriculum and enhance student involvement. Collaborative learning relationships between instructors, students, and community participants encourage interactions that foster personal and community empowerment (Cress, 2012) and the project’s approach facilitates these outcomes by providing strategies to purposefully engage in such collaborations.

Interactive Documentary (iDoc) Filmmaking

Documentary, as a term, has included products such as actualities, travelogues, news, and educational films (León, 1999). Bill Nichols’ (1991) widely accepted definition includes not only the audience but also a body of texts and a group of filmmakers. With the evolution of interactive technology, iDocs emerge and Gifreu-Castells (2011) defines interactive documentary as an interactive application which tries to represent different navigation and interaction modes. Aston (2014) describes it as the new possibilities for both the construction and representation of reality brought about by the human–computer interface. For a documentary to be interactive, a physical action needs to take place between the human and the medium and this can take many different forms of interactivity, such as mouse clicking through a website, tapping on a multi-touch tablet screen, using a smartphone and, participating in a live forum (Aston & Guadenzi, 2012, p. 126). Gaudenzi (2013) mentions that any project that starts with an intention to document the real and does so by using digital interactive technology is considered an interactive documentary. Gaudenzi includes all the factual narratives concerning present and future devices such as tablets, computers, and mobile phones (Cortés-Selva & Pérez-Escolar, 2016).

The opportunity to undertake iDoc filmmaking in education has been brought about by recent developments in the affordances of commonly available electronics such as high-quality video cameras integrated into smart phones and currently carried by many people on a day-to-day basis. This reality allows for many individuals to create videos using these affordable devices, edit them using widely available free software, and then publish them easily on internet-based platforms, thereby making them widely accessible. The iDoc project took advantage of these capabilities, teaching and examining the students’ creation of iDoc products in ways that effectively communicate about relevant topics so as to promote civic engagement.

Interactive Documentaries and Civic Engagement

Cortés-Selva and Pérez-Escolar (2016) argue that the potential of iDocs in civic engagement resides in changing the role of citizens, from passive individuals to active participants, via the interaction between participants of documentary communities. They posit the idea that social interaction denotes a reciprocal process in which citizens produce, select, and interpret content individually or collectively (Carpentier, 2012; Jenkins, 2006). Interactivity is thus seen as a characteristic of media technologies that incorporate the possibility of user-content and user-user interaction (Carpentier, 2015). This civic participation includes different forms of interaction and implies a high level of civic engagement and social commitment (Cortés-Selva & Pérez-Escolar, 2016). In their study, using Jenkins’ (2006) and Carpentier’s (2012) observations, Cortés-Selva and Pérez-Escolar (2016) write that citizens can participate in iDocs by “participation on media” and “participation through media.” Participation on media refers to the inclusion of non-professionals in the decision-making process around a platform—structural participation—or around content production—content participation. On the contrary, participation through media focuses on the social dimension of the documentary: individuals finding opportunities to get involved in the social debate through the media itself. The study further delineates Aston and Gaudenzi’s (2012) taxonomy in which they distinguished four types of interactive documentaries: conversational (a conversation between users and the computer); hypertext (a limited user experience through preset choices); participative (a conversation between authors and users in which users are actively involved in the production of content); and experiential (users utilize space to structure and to personalize the user experience until the boundaries between real life and virtual life become diffused). (See https://bit.ly/2T8qmWc and https://bit.ly/35XvKyh for some examples of these types of interactive documentaries.)

Place-Based Education

Scholarship on PBE provided guidance regarding how its principles can be implemented in the iDoc approach, especially with respect to the experiential dimension of interactivity, and enhances the project’s compatibility with contemporary curriculum goals. It is generally held that to help students succeed in the global environment, higher education has to position instructors as mentors and facilitators so as to model classroom learning using real-world applications. Students in such an environment learn more through reflection and assimilation of ideas and concepts and application of theory to solving real-life issues than mere understanding of tools and techniques. For these reasons, as noted by Norman (2010), there has been increased interest in designing curriculum that is rooted in place-based pedagogy (Bowers, 2001; Fien, 1993; Smith, 2002; Tanner, 1998; Theobald, 2006; Theobald & Curtiss, 2000).

