The Breaking Point

My colleague Scott and I teach a class called the Sudan Project. It is a year-long course with the goal being to take over forty hours of footage provided by photojournalist Karin Muller and create a documentary about Sudan and specifically the crisis in Darfur. We spent the first semester trying to lay some groundwork for the students covering the history of Sudan, the nature of the conflict, other geo-political conflicts, documentary film making and training them on the video editing software they need for producing this film. We’ve have our had ups and downs, but for a team-taught, interdisciplinary class with no blueprint, I have been fairly pleased with our progress…until today. Today was our first production meeting and the power of the mob ruled the day. Students were broken up into groups to produce ten mini-documentaries that will then be sifted through for the final product. As groups began reporting, we heard the start of grumbling: it took a long time to download the footage; the timecodes aren’t matching up with the shot lists; there is so much footage to look through; there is no way to do this task in sixteen school days. The frustration built as each group reported to such a point that when a young woman wanted to report the success she was having with aligning the shot list and the clips, students were literally shouting her down. Normally my colleague and I play a bit of good cop/bad cop, but in this case we both put the hammer down. When the students left disgruntled, we simply stared at each other and realized that this was really our first hurdle that the class had to overcome. Sure there were technical glitches with their documentaries from first semester, but the gravity of their job was finally hitting them. Their frustration and anger had two sources. One was the overwhelming work of sorting that few anticipated because they simply did not know the process: They were not used to the idea that there was no easy solution to this problem. The other was the realization that they were responsible to the people they were seeing in their film. As one student said, “I don’t want this to be a show on Animal Plant looking at some weird place. I want my audience to be able to connect with the humanity of these people.” I know that meaningful learning is born out of frustration and while I would not wish such discomfort on my students regularly, in the midst of my own aggravation, I was lucky to witness one person’s triumph.