Chapter 11: Documentary Filmmaking: An Arts Integrated Approach to Research

Do you have a topic that you have to teach that you just don’t enjoy? I think teachers can be transparent and agree that even though we can teach all of our content, there are some units or standards we just don’t love. I am not Mary Poppins who can tap dance and pull things out of a magic bag, and when year after year, my students’ eyes would glaze over at the “annual introduction to the research process,” I, too, started dreading the entire thing. Maybe there are teachers out there who are creative and passionate about reliable sources, citation formats, and notetaking of researched facts. That is not my gift. I am more excited about literary analysis and anaphora. I used to dread when I would have to tackle research, but as an honorable teacher I did my duty to cover reliable sources as a part of my curriculum, as I realized inherently that it was a necessary skill for upper grades and college. However, I kept wondering: how could a teacher make research applicable and interesting? I really didn’t want to read any more essays on topics like global warming or abortion, and my eye would start to twitch with stress when I thought about how many papers so often included “cut and paste” paragraphs from the internet. How I dreaded all those, “I’m sorry to give you a zero, but you plagiarized this paper” conversations with students, only to be met with, “But I changed every fifth word!” Can you relate?