PBE is an approach that connects learning and communities through the development of the learner’s sense of place, which is the combination of varied meanings and attachments imbued to the place by individuals and groups (Semken et al., 2017). PBE emphasizes the relationships among people and places—specifically those places that people have imbued with social meanings and personal attachments (Semken et al., 2017). PBE invests young people with a sense of agency (Rodriguez, 2008), acknowledges them as producers rather than consumers of knowledge (Smith, 2002), enriches their education through hands-on and community-engaged learning, and provides them with relevant knowledge and experiences to participate actively in democratic processes and devise solutions to social and environmental problems (Smith, 2002; Smith & Sobel, 2010). Although PBE has become widely accepted in environmentally oriented courses, this model has potential for much wider applications as all disciplines have the potential of engaging this model to help students strengthen the link between community and education (Norman, 2010).

Place-Based Education and Civic Engagement

Numerous case studies have documented how PBE can promote civic engagement while ensuring an intellectually challenging education that meets national standards (Gibbs & Howley, 2000; Herman et al., 2018; Smith, 2002; Sobel, 2005; Wood, 1992). Place-based studies have brought students into contact with people and organizations within their neighborhoods and encourage young people to work for the common good rather than self-interest (McInerney et al., 2011). PBE not only increases academic achievement but also helps students develop stronger ties to their community, enhances their appreciation for the natural world, and creates a heightened commitment to serving as active, contributing citizens (Sobel, 2005, p. 7).

Furthermore, community vitality and environmental quality are improved through the active engagement of local citizens, community organizations, and environmental resources in the life of the school (Sobel, 2005, p. 7).

The iDoc Project

The rationale for iDoc was based on the fact that instructors need support in both content and pedagogy to implement and facilitate educational reform and to engage students in civil society through academic cooperation. The iDoc model facilitated educational reform with a focus on civic engagement that emerges from exchanging ideas about community-relevant issues such as environmental sustainability, social justice, and community resilience. Planning and utilizing the available media with an intention to reach the larger and more diverse portions of communities is vital and further adds to the dimension of sustainability. Through iDoc participation, students and community members can strategize positive civic change and also utilize social media tools for disseminating messages to the community. Through the innovative combination of iDoc and PBE, this project promoted civic engagement, both among the faculty and students in the courses and among members of the community.

This iDoc project used the participative and experiential interactive documentary models. The participative mode counts on the participation of the user to create an open and evolving database and in participative documentaries the user can be involved during the production process (Aston & Gaudenzi, 2012). Gaudenzi (2013) considers the participative mode the main model that motivates transformations in the documentary because the audience is able to change content and to promote the growth of the documentary as if it was a living documentary. In this way, the project emphasized the use of iDocs as “not just the representation of the reality or the narration,” but also as the “co-creation of reality or co-creation of the story” (Cortés-Selva & Pérez-Escolar, 2016, p. 582). The interactive documentary enabled users to navigate through the structure of the platform, look up information, and more importantly, participate in the story by providing documents, videos, and comments and post messages on social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook. What distinguishes this project from other forms of documentary filmmaking is that it allowed members of the community to participate in the structure: members of the community were involved in how the project was going to be articulated and organized, as well as participate in debates and forums. With this audience interaction, the documentary becomes a shared project with the public and is not just an object or a film (Bishop, 2004).

The experiential mode brings users into physical space and creates an experience that challenges their senses and their perception of the world (Aston & Gaudenzi, 2012). The iDoc project incorporated the experiential model by using principles of PBE. The design principles of PBE call for experiences in the places that carry meanings and attachments (Semken et al., 2017) and the iDoc process called for experiences in a place in ways that allowed for the exploration of these meanings, extending and deepening them for the students and—as they interact with the iDoc process—for the local citizens, both individually and collectively. This encourages civic engagement for the sake of supportive community dispositions, relationships, and actions that underlie civic engagement outcomes.

The civic engagement component of the iDoc project was designed using the Civic Learning Spiral (Musil, 2009), which depicts a fluid and continuous outcomes framework for civic learning that can be applied to study the impact of curricular and co-curricular programs. Among the civic learning outcomes, the following were especially valuable to the iDoc project: disposition to create and participate in democratic governance structures of school, college, and the community; disciplined civic practices that lead to constructive participation in the communities in which one lives and works; formulation of multiple strategies for action (service, advocacy, policy-change) to accomplish public ends/purposes; planning, carrying out, and reflecting upon public action; development of the moral and political courage to take risks to achieve the public good; and determination to raise ethical issues and questions in and about public life (Musil, 2009).

