Reading, writing, 'rithmetic and ...documentaries?

Yes, documentaries are more than the black and white film reels many people might remember from their elementary school days. They can teach more than we often realize.

This year the Full Frame Documentary Festival took the initiative to help teachers reach students through documentary film.

Through funding from the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation and GlaxoSmithKline, the festival rolled out its "Teach the Teachers" program. The program invited six Durham high school teachers to the festival to learn how to use documentaries to enhance student learning.

The program has three goals: to help teachers select and effectively use documentaries in their classes, to expose teachers to the educational resources provided by Full Frame in its annual festival and year-round programming, and to develop teachers into ambassadors for the festival to other Durham teachers.

Alan Teasley, an adjunct assistant professor of education at Duke University, retired from Durham Public Schools in 2006 and is the program instructor. He spent 31 years as a high school teacher and central office administrator and also taught mass communication, film history and filmmaking at Southern High School in the 1970s.

Teasley, a former columnist for The Durham News, said Full Frame has always reached out to teachers and students through its free Youth Program Screening on the Thursday morning of the annual festival. The screening attracts hundreds of students and their teachers. This year the festival took things further.

The Full Frame staff worked through central office curriculum coordinators to recruit the teachers that volunteered to be part of the inaugural group. The teachers were asked to attend four short "touch base" meetings during the festival and two follow-up meetings afterward.

According to Teasley, the teachers learn methods for analyzing documentary films with their students. From his eight years on the festival's selection committee, he has discovered that documentaries can address and teach almost any subject. They can be biographies, history, essays, or even concert films. They can also be in traditional "Ken Burns style," a cinema verite style, or a hybrid of styles that may include re-enactments and animation.

Documentaries can extend learning in a variety of ways. Teasley told me about a Northern High School teacher who coupled a non-fiction book with Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg's "The Devil Came on Horseback" in a world literature class to educate students about the genocide in Darfur.

Students watched the film after reading the book. The combination provided a different, more tangible way of comprehending. The film transported students into issues that they might otherwise have ignored or misunderstood. As the professor says, if a person hasn't been to a place it can be hard to understand.

Students analyze the films and after watching them talk about fairness and bias, why certain music was used and about visual and audio content.

"Instead of using Ken Burn's 'The Civil War' for only historical content, let's look at the actors and how did he use them and the music in the film," said Teasley.

Students have a chance to discover the story behind the story.

The program is taught using National Council of Teachers of English member and author John Golden's "Reading in the Reel World." Teasley hopes teachers will develop study guides about films to share with their students.

There are an infinite number of angles to documentaries. Deirdre Haj, Full Frame's executive director, summed up the genre pretty well.

"It's a big broad documentary world, and it's absolutely fascinating," she said.