The Video Essay as a Tool for Teaching and Learning

Jorrit de Jong and Cecily Tyler
Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation,
Harvard Kennedy School

Copyright © 2019 Jorrit de Jong and Cecily Tyler
All rights reserved

What is a Video Essay?

A video essay is a short documentary film of about 5 to 15 minutes. It is a visual equivalent of the traditional written research paper that students write to present research. It comes with a slide deck that contains the underlying research design, the findings, references to the relevant academic literature, conclusions and recommendations and/or suggestions for future research.

The video essay itself presents the inquiry that the student has done in a way that leverages the comparative advantages of a visual medium: it allows students to show rather than tell, to construct a narrative that both integrates the various data and interpretations and is more appealing. The video essay brings together voices and images from the community or natural environment that is the subject of inquiry.

Filmmaking as a form of field-based inquiry is of course not new, but it is rarely used in public policy schools in a systematic way. We ran a pilot to discover how the video essay might be leveraged as a tool for teaching and learning. We learned from the results and created materials to share these lessons with educators.

The results of our pilot are four examples of video essays, a structure for designing a video essay project (research plus film), a rubric for evaluating a video essay, samples of syllabi, tutorials, and an overview with types of support for students.

Why use the video essay as a learning tool?

The act of filming creates new levels of engagement and helps students to develop stronger skills in inquiry and in communicating the findings. The process of film editing forces students to reflect thoroughly on what they have learned, and on how to present the findings in a way that does justice to the people or community that were the subject of research and appeals to and informs or educates a larger audience. This requires deep integration of the literature review, the data obtained from regular quantitative and qualitative analysis, and data obtained through direct interaction with members of the community through interviews and observation. These multiple new forms of analysis and reporting can lead to a much higher level of engagement with the subject, and with the methods of data collection, analysis and interpretation of results. The more visually appealing product of the video essay can be used in further engagement activities with the community that has been portrayed, which can lead to a further discovery and learning.

How does a video essay project work?

Students take about a year to create the documentary through site visits and group study to present their research. Students gain familiarity on the site and subject of their research and explore and define the problem in interaction with the community. Prior to filming, students formulate research questions, and design the research strategy under faculty supervision.

Students need to be trained and supported in conducting research in social science or humanities as well as in filming, storytelling and editing. Students also need to fully grasp the community engagement aspects of using video in the field and hone their methods, skills and ethics of giving a voice to the community through film and by conducting successful interviews. Having media literacy and learning technical skills such as video editing and handling production equipment are critical to the completion of the project.