The iDoc project also addressed the need for innovative instruction that engages students in learning challenging content. iDoc provided teachers with tools that engaged students in developing interactive documentary projects as part of their subject area. Having the students focus their work on specific locations meant that the project was able to apply well-established principles of PBE as a framework for the development of the iDoc products. Therefore, by using iDoc techniques within a PBE framework, the courses facilitated civic engagement through the exchange of perspectives between members of the community with respect to the places that are the focus of the media development, and the significance that those places hold. Ultimately, this project provided university instructors with techniques, tools, skills, and knowledge to encourage civic engagement with respect to sites that are important to their communities through the creation and evaluation of interactive documentaries.

Activity Description

The project was conducted at two medium-sized universities, one in the United States and one in India, recruited specifically for this project. Similar to the United States, India has a large and vibrant civil society with a tradition of volunteerism and civic engagement (Etra et al., 2010), and as an additional location enhances the project’s impact as it allows the comparison between two societies in terms of motivators and deterrents with respect to civic engagement and the role that iDoc and PBE can play in enhancing the motivators and mitigating the deterrents. It is acknowledged that the two countries are not the same but, following the economic boom in the 1980s and 1990s when the multinational companies entered India with their global products, India has placed modern policy practices in the context of cultural politics, consumerism, and globalization and has used innovative perspectives on standardization of messages to reflect the global consumer while retaining the localization of Indian culture (Mazzarella, 2003). Therefore, India provides an excellent setting for this project, which aims to further the understanding of interactive documentary elements in higher education in ways that could work across cultures.

The primary activity was the design and implementation of a course module in Interactive Documentary Filmmaking (iDoc) to be introduced in the curriculum of the two universities, followed by evaluation of the intended student outcomes with respect to civic engagement. The course module was designed with the requirements for civic engagement learner outcomes using the six elements of the civic spiral: self, communities and cultures, knowledge, values, skills, and public action elements. Faculty recruited for this project were trained in the pedagogical and technical aspects of iDoc by offering workshops in interactive documentary filmmaking and seminars in integrating civic engagement in curriculum.

Assessments

To evaluate the civic engagement outcome of the course, a survey was administered to the enrolled students in the beginning of the semester and the same survey was administered at the end of the semester. Due to the nature of the classes, the sample size in this pilot project was limited to 23 students (11 who identified themselves as male and 12 who identified themselves female). The survey used Doolittle and Faul’s (2013), 14 item, 7 point, Civic Engagement Scale to measure the students’ attitudes and behaviors of civic engagement that have been affected by the experience and is used in educational settings (Doolittle & Faul, 2013).

To further evaluate the civic engagement outcomes, at the end of the semester and after the interactive documentary film was completed, the students were invited to a focus group where the facilitator led the discussion by debriefing the participants and asking them to reflect upon the experience.

Analysis of Survey

Findings from paired t-Test results demonstrate that positive changes resulted in participants as the survey items showed statistically significant changes. The eight combined Civic Attitudes Survey Items (Cronbach’s alpha = .91; Doolittle & Faul, 2013) and six combined Civic Behaviors Survey Items (Cronbach’s alpha = .85; Doolittle & Faul, 2013) also showed statistically significant changes (See Table 1).

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Table 1.

t-Test Results for Combined Survey Items.

	Pretest		Posttest		df	t	ρ
Survey Items	M	SD	M	SD
14 Combined survey items	4.82	1.64	5.51	1.34	22	−4.61	0.00
8 Combined civic attitudes survey items	5.34	1.30	5.77	1.12	22	−2.77	0.01
6 Combined civic behaviors survey items	4.11	1.79	5.15	1.53	22	−5.22	0.00

Further analysis showed positive changes for the attitude measurement items, with only two of them being statistically significant (See Table 2).

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Table 2.

t-Test Results for Civic Attitudes Items.

	Pretest		Posttest		df	t	ρ
Civic Attitudes Items	M	SD	M	SD
I feel responsible for my community.	4.70	1.43	5.78	1.04	22	−3.27	0.00
I believe I should make a difference in my community.	5.43	1.27	5.83	1.03	22	−1.74	0.10
I believe that I have a responsibility to help the poor and the hungry.	5.13	1.36	5.70	0.97	22	−2.51	0.02
I am committed to serve in my community.	4.96	1.49	5.39	1.27	22	−1.45	0.16
I believe that all citizens have a responsibility to their community.	5.43	1.08	5.91	1.31	22	−1.67	0.11
I believe that it is important to be informed of community issues.	6.35	0.71	6.26	0.86	22	0.62	0.54
I believe that it is important to volunteer.	5.61	1.12	5.91	0.96	22	−1.43	0.17
I believe that it is important to financially support charitable organizations.	5.09	1.28	5.39	1.31	22	−1.05	0.31

For the civic behaviors survey items, there were statistically significant changes across all six survey items (See Table 3).

