Teach and Learn Documentary Filmmaking: How Interdisciplinary Team Teaching Can Train Both You and Your Students to Make Historical Documentaries

This session will show how an historian and digital artist are teaching documentary filmmaking at Saint Xavier University in the spring of 2015. The crux of the course is collaboration. Students are enrolled in an art and a history class, but receive one syllabus and one grade. Each student will complete a five-minute film, but the course goal is to integrate four films into a twenty-minute video on the heritage and legacy of the Sisters of Mercy, the University's founding order. Using the film, the University can better communicate its values to both internal and external audiences.

The course is opening new vistas to students and teachers. There are no prerequisites, so students are learning historical and artistic methods primarily through practice. For history, this means an introduction to historical thinking, bibliographic instruction, discussion of primary and secondary sources, and lectures. For art, this means training in the use of digital tools, including lighting, photography, videography, editing, animation, workflow, and critical analysis. In these domains the instructors have expertise. But both instructors and students are treading new ground to merge the disciplines. The course marries an historian's love of language and emphasis on chronology, context, and causation to the artistic domain of visual communication and sound.

By this mechanism, the course is turning students into filmmakers, and history into film. The final product will use the power of moving images to help distill a complex past into more usable form. In addition to using words, the film will communicate information, ideas, and emotions, both through sound and the selection and movement of images. For students and faculty alike, this is literally a new way of seeing and hearing the past. Hence the course not only begins the training of students, but also of faculty, to make historical documentaries.