Table Of ContentObservational Filmmaking
for Education
Digital Video Practices for
Researchers, Teachers and Children
Nigel Meager
Observational Filmmaking for Education
Nigel Meager
Observational
Filmmaking
for Education
Digital Video Practices
for Researchers, Teachers
and Children
Nigel Meager
King’s College
University of Cambridge
Cambridge, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-90625-6 ISBN 978-3-319-90626-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90626-3
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Foreword
For several decades, I and my colleagues have been exploring how film
and video can be put to better use in anthropology. Anthropological
films used to be either what we called didactic ‘illustrated lectures’, with
the images serving largely to support what was said on the soundtrack,
or they were simply unedited records of events to be used later for var-
ious forms of ‘objective’ analysis. They made little attempt to engage
with the everyday experiences of their subjects.
Observational cinema was a reaction against this static and imper-
sonal view. It attempted to bring anthropological films closer to the
actual experiences of people living in other societies. Instead of simply
presenting anthropological knowledge previously gained, it was more
exploratory, moving closer to its subjects and trying to interpret what
was happening to them at the time of filming. This was made possi-
ble by the availability of new lightweight cameras that could film almost
anywhere.
The anthropology of childhood has had a parallel history. At the
beginning, anthropologists hardly acknowledged that children had any
role in society, beyond being socialised to become adults. They simply
existed on the periphery of society as a general type. Only in recent
v
vi Foreword
decades have children’s individuality and contributions to society been
widely recognised. And only recently have children’s own perspectives
become important in anthropological research.
Despite these gains, for most people children still remain either ideal-
ised or seen as unfinished adults-in-the-making. It was perhaps for those
reasons that I started making films about children twenty years ago.
I wanted to see what I could learn about the emotional, physical and
intellectual fabric of children’s lives by filming amongst them. And as I
had already been making anthropological films, it was not unlike enter-
ing one more society about which I knew very little.
I began by filming at a boarding school, and almost immediately a
boy came up to me and said, ‘What are you doing?’ What could I tell
him? I gave him the only answer I could think of at the time. I said I
was making a study of life at the school, but instead of writing a book
about it, I was writing it with a camera. For some reason, he accepted
this as explanation enough. Over the next three years, I spent many
months at the school, trying to share the students’ world and capture
their varied experiences of living at the school. In the end, I edited
five films from this material, with the aim of immersing viewers in
the school’s environment and the students’ collective and individual
responses to it. The films became essays about the school, the experi-
ences of those I was filming and the situation we were both part of.
Much later, after making more than a dozen observational films
about children’s lives, mostly in schools in India, I began a new project.
I felt I had reached a kind of limit by filming children myself. To learn
more about children’s own perspectives, I began encouraging them to
make films themselves. And in doing so, I introduced them to observa-
tional filmmaking.
The project was organised as a series of video workshops in differ-
ent parts of India. Most of the children had only seen television and
Bollywood films, so they were being asked to do something com-
pletely outside their normal experience. I asked them to find topics in
their own community or family and, after receiving some basic train-
ing, to explore them with a video camera. They soon accepted the idea
that this was a research project to which they could make a valuable
Foreword vii
contribution. They often knew their chosen topics more intimately than
the adults around them.
I discovered that the children learned the basic skills of camera work
much more quickly than adults, and what they didn’t know about
filmmaking they invented. The results were often surprising. Each
film differed from the others in conception and style. Each expressed
the personality of the child who made it. It seemed as if, as in the best
observational filmmaking, they were using the camera as an instrument
to think with. As they learned more about a subject, they explored it
more deeply. I met with them each day, and we looked at what they had
shot the day before. They learned from their own mistakes and the mis-
takes of others, and the simple act of viewing their work gave them new
ideas.
Today, we can see ever-increasing potential for this approach.
Observational filmmaking can bring us new knowledge about the
immediate responses of individuals, whether the films are made by chil-
dren or adults. It can bring a new empirical and qualitative dimension
to research that in the past has struggled to express many aspects of
human experience in words. It can be employed not only to understand
how things are, but how things change—such as how children think
and learn.
I welcome this book as a new departure for both observational film-
making and education. It broadens the scope of observational filmmak-
ing by bringing it into the world of education research, but it also opens
up further possibilities for children themselves, as an intrinsically reflec-
tive and creative way of engaging with the world around them. The
book demonstrates that the core values of observational filmmaking can
become both a vital part of learning and a new way of understanding
the processes of learning itself.
