Undergraduate Education Overview, Mission, and Learning Outcomes

Courses Offered for the Upcoming Semester – Spring 2010 Courses

Current and Past Semester Courses –

Courses

Instructors

Undergraduate Certificate

Documentary Studies Courses and Cross-Listed Courses

Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor in Documentary Studies and American Studies

Student Opportunities at CDS





Overview

Documentary work is creative and artistic, driven by personal motivations and talents; it is also a public process of engagement and a powerful tool for communication and for fostering understanding and change. Documentary Studies courses allow undergraduate students to connect their educational experiences and creative expression to broader community life through documentary fieldwork projects, while they also examine theoretical and practical issues related to this work through readings, screenings, and classroom discussion. Taught by CDS staff, faculty members, and adjunct instructors, these courses provide community-based experiences using the mediums of photography, film and video, audio, and narrative writing.

CDS undergraduate courses at Duke University supplement and enrich students’ work in a broad range of academic disciplines. Some courses, with permission of the instructor, may be taken as early as freshman year. If students choose, they may complete the Certificate in Documentary Studies, which requires a minimum of six courses, including the survey course Traditions in Documentary Studies (DOCST 101) and the capstone course Seminar in Documentary Studies (DOCST 196S), and completion of a final project.

The survey course Traditions in Documentary Studies looks at documentary work through an interdisciplinary perspective, with an emphasis on twentieth-century practice. The course introduces students to a range of documentary idioms and voices, including the work of photographers, filmmakers, oral historians, folklorists, musicologists, radio documentarians, and writers. The course also stresses aesthetic, scholarly, and ethical considerations involved in representing other people and cultures.

Other courses are more specifically involved with documenting local communities through the use of a particular medium, such as The Documentary Experience: A Video Approach, Literacy Through Photography, Introduction to Oral History, American Communities: Introduction to Documentary Photography, and Documentary Photography and the Southern Cultural Landscape.

Additional special topics courses are offered each semester. These have included explorations of children and the experience of illness, farmworker advocacy, immigration, reframing Asian America, black women in the Jim Crow South, large format photography, and the documentary imagination, among other topics.

See courses offered during the upcoming semester

See current and past semester courses

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Download Documentary Studies Resource Guide for Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (168 kb)

For more information about the undergraduate program at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, contact Charlie Thompson, education and curriculum director, at 919-660-3657 or cdthomps@duke.edu.



Mission

The mission of the undergraduate program in Documentary Studies is to allow undergraduate students to connect their educational experiences and creative expression to broader community life through documentary fieldwork projects, while they also examine theoretical and practical issues related to this work through readings, screenings, and classroom discussion. Program courses will foster concrete analytical, interpretive, and communication skills connected to a broad range of academic disciplines, challenging students to combine intellectual ideas with grassroots engagement as they use tools of documentary inquiry to learn and render in various mediums.

Students in our program are asked to consider seriously the representational and ethical matters of documentary work as they engage in their coursework and to put these considerations to use in their fieldwork projects. The undergraduate program in Documentary Studies resides at the nexus of the documentary arts and active engagement in broader society.

The knowledge, skills, and values we strive to teach include the following:

1) An understanding of fieldwork as a theoretically grounded mode of research that includes ethics and theory regarding interactions with and representations of various community members who become subjects of students’ work;

2) Engagement in the lives, experiences, and histories of communities, challenging students to develop effective written and visual communication skills and to synthesize fieldwork-based knowledge to reach a larger public audience, thereby fostering mutual respect, in-depth understanding, and original interpretations;

3) Cross-cultural fluency in a variety of different cultural settings. For example, we teach courses in Durham that take students off-campus where they may engage in projects. As part of DukeEngage, we sponsor initiatives in Tanzania and at the U.S./Mexico border.

4) Ethics, accountability, and civic responsibility, which are covered in our courses and discussed throughout students’ work in communities;

5) Social and community sensitivity and action. Through documentary work, students contribute something tangible to community change. For example, we offer a course that works in tandem with Student Action with Farmworkers. Participants engage in farmworker advocacy. We also offer a course titled Documentary Engagement, which explores how the documentary arts can be used for societal change in a variety of settings. Through Documentary Studies, students who are active in communities can leave tangible work of lasting value—whether an oral history, film, or photograph – in the hands of local residents.

Documentary Studies students combine their coursework with a variety of majors, using their skills in the documentary arts to convey information to broad audiences. Students may elect to complete the Certificate in Documentary Studies program, a six-course sequence with electives that culminates in the completion and presentation of a major documentary project.

Students with specific photography skills, filmmaking abilities, or audio broadcast techniques may easily find work in professional settings that emphasize these arts, but increasingly as communication through websites and multimedia access points continues to grow, such expertise is also in demand in nontraditional settings. City governments, corporations, and academic institutions all are seeking ways to reach audiences with images, recorded sound, and oral history–based writing. Our students likely will find that by adding documentary skills to their resumes, they will become more attractive candidates to graduate schools and to various institutions in the working world.



Learning Outcomes

• Students will identify and explain the major traditions of documentary studies for the past 100 years, beginning with Lewis Hine, Jacob Riis, James Agee, Dorothea Lange, and others and ending with more contemporary documentarians, such as Frederick Wiseman, Mary Ellen Mark, David Isay, Joan Didion, and many others.

• Students will become proficient in one or more of the following documentary methodologies:

> Photography
> Film
> Audio/radio
> Oral history/narrative writing

Students will engage in critical thinking regarding fieldwork as a responsible and theoretically sound mode of research that can be used effectively in a variety of settings and related directly to academic research in a variety of disciplines. Using their chosen methodology, students will produce professional-quality documentary work, including at least one major project with a public presentation.

• Students will connect their field-based experiences with appropriate archival sources and literatures.

• Students will demonstrate the ability to make informed decisions about representational and ethical matters regarding the subjects of their documentary work, as they show in-depth understanding of the intricacies of collaboration, self-knowledge as it pertains to documentary work, and service learning.

• Students will communicate effectively with individuals and/or groups outside of Duke University and/or separate from their own personal experiences.

Undergraduate Education Gallery



During the week of her exhibition opening at the Center for Documentary Studies, the artist Tone Stockenström gave a public talk about her projects and led a workshop on collaborative documentary techniques. For undergraduate students enrolled in the course "Traditions in Documentary Studies," she also led a special tour of the exhibition. An excerpt of the tour is presented in this video gallery.






An exhibition of toned black-and-white silver gelatin contact prints made from 4-x-5-inch negatives by students using large-format view cameras. Duke University students in a Fall 2004 course at the Center for Documentary Studies were encouraged to find their own visual language to investigate and describe something deeply held.





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Untitled, from the series Latino Pastimes—La Vida y el Fútbol. Photograph by William L. Plaxico, from the course "Documentary Photography and the Southern Cultural Landscape," taught by Professor Tom Rankin.