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The DOCuMENTARIAN
Reeling in Students
Ellen Livingston is exploring the power of documentary film in social studies education
Social studies may be unique in requiring students to
not only participate, but actually care about topics
under discussion and develop an informed opinion.
Ellen Livingston, a student and instructor in TC’s Social
Studies and Education program, sees documentary film as
an ideal tool for provoking such engagement.
“Meaningful education should have a strong affective component,”
she says. “People become involved in causes not
just because of knowledge, but because of feeling and experience,
and film is a great way to do that.”
Yet while classroom film use has increased dramatically
since the days when teachers booked the school’s crotchety
film projector, Livingston’s doctoral research indicates that
educators may be shying away from good material.
Like, for instance, the infamous Rodney King video.
“People, particularly African-American people, have
always known there’s a problem in the relationship
between African Americans and the police, so it’s not that
the brutality in the video was absolute news,” Livingston
says. “It was more that people saw this video and it made
them angry, so they expressed it in a very dramatic way.
And that’s what film can do.”
Educators may be leery of tapping into students’ anger. But
to Livingston, a society that confronts such issues in the
classroom is far less at risk for doing so in the streets.
People become involved
in causes not just because of
knowledge, but because of
feeling and experience, and film
is a great way to do that.
A former journalist who often covered education,
Livingston came to TC to earn an M.A. One of her professors,
Margaret Crocco, who is also Coordinator of TC’s
Social Studies and Education program, subsequently
tapped her to write a chapter for “Teaching The Levees,”
the award-winning curriculum keyed to the Spike Lee
documentary on Hurricane Katrina.
Since then, Livingston has written discussion guides for
Pray the Devil Back to Hell, a stirring 2008 documentary by
Abigail Disney about how women in Liberia rose up to end
that nation’s civil war, and Let Freedom Swing, a collection
of educational videos combining the study of American
democracy with a focus on the democratic character of jazz.
At TC, Livingston has been teaching a course called
“Teaching about Africa Using Film.” To create lesson plans
on apartheid, her students have located clips from 1960s
South Africa in which people express diametrically opposing
viewpoints. As with all of Livingston’s work, the class is
questioning “the mythology that documentary films show
the whole truth because it’s all caught on camera.” But as
future teachers, they’ve got an even more immediate interest
in the historic footage.
“It’s interesting stuff,” Livingston says, “and something
they can use in the classroom.”
— Zoe Singer
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photograph by Heather van Uxem