Teaching with Documentaries

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As I prepare for fall classes, I am having my annual dilemma over content I want to share with my students. This semester I'm teaching two classes that I've taught before: 1) Global Perspectives on Natural Disasters and 2) Global Change (I'm team-teaching the second one). In both classes, I use a textbook but also assign additional readings and show short and long documentaries during class.  I like to think of the videos as multimedia reading assignments that give students something to think about and discuss. But just like articles and books, I can only show the same documentaries for a while until they become outdated. So each time I have to decide if it's time to retire that favorite video or show it one more time.

A great example is The Trouble with Malaria. It's an episode of the CBC series "The Nature of Things" and gives an excellent overview of the disease and struggles to fight it. But it was made 20 years ago! I've been showing it in GEO 333, but think I have to move on now. Another 20-year-old documentary that I'm going to retire this semester is After the Flood. This documentary discusses river engineering on the Mississippi and (then planned) river works projects on the Brahmaputra River in Bangladesh. It's also really good, but I feel like I need to find something newer.

I've looked for newer documentaries to show on these topics but haven't found anything quite as good. So I'm trying to find articles that can feed into in-class group work instead. I have found some great shorter segments from VICE (I had to renew my HBO Now subscription!) that I can show on some topics and still have some episodes of NOVA that are pretty good, but I hate to say farewell to my favorites. I guess it forces me to update the course and I know I'll still tell my students "there's a video I used to show that talks about..." because I already do that.

For GEO 211 I'm not quite running out of time yet- I have a 2009 documentary that I'll show again- Blue Gold: World Water Wars- and for other topics have shorter segments to show. Otherwise, I'll keep scouring Netflix and other streaming sources in search of the perfect documentary. They're both fun classes to teach since they turn out different every time and the topics change with current events.

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