The Documentary Form in Historical Context
Sections of this Case Study
Introduction
Case Study Title
The Documentary Form in Historical Context
Authors
Dr. Charles Anderson*, Department of Higher and Community Education, School of Education, University of Edinburgh, Paterson's Land, Holyrood Road, Edinburgh. [* corresponding author]
Dr. Kate Day, Department of Higher and Community Education, School of Education, University of Edinburgh, Paterson's Land, Holyrood Road, Edinburgh.
Dr. Jo Fox, Department of History, University of Durham, 43 North Bailey, Durham DH1 3EX.
URLs
About the authors
Jo Fox is a Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Durham, specialising in film propaganda in historical contexts. She is the author of Filming Women in the Third Reich (2000) and Film Propaganda in Britain and Nazi Germany: World War II Cinema (2007). She is also active in the national teaching community, is an HEA Subject Centre Teaching Project grant holder and in 2007 was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship by the Higher Education Academy.
Charles Anderson and Kate Day are Senior Lecturers in the School of Education, University of Edinburgh. Recent research experience that is of direct relevance to the pursuit of this particular case study has been gained on an ESRC funded project, Enhancing Teaching-Learning Environments in Undergraduate Courses, (ETL Project) which focused on examining how best to support undergraduates learning within specific disciplines. Charles Anderson and Kate Day were responsible for the history strand of the project (Anderson and Day, 2005, 2006a): and research activities for this project included a case study of the features of course design and teaching that assist undergraduate students' to engage effectively with primary sources (Anderson et al., 2006b). Charles Anderson and Kate Day also have a history of involvement in projects evaluating the use of ICT in higher education, (both at the level of individual projects and at the level of policy initiatives) and with another colleague are currently (2007-2009) evaluating a large institution-wide ICT learning and teaching initiative.
Brief description
This case study outlines the principles underpinning the design of an online environment to support the interactive reading of documentaries and textual primary sources and reports on students' reactions to this environment.
Overview
There has been an increasing move by history lecturers in the last decade to exploit the potential of multimedia. In a 2003 article David Jaffee has pointed up the need to move beyond the presentational and evocative power of multimedia to focus on how "multimedia materials need to be designed in a way to get students to interact with them creatively." Jaffee's article also brings out how enabling this creative interaction with different types of texts involves supportive structuring of students' efforts and the unpacking of disciplinary practices.
The current case study focuses on an online environment that has been designed to give both structured support to, and encouragement of, students' own efforts in interpreting documentaries drawn from the Film & Sound Online archive. The films are linked to relevant textual materials which enable students to create a context for their interpretation. These textual materials include primary documents that relate to the films' intent, initial reception, etc., and secondary sources that provide contrasting interpretations of the documents. The films are also accompanied by sets of questions to structure students' interpretation of the films and provide them with challenges. (These questions relate closely to discussion activities in face-to-face seminars.) Central to the design of the environment is the aim of enabling students to read films and documents in an interactive fashion.
The following report will:
- delineate the approach to learning and teaching as well as the historical disciplinary practices that underpinned the design
- present students' evaluations of specific features and overall reactions to the environment.
While this case study which examines in fine detail an on-line environment for engaging with historical documentaries has been written to stand by itself, it forms part of a wider programme of work that we are currently taking forward. This wider research and development initiative focuses on the specific practices and challenges that students face in interpreting films as primary sources and the question of how best to enable students to meet these challenges. In taking this agenda forward it seeks to begin to fill a distinct gap in knowledge. The literature has fore-grounded the question of exploring how history itself is represented within films (e.g. Rosenstone, 2006) and some work is now beginning to be published that examines questions concerning how to assist students to read films for their representations of history (Abrams and Marston, 2006). However, another central thrust of historians' engagement with film (Fox 2000, 2007), i.e. deploying films as primary sources in the construction of an account of a historical topic or issue has not been examined in any depth in relation to undergraduate learning and teaching.