Canberra, Australia Professor David MacDougall
July 2018 Research School of Humanities
and the Arts, Australian
National University
Acknowledgements
I wrote this book following the completion of my doctorate at the
Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge in May 2017. The
Ph.D. followed many years working at various times as an artist,
art gallery educator, teacher trainer, arts education consultant and
schoolteacher. I am very indebted indeed to my Ph.D. supervisor at
Cambridge, Professor Richard Hickman, who looked after me and con-
sidered my interests at the University with such care and thoughtful-
ness from the start. This project would not even have got off the ground
without him.
I am enormously grateful to the UK Arts and Humanities Research
Council’s Doctoral Training Partnership (AHRC DTP) at the
University of Cambridge who funded my Ph.D. studies with a schol-
arship. I found the training and support inspirational at times. I
thank Dr. Alistair Swiffen and Professor Chris Young for a programme
that extended my horizons across Arts and Humanities disciplines.
Established academics and fellow Arts and Humanities Ph.D. candi-
dates whom I met opened my mind to a raft of new ideas and practices.
This open-mindedness and cross-disciplinary exploratory freedom fed
into this book in many ways.
ix
x Acknowledgements
The Cambridge AHRC DTP and Australian National University
(ANU) combined to generate a three-month Visiting Fellowship
at ANU in 2015. There, I worked under the guidance of Professor
David MacDougall. This was a pivotal time in my doctoral research.
Professor MacDougall has been a generous and inspiring mentor. His
work as an ethnographic filmmaker, and most recently his work sup-
porting Indian children to be observational filmmakers of aspects of
their lives and interests, showed me just how valuable the practice of
observational filmmaking might be for education research and children’s
learning. I have been able to write much in this book because of David
MacDougall’s pioneering work with children in India.
Dr. Anne Harris of Monash University, Melbourne, convinced
me that this topic would be of interest to Palgrave and that potential
of observational filmmaking in education should be explored in book
form. I found my conversations with Anne very valuable. I would also
like to thank Professor Pam Burnard, Professor Fernando Hernadez
Hernandez and Professor Susan Wright for their insights and the oppor-
tunities they offered and generous encouragement for supporting my
work.
Children from Park Street Primary School, Cambridge, contributed
a great deal to the first phase of my exploratory research. Their enthu-
siastic willingness to learn and experiment with observational filmmak-
ing inspired me to stretch much further than I might have. Particular
thanks to Alexi Hickman, Ana Zandi, Bella Antunes, Carla Roth,
Laurie Pattison, Luke Arnone and those who worked with me from
January to July 2016. I also thank those children’s class teacher, Laura
Smith, their head teacher, Gillian Owen, and their respective parents
and carers all of whom were always so supportive of the project.
In 2017, I began been working collaboratively with children and
teachers at Escola Dovella, a primary school in central Barcelona. The
teachers Mónica Segura Guerrero who taught Grade 6 and her colleague
Ita Alabat Ramon helped with the practical side of the project, liaised
with parents and carers and facilitated a series of initial workshops with
Grade 6 children at the school. Fernando Hernandez Hernandez of the
Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona (UB) has been a val-
uable critical friend of the project. He secured Visiting Researcher status
Acknowledgements xi
at UB for me. This has supported my ongoing research in Catalonia.
Two students, Cristina Vianey Casillas and Anne Uijttewaal, studying
with the Visual Arts and Education Masters course at UB supported
the work throughout. I particularly thank the volunteer children film-
makers from Escola Dovella, Arantxa Saray Aragón Martínez, Rayssa
Ramatu Canté Djalo, Eudald Clarella López, Marcel Estany Morató,
Jéssica Gimeno Beltrán, Jana Núñez Renau and Ernesto Sassot Puig.
Since 2015, I have supported visual arts practices at King’s College,
Cambridge. After completing my doctorate, the College offered me
Associate membership. This has been very helpful, as King’s has become
my academic base in the UK. The continued interest and support of fel-
lows and students at the College is very valuable.
Finally, but most importantly, I must thank Dr. Julien Morton of
London South Bank University. His sharp reposts are constant foil for
my tendency towards emotional, generalising woolliness. I also thank
the very same Julien Morton as my best friend. Julien, together with
his wife Jo, 4-year-old son Ikey and baby daughter Patti, offers an emo-
tional bedrock that enables almost everything I do.
February 2018 Nigel Meager
