Keywords
literacy skills, literacy instruction, classroom instruction, teaching methods, documentary writing
Submission Type
Research
Preview
When two new documentaries appeared on my "Recommended For You" list this past year, I had an epiphany that has enriched my teaching. Fyre Fraud (2019) is a film made for Hulu by Lana Barkin and Julia Nason, while Fyre (2019) was made for Netflix by Chris Smith and Danny Gabai. Both films address the failed music festival in the Bahamas that was heavily promoted by Instagram influencers. The films cover the same topic but present drastically different interpretations of the events leading up to the disaster. While I could never show these documentaries in their entirety to my students due to content, I began to see documentaries as pieces of writing with their own audience, purpose, and tone. I also realized that in all the documentaries I'd seen, they all followed similar organization patterns. Finally, it came to me: why not use documentaries to teach writing, improve comprehension, and spark debate? Over the last year I have incorporated documentaries into my classroom with encouraging results. By using documentaries as texts for analysis, models for writing organization, and as the basis for classroom debate, I have been able to enhance my students' writing, speaking, listening, and reading skills in a way that is highly engaging for twenty-first century learners.
Recommended Citation
Chausow, Johanna
(2019)
"Scandal, Pop Culture, and Crime in the Classroom: Using Documentaries to Teach Twenty-First-Century Literacy Skills,"
The Utah English Journal: Vol. 47, Article 4.
Available at:
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/uej/vol47/iss1/4