THE VIDEO ESSAY RAR:
LEARNING OUTCOMES AND THE PEDAGOGICAL BACKGROUND
Written By Alyson Gouden Rock
INTRODUCTION: A RATIONALE
The Reading and Research Video Essay Course was a reading and research (RAR) independent study option, offered under the guidance of Dr. Jorrit de Jong, Faculty Director of the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, and Ash Fellow and seasoned filmmaker, Cecily Tyler. It was sponsored and funded by the Harvard Initiative for Teaching and Learning (HILT) at Harvard University and the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation.
Piloted between 2016-2018, first as a graded assignment in the Innovation Field Lab at HKS and then as an Ash Center-sponsored study group, the RAR Video Essay Course combines new forms of inquiry and cognition with traditional forms of rigorous academic qualitative and quantitative methods of discovery and design in field-based experiential learning.
RATIONALE
For profound learning, multiple forms of analysis and reporting are needed. John Dewey argued that “The learning of public policy and governance cannot take place through forced, textually limiting transmission-based materials like textbooks.”
Learning environments that place students at the center of their own learning and give them decision-making opportunities that mirror real-life are particularly valuable for public policy and management students.
The ‘guerilla-style’ video production process students learned in the Video Essay RAR Course required the use of both quantitative and qualitative analysis, coupled with visual narrative reporting. This method breaks from the transmission-based teaching model and immerses the student in an active role that enhances learning.
As Holland (2014) points out, “There are four principal reasons for studying video use in higher education, generally, and in Politics and International Relations in particular. First, the way that current affairs (such as international relations, politics and foreign policy) are reported has evolved in line with new video technology. (...) Second, students are increasingly recognized as ‘digital natives’, having grown up with these new technologies. (...) Third, video use is increasing in the classroom with significant numbers of academics indicating that they expect to make greater use of videos in the future. (...) Fourth and finally, video use in Politics and International Relations offers the potential to help educators tap into “all of the ways that the human brain learns.”
Engaging with video essays allows students to become social change agents, targeting social conditions for and with a community and its stakeholders. As such, video essays represent a useful and timely addition to traditional research methods.
GAP IN CURRENT PEDAGOGICAL OFFERING, AND DEMAND FOR NOVEL VIDEO-BASED METHODS
With most students now digital natives, demand for using video and other multimedia approaches to discovery and learning is increasing rapidly. However, a gap exists between the predominantly analogue and text-heavy learning environment of academic programs and the digital and image-rich world that students live in. We are seeing an increasing appetite to bridge this gap with enhanced engagement skills and capabilities in classroom projects that seek to give voice to community issues. Our experience suggests that the video essay can help students and faculty working on real-world problems in field courses and design studios, or in innovation lab settings.
Why incorporate video into a traditional pedagogical toolkit? The video essay provides students with a medium and language with which to express under-represented experiences and insights using numbers, graphs and written text. It presents instructors with the methodological and pedagogical challenge of integrating this complementary form of data collection and interpretation with other, more conventional forms of research and learning. Those forms include quantitative data analysis.
Materials created in pilots and for the Video Essay RAR Course comprise a novel pedagogical approach. This document sets out how to make the video essay more universally available to faculty and students.
COURSE OVERVIEW
After smaller successfully piloted versions of the video essay work were integrated into courses, a full video essay course was designed as a year-long, faculty-supervised, independent study in which the students learned how to make a compelling 15-25-minute, “guerilla-style” video essay, to describe and propose solutions for academically relevant social issues.
Use of the video essay
While the use of film has enriched the pedagogic toolkit of teachers in higher learning, the role of the student is primarily that of consumer of the material. This approach puts the student at the center of their own learning, as a producer or creator of a video essay.
This is in response to the gap between the predominantly analogue and text-heavy learning environment of academic programs and the digital and image-rich world in which students live. This opens up peer learning opportunities through collaboration and engagement with other students and extended community as co-creators. This occurs through interviewing and reporting on and off camera, and the generation of new visual, auditory and narrative forms. The act of filming creates new levels of engagement and listening skills within multiple, dynamic environments. The process of editing creates new levels of metacognition, or thoughtful reflection. These novel forms of analysis and reporting can lead to deeper cognition and a richer learning environment.
Written by Cecily Tyler
Copyright © 2019 Cecily Tyler
All rights reserved
THE VIDEO ESSAY RAR:
LEARNING OUTCOMES AND THE PEDAGOGICAL BACKGROUND
Written By Alyson Gouden Rock
Copyright © 2019 Alyson Gouden Rock
All rights reserved
BACKGROUND ON LEARNING OUTCOMES
Learning Outcomes articulate the overarching goals which describe the most important competencies (intellectual abilities and skills) that students need to explore, learn and understand as a result of taking this video essay course. We can break learning outcomes into general and specific outcomes. Effective learning outcomes are clearly defined with precise action verbs that specify what students will be able to do as a result of their learning experience. These basic questions frame a successful learning experience.
What should students know about video essay making? This is content knowledge
What should students do with their knowledge about video essay making? We want to develop students’ intellectual abilities, competencies and higher-level thinking skills so that they can do something with their content knowledge
How will students get there? Teaching activities and learning activities are how students practise their thinking skills and content knowledge
How will we know if they are successful? For this, we have assessments
For a video essay course, there are specific knowledge and thinking skills that we want to develop.
Knowledge refers to what we want students to know (e.g. content information, facts, frameworks, concepts). It can be categorized as: factual, conceptual, procedural, metacognitive.
Factual Knowledge consists of basic elements students must know to be acquainted with a discipline or solve problems in it.
Conceptual Knowledge includes categories and classifications that form the basis of conceptual knowledge. These “mental models”, “schemas” or “theories” allow individuals to organize a body of information in an interconnected, systematic manner.
Procedural Knowledge includes knowledge of skill, algorithms, techniques and methods, collectively known as procedures – and when and where to use them.
Metacognitive Knowledge. This is a student’s knowledge of general strategies for learning and thinking and their knowledge of cognitive tasks, as well as when and why to use these different strategies. It also includes knowledge about the self in relation to both cognitive and motivational aspects of performance.
Thinking skills are what we expect students to be able to do (e.g. synthesize information, apply knowledge in an appropriate situation); they can be thought of as the cognitive complexity of a learning or assessment task. This is determined by the number of operations that have to be carried out, or the number of ideas that have to be brought together, and the nature of the relationships or links between them. Cognitive complexity can be categorized into the following skills (from most complex to least complex):
Synthesize/Create: creating something new based on some criterion
Evaluate: making judgments based on criteria and standards
Analyze: breaking material into its constituent parts and detecting how the parts relate to one another and to an overall structure or purpose
Apply: carrying out or using a procedure in a given situation
Understand: determining the meaning of instructional messages, including oral, written, and graphic communication
Remember: retrieving relevant knowledge from long-term memory
LEARNING OUTCOMES FOR VIDEO ESSAY COURSE
This course was designed to build upon Bloom’s Taxonomy’s types of knowledge and thinking skills (cognitive complexity). A summary of which types of knowledge are being built and which thinking skills are being developed by this course are outlined below.
FACTUAL KNOWLEDGE (CONTENT KNOWLEDGE)
Develop relevant knowledge
Knowledge of video-making technical details
Knowledge of Public Value concepts, especially about the diagnosis of social conditions to be improved
CONCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE
Establish an analytical framework to use in order to evaluate and compare and contrast systems and practices
PROCEDURAL KNOWLEDGE
Develop procedural knowledge needed to produce a finished video product - the video essay and a deck—for an internal Harvard University audience
METACOGNITIVE KNOWLEDGE
Develop metacognitive knowledge
Learn about and deepen community engagement through the process of creating and screening a video essay
Organize on-camera community engagement in the field, understanding of related ethics
Organize engagement with community
Develop sensitivity for communities
Establish trust for interactions (e.g., interviewing individuals and overseeing a video essay production that reflects the voices and living environment of the community
Develop empathy
Establish personal commitment
Achieve academic commitment and goals
THINKING SKILLS
Create
Develop story development methods
Develop media production methods
Learn to prepare, produce and edit a no-budget narrative with a supplemental deck (utilizing established Harvard University-offered resources)
Develop media production skills
Organize a compelling narrative
Organize a film production schedule
Speak naturally on camera and for short-film format
Interview others ethically and thoughtfully on camera
Generate new footage that helps to show the individuals and their living environments
Create a narrative from a place of leadership and agency
Research and use archival photos and footage
Create new footage of environments and landscapes
Create text graphics
Develop supplemental materials
A deck—to document pedagogic experience and communicate benefits, transferring insights and knowledge to Harvard faculty, staff and students
Develop leadership skills
Lead a (video essay) team
Develop community leadership skills
Discover community voices
Raise up community voices
Evaluate
Discover one or more hyper-local stories to illustrate the social conditions targeted
Formulate field-relevant, focused research questions
Analyze
Learn how to use a documentary video lens through which to view a social problem
Identify an important societal problem within a community and zoom in on relevant research questions that can be addressed using a video essay
Identify macro-social conditions in need of improvement (e.g., urban blight, water rights, civic engagement, access to education), and build the basis for the development of a public value proposition
Identify micro-level social conditions in need of improvement
Integrate methodology and data collection strategies
Generate analysis of findings and results
Apply
Generate recommendations for further research
Propose a hypothesis
Understand
Determine meaning from relevant factual knowledge about public value and video essay production
Remember
Develop relevant factual knowledge about public value and video essay production
MEASURING LEARNING OUTCOMES
Learning outcomes should be measurable and performance-based, and must capture the integrated skills, knowledge and attitudes that a student is expected to learn. Why are learning outcomes important?
The fear of many educators that the detailed specification of objectives forces us to work with only simple behaviors which can be forced into measurable and observable terms, is, indeed, an incorrect notion. The situation rather is, that if we do not attempt to specify the complex processes we want to see in the student, then we are in danger of omitting them and following the path of least effort toward teaching more easily observable and trivial behavior.
Robert Glaser, Science Education News, June, 1967, p. 2.
We measure learning outcomes with a comprehensive and clear rubric that summarizes how we will know when the students have achieved competency in video essay-making at various levels of difficulty and mastery. Criteria for evaluating learning outcomes are stated from the learner’s perspective (The learner will be able to…), and are measurable in some way in order to best grade the student. (What will you accept as evidence that learning has occurred?). They are clear.
METHOD OF INSTRUCTION
Since starting to collaborate in 2017, Jorrit and Cecily focused on developing and offering a set of teaching resources for the Video Essay RAR that can be integrated into courses across all Harvard University programs. Multiple performance assessment methods (e.g., individual pre-course surveys, post-course group interviews and individual interviews, faculty assessments, expert assessments, student peer evaluations and product evaluations) have informed iterations of these teaching resources.
Each student developed a deck that includes: a preface; the problem identification; research questions; a body of literature; analytical frameworks; methodology and data collection strategies; key findings; future research recommendations, and suggested future research questions. Finally, metacognitive learning outcome assessments of community engagement generated during the production and screening of their video essay were evaluated. As they created their video essays, students developed: a treatment; a storyboard and script; an interview protocol, and a film production schedule; and worked individually (or in small teams) to organize, film and edit a video essay.
Students learned how to develop a story to investigate or call out an under-examined research question in a community. The stories highlighted by students succinctly share concrete questions and critiques that become visible and available only when a particular community is studied at the hyper-local level. Crucially, this level of observation potentially highlights findings that may otherwise go overlooked by traditional scientific methods of qualitative and quantitative inquiry. Lastly, students learn how to authentically integrate voices from their local stakeholders (e.g., government officials, local business owners, or residents), as they learned about a variety of perspectives related to macro- and micro-level social conditions. Stories brought to life by video essays resonate with diverse groups of stakeholders well beyond the classroom, and after the course is over.
Video as Innovative Audio/Visual Pedagogy
The act of engagingin media creation promotes metacognition as “creators” become more aware about what they witness and how they record the information and data. It also asks the student-researcher and the subject in front of the camera to consider who else can be impacted or influenced through their recordings.
STANDARD OF RIGOR: ACADEMIC EXPECTATIONS
Academic Honesty
In accordance with its mission to prepare individuals for public leadership, Harvard Kennedy School values academic honesty, and is committed to produce graduates who are ethical professionals. High standards reflect the school’s academic integrity, foster a respectful environment for work and study, and provide an example of academic excellence for others. This course will strictly follow the HKS Academic Code. Students are expected to follow the Code of Conduct. See the General Regulations and Standards for further details.
Expectations
Students are expected to produce thorough and timely deliverables. They should expect to arrange one-on-one meetings with faculty members–who can help them deeply consider their research design, and serve as interviewees–while also establishing positive working relationships with a variety of local community members including residents, municipal employees, local business owners and local institutional leaders. Each student needs to consider how and when to collaborate with other classmates, and also how to conduct field interviews and produce additional footage. Each student can expect that their ideas, suggestions, questions and recommendations will be taken seriously by the community in which they research, and that they will broaden their professional network and knowledge in addressing problematic societal conditions. Students will be challenged throughout their academic development through lectures, discussion sessions, one-one-one meetings with faculty, and independent research. This might comprise of organizing community engagement in the field and over the duration of the video-essay development and skill-building.
Students should aspire for their work to fundamentally change the way a local community operates and behaves, and to help further the learning for other communities experiencing similar public and societal conditions. They will have the opportunity to experience deeper levels of learning while also developing and demonstrating their leadership skills.
The communities with which a student engages will expect each student to be a professional partner. Punctuality and preparedness for all meetings is expected. A responsive approach to communications is critical for building trust with community members. Polite persistence may be required, as video-making does not always follow a straight path.
Course Structure and Schedule
Unlike other classes, the Video Essay RAR Course is not facilitated or organized within a classroom meeting schedule. Please see the “How to: Do’s and Don’ts of Bringing A Video Essay into Your Classroom” website which outlines what a course schedule may look like.
Note that if offering this type of course, students will need to be fully committed, flexible and attentive throughout the year. They may need to be prepared to film during their winter break.
ASSESSING STUDENT LEARNING AND EVALUATION FINAL PRODUCT.
Please see the “Project Structure” appendix to learn about a framework for integrating a video essay assignment into your classroom, and the “Rubric” appendix to evaluate a student’s work in depth.
Appendix B
Project Structure
Appendix C
Rubric
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