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Table 3.

t-Test Results for Civic Behaviors Items.

	Pretest		Posttest		df	t	ρ
Civic Behaviors Items	M	SD	M	SD
I am involved in structured volunteer position(s) in the community.	3.43	1.93	4.52	1.70	22	−2.77	0.01
When working with others, I make positive changes in the community.	5.04	1.22	5.61	0.99	22	−2.33	0.03
I help members of my community.	4.50	1.41	5.57	1.04	21	−4.04	0.00
I stay informed of events in my community.	4.00	1.76	5.26	1.66	22	−3.78	0.00
I participate in discussions that raise issues of social responsibility.	4.43	1.85	5.48	1.47	22	−3.76	0.00
I contribute to charitable organizations within the community.	3.35	1.99	4.48	1.83	22	−3.81	0.00

Comparative analysis showed a few differences for some of the survey items between the student groups in the two countries (See Tables 4 and 5).

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Table 4.

Civic Attitudes Between Country iDoc Groups.

Civic Attitudes Items	Indian = 12	USAn = 11
I feel responsible for my community.	√	X
I believe I should make a difference in my community.	X	√
I believe that I have a responsibility to help the poor and the hungry.	X	X
I am committed to serve in my community.	X	X
I believe that all citizens have a responsibility to their community.	√	X
I believe that it is important to be informed of community issues.	X	X
I believe that it is important to volunteer.	X	√
I believe that it is important to financially support charitable organizations.	X	X

Note. √ = Significant (p < .05); X = not significant.

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Table 5.

Civic Behaviors Between Country iDoc Groups.

Civic Behaviors Items	Indian = 12	USAn = 11
I am involved in structured volunteer position(s) in the community.	X	√
When working with others, I make positive changes in the community.	X	√
I help members of my community.	√	√
I stay informed of events in my community.	√	√
I participate in discussions that raise issues of social responsibility.	X	√
I contribute to charitable organizations within the community.	√	√

Note. √ = Significant (p < .05); X = not significant.

Conclusion

The iDoc project provides support to the community engagement nature of an interactive documentary film. Analysis shows that following the experience of creating an interactive documentary film, students are actually more engaged with their community. Civic attitude increased for all the participants after the iDoc experience and showed significant increase in the areas of participants feeling responsible for their community and feeling responsible to help the poor and hungry. Interestingly, for civic behavior, there were statistically significant changes across all six items, pointing to a significant increase in community engagement. This provides empirical support to Cortés-Selva and Pérez-Escolar’s (2016) theory that the potential of iDocs in civic engagement resides in changing the role of citizens, from passive individuals to active participants, via the interaction between participants of documentary communities.

Comparative analysis showed a few differences for some of the survey items between the student groups in the two countries, notably in their civic behavior. There were statistically significant changes across all six civic behavior items for the U.S. students compared to significant changes in three items for Indian students. This could perhaps be a reflection on India’s overall relatively low level of civic engagement: on a 100-point global scale for 146 countries, the civic engagement index for the United States was 58, while for India was 22 (Gallup, 2018). Data also show that adults in developed countries are much more likely to be civically engaged than those in the developing world (English, 2011). Nevertheless, the attitude and behavior score for Indian students did show a significant increase in the constructs of community engagement indicating that the iDoc experience changed the civic engagement level even in a society with low overall civic engagement.

As evidenced by the qualitative comments, the iDoc project supports the literature that shows integrating a curriculum around the study of place can transform the lives of young people and their communities (McInerney et al., 2011) and PBE is effective in making young people become active citizens of society by engaging in beneficial learning experiences that contribute to making their communities better (Smith, 2002). It also supports the literature that show civic engagement motivates students toward conscientious community action (Bernacki & Jaeger, 2008) and is in agreement with the research that show students who participate in civic engagement gain interpersonal effectiveness, the ability to collaborate across diverse perspectives and a sense of self-efficacy for positively impacting individuals, organizations, and communities (Cress et al., 2010).

The iDoc project thus makes a case for the educational and social values of an interactive documentary. By infusing the making of interactive documentaries into instruction, the dynamic instructional approach that this project developed can be a model for instructional material design that encourages and enables civic engagement throughout